Schoolwide Support for Multilingual Learners

In my time as a former principal and now as a consultant and coach, I’ve worked in many schools and classrooms with growing numbers of multilingual learners (MLs). Rather than looking for quick solutions, schools that make the greatest impact on MLs ask the question, “What schoolwide conditions help teachers consistently plan and deliver instruction that supports MLs’ content learning and language development?”

Here are five ways school leaders can contribute to creating the conditions that foster MLs’ growth and learning.

Build Shared Understanding

Principals can ensure that all teachers and staff, not just ML or English language learner teachers, receive foundational professional learning on MLs before any tool kits or scaffolds are rolled out. This includes understanding multilingualism, how it is an asset, and how to use home languages to bridge learning a new language. Understanding language acquisition and the difference between social and academic language helps teachers plan for students’ proficiency levels across modalities. Awareness of the affective filter allows teachers to create a low-stress, supportive environment for language learning through visuals, gestures, and simplified language structures as needed.

Foundational professional learning gives staff a shared understanding of planning with students’ home languages, skills, and scaffolds in mind. When teachers understand why scaffolds work, they can make stronger instructional decisions. Systems to sustain this professional learning involve coaching cycles, common planning time, and multiple discussions throughout the year, so that teachers can internalize these practices.

Foster Teacher Collaboration

Teacher collaboration through structured professional learning communities (PLCs) is another strategy that school leaders use to center MLs in their schools. To do this, leaders schedule 60–90 minutes for teaching teams to meet in PLCs to internalize and plan upcoming units two and three weeks in advance.

This can be done during common planning periods or after school, or completed over multiple professional learning sessions. When an interdisciplinary team of both ML teachers and content area teachers is included, everyone’s expertise can be leveraged. Teachers can answer the following example questions to help center the work back on MLs:

• What is the key content that students are learning in this unit? How does this fit with the other units?
• What are the language demands of the important skills, strategies, and tasks required of students in this unit?
• What prior knowledge, skills, or unfinished learning will most impact access to this unit?
• What are the key vocabulary words that students will need? What strategies will support their usage?
• What are the language objectives, extensions, and student-facing scaffolds needed, based on our students’ proficiency levels?

Taking this proactive approach at the unit level, not just as an add-on at the end of a lesson, has helped teachers I have worked with to be more confident in their day-to-day lesson and language objective planning and to anticipate ways to support and challenge MLs.

Calibrate Strong Multilingual Learner Instruction

I have seen the most instructional shifts made when teachers and leaders collaborate on a shared vision, and a schoolwide look-for form can help develop strong ML instruction. When it is used during monthly, nonevaluative learning walks, leaders can identify trends, highlight effective practices, and provide precise, low-stakes feedback. To ensure that the look-for form is supportive rather than evaluative, visits are kept short and instructional trends are shared at the grade or school level, not individually.

Here are some sample look-fors:

• Clear content and language objectives are shared with students.
• Students engage in all four modalities: speaking, writing, reading, and listening.
• Teachers use flexible scaffolds (sentence frames, word banks, graphic organizers) to support and challenge students with grade-level content.
• Teachers build background knowledge through multimedia, examples, and real-world connections.
• Teachers explicitly model and teach vocabulary.
• Students engage with vocabulary through visuals, word banks, glossaries, cognates, and other supports.
• Students actively participate in whole-group and small-group activities.

Include Teacher Reflection

Reflection is a powerful tool to help sustain instructional practices, respond to concerns, and foster collaboration and innovation. School leaders can foster this through anonymous surveys via Google Forms or another preferred format administered two to three times a year to review during reflection meetings.

Here are two key questions about ML support you can include in these surveys:

1. How comfortable do you feel supporting MLs in your class? (Scale rating.)
2. What are the current challenges you or your team face when implementing the strategies to support MLs? (Select the top three.)

• Content Knowledge: Professional development on language acquisition, MLs, strategies, and scaffolds.
• Planning and Preparation: Planning grade-level/content lessons and objectives with MLs in mind.
• Resource Needs: Materials and examples for implementing language objectives, strategies, and ML supports.
• Differentiation: Instruction and planning for MLs across proficiency levels.
• Assessment: Monitoring ML progress and using authentic assessments.
• Data-Driven Instruction: Using ML subgroup data (proficiency, formative/summative, unit, screener, diagnostic) to plan instruction.
• Family Outreach: Engaging ML families in their child’s education.
• Other: _____

Gathering this teacher reflection and input can also support upcoming coaching cycles and tee up data meetings. For in-person reflection meetings, I find it most helpful to do this midyear and/or at the end of the school year, when teachers can consolidate their learning and set goals. Here are some example questions I have used in reflection meetings:

• What is one instructional shift you made to strengthen ML participation and language development?
• What changes did you notice in ML engagement, participation, or language production?
• How can you strengthen methods of challenging and supporting MLs in your class across content areas?

Keep Multilingual Learners Visible

I find it most impactful to include MLs’ needs and goals embedded within the broader schoolwide improvement plan. During data meetings and progress monitoring cycles, ensure that data is tracked for subgroups, such as MLs. This helps to keep them at the forefront of the work, not the margins.

Systems that sustain schoolwide support include scheduling weekly common planning, designating and rotating facilitators for the unit-level unpacking, and involving all administrators in the coaching and monitoring of strategies through regular class visits. Regarding students, teachers noticed that MLs’ engagement and confidence increased as a result of the support and strategies employed. With these methods, leaders saw how teacher teams became more comfortable in implementing language objectives and scaffolds with a stronger understanding of the units and MLs.