Summer Multilingual Learner Planning Series Part 4: Progress Monitoring and Advocacy

Welcome to the final part of the Summer Multilingual Learner Planning Series! We are focusing on progress monitoring and advocating for your MLLs and ELLs within your school building. You can check the other parts of the series out here:

Part 1: Know Your Students
Part 2: Creating Language Goals
Part 3: Lesson Planning

Once you have everything set up as far as understanding your student data, how to create language goals from that data, and how to lesson plan based on it too, it's time to set up progress monitoring and understand your role of being an advocate for your multilingual learners. 

The best way to monitor progress if your district does not have a specific way they want it done, is to set up a form and a way to communicate with content teachers to have them fill out the forms to make sure they are successful and their scaffolds are assisting them with access to curriculum and instruction. Some districts have programs like ELLevation, which is great! However, some do not. If you need a form for progress monitoring, you can check this one out here!

Monitoring Forms
Your forms should include some basics for your teachers in your building to fill out such as:

• Academic performance
• Peer interaction
• Class participation
• Communication with teacher
• Task completion
• Attendance

It should be communicated to teachers that these should be taken into account with a language lens and with knowledge of student's proficiency's levels. This report should not be a "gotcha". The purpose of the report is to see how students are doing in the content areas. I'd recommend doing these roughly every month and a half or two.

How to collect reports
Everyone has their preferences, but I prefer doing these reports digitally and keeping them in an online sharing space such as Google Drive or One Drive. Otherwise, they can be printed out and placed in teacher's boxes and asked to be returned at a specific date. I have found that it is more effective to give an actual date for return. Sending these out on a Monday and asking for them to be returned on a Thursday is sufficient time.

What if students are not performing well?
If students are not performing well in class or not interacting with others, it would be beneficial to review a couple of things with the teacher and then follow up with a plan of action. 

• What scaffolds are teachers using? Do they need to be adjusted? (Scaffolds are meant to be temporary and adjusted as needed.) Some example questions to teachers based on the student's proficiency level might be:
  • Is there sufficient wait time? Is instruction given clearly and at a regular speaking speed (not too fast) for emerging to expanding students?
  • Does the student have a buddy who speaks their native language?
  • Are visuals being used? How do you scaffold assignments?
• Is the student absent a lot? Have the parents been notified? Was a translator used to contact parents?
• Have their been any assessments done in their native language to see if it is a language barrier?

Advocating for students
As you can see, there is a gentle balance between advocating for your students but also maintaining a good working relationship with colleagues. We want to give them the benefit of the doubt and coach them with how to support our multilingual students as best and as gracefully as we can. At the end of the day, students are at the center and we are all working for their success. Here are some ways that you can advocate for your MLs and ELs:

• Visit department and PLC meetings to give bite-sized chunks of helpful tips and information
• Create mini-PDs for teachers through newsletters and infographics that can be shared by the copy machine, by sign-in sheets, or in the bathroom (yes, there is such thing as "potty PD" and it's effective! Hang up a quick PD in the bathroom stall!)
• Coordinate with counselors to ensure student success with class placement and progress
• Create a digital folder for best practices and instructional tips on a Padlet, on a school website, in One Drive or Google Drive, or any other online platform that your school or district uses

Embracing leadership
I bet you never thought this before you became an ESL teacher, but leadership is something you start to embrace after advocating for your students so much! Personally, I am an introverted teacher so it took me a while at first to feel comfortable in this role. But I kept reminding myself that it was all for my students. Being a teacher leader means doing some of the following:

• Embracing advocacy for your students
• Leading faculty-wide professional learning, and if it is not happening, advocating for it to happen with your admin team
• Offering to lead professional learning at the district level
• Attending professional learning outside of your district online or in person
• Requesting from your admin or district EL/ML department certain PDs or offerings for them to pay for you to attend and receive (most districts will pay with purchase orders- you just have to ask!)
• Leading professional learning at the national level
• Creating an online professional learning network (PLN) through social media (Teacher Twitter is great for ESL teachers and those who serve multilingual learners!)

I encourage you to continue your learning and reach out to others online if you do not have a PLN in your area or district. I have learned so much by doing this when I created my Teacher Instagram and Twitter! I never knew how beneficial it would be!

And if you feel you need more support or resources, check out our monthly teacher membership (and don't be afraid to ask for a purchase order!).

Happy learning and advocating, teacher friends! I wish you the best year yet!
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