Preparing candidates to work with English learners

English learners (ELs) are one of the fastest-growing populations of students in our schools, with over five million ELs enrolled in public schools,¹ an increase of 35% over the last two decades.² Every state has at least some share of ELs, so every aspiring teacher needs to be prepared to support those students and should have practice working with ELs. This strategy works: student teaching in a classroom with a higher proportion of ELs makes teachers more interested in working with this population.³

Yet ensuring teacher candidates work with this growing population is not always a consideration for prep programs. Leaders from one state education agency shared that one of their prep programs reported difficulty in locating clinical placements with ELs. When the state leaders visited the campus one day, they realized that after they’d walked two blocks away from campus, the signs had changed from English to Spanish, the churches were Spanish-speaking, and the people around them spoke Spanish. Yet the program had not placed any student teachers in this community. In another instance, state leaders described visiting a clinical placement site as part of an accreditation visit; the placement site was a linguistically and racially diverse school an hour away from the university. And it sat in the shadow of another institution whose preparation program reported they could not find diverse placements. These examples illustrate that teacher prep programs need to look beyond the walls of their institution and beyond the schools in which they typically place student teachers, to partner with local communities to build opportunities for candidates to teach ELs.

Several states and prep programs are placing more of an emphasis on ensuring student teachers teach in diverse settings.

Western Governors University (WGU)

WGU checks whether program supervisors speak multiple languages during the application process. Candidates often conduct clinical practice in places where students speak multiple languages and may be multilingual themselves. The program supervisor application form now checks whether supervisors speak languages in addition to English, so that they are better able to observe and provide feedback to student teachers who are teaching ELs.

• Read more in the Western Governors University case study

Massachusetts 

The state’s Guidelines for Program Approval and Guidelines for the Candidate Assessment of Performance require that teacher prep programs intentionally center the ability of candidates to teach all learners, including multilingual learners. In 2023, the state updated its Guidelines for Program Approval to align with the state’s focus on culturally and linguistically sustaining practices. The Program Approval Guidelines specify that prep programs are expected to provide

“field-based experiences that afford candidates access to an anti-racist and culturally and linguistically sustaining school culture, effective supervising practitioners, high-quality curricular materials, PK–12 students from diverse identities and backgrounds, and opportunities to participate in all components of the school community.”

The state’s Program Approval Guidelines also state that supervising practitioners should

• “be able to model evidence-based instructional practices, including anti-racist and culturally and linguistically sustaining practices
• be able to provide candidates with high-quality feedback and evaluation that prepares them to be effective, anti-racist, and culturally and linguistically sustaining educators
• be able to effectively and equitably support candidates of all races, ethnicities, identity groups, and backgrounds”

If the sponsoring organization is unable to match the candidate with a supervising practitioner who meets these criteria, the sponsoring organization is responsible for directly supporting the candidate with additional resources in that area.

Further, the state’s Candidate Assessment of Performance looks for evidence that student teachers can meet the diverse needs of students, including ELs. One of the seven Essential Elements in the CAP is Inclusive Instruction, which requires teacher candidates to demonstrate that they can “accommodate and support individual students in all students’ learning needs, abilities, interests, and levels of readiness, including those of . . . English learners and former English learners” through strategies including “tiered supports, educational and assistive technologies, scaffolded instruction, and leveraging students’ native language and linguistic resources to make grade-level content accessible and affirming for all students.”

• Read more in the Massachusetts case study
• More information about Massachusetts’ program approval guidelines and observation instrument

Michigan

The state’s Educator Preparation Institution performance score considers the “diversity of placement sites during student teaching.” The state has classified each school in the state as diverse or not based on demographics including students’ race/ethnicity, economic status, English language learner status, and disability status. Schools that are above the state average for any of these groups are considered diverse. To identify placement schools, the state uses the clinical practice placement locations candidates report in surveys. The program earns full points for this metric if the percentage of placement sites that are diverse meet or exceed a state-determined benchmark.

• Read more in the Michigan case study
• Educator Preparation Institution performance score manual