Resources

Core Practices for Teaching Multilingual Students

Dr. Megan Madigan Peercy, Professor in the College of ��ϴ��, recently co-authored a book titled, "" The book illustrates real-world examples from the classrooms of English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers, unpacks the teachers’ thinking about their instruction, and identifies six core practices that are foundational to teaching multilingual students. This text and the accompanying materials shared here aim to help pre- and in service teachers of multilingual students to center equity and justice in their practice and understand how to move humanizing mindsets into action.

Click on the links below to download any of our table or visual resources related to this text! Most are in PDF form.

This table lays out all of the core practices for multilingual students
A full-page version of the official Core Practices graphic can be found here

Here are some resources that may be helpful in the classroom:

These two template options can support teachers' observations of an example lesson or reflect on their own lessons. We have two versions available for download - Table 7.1 and Table 7.2. They both help the observer focus on identifying the core practices present in the lesson, and considering how the practices in the lesson humanize the learning experience.
This lesson plan template can be used in a variety of contexts, and provides space to plan content, language, and social justice standards and objectives, key vocabulary, materials and resources, technology components, and even a space for self-reflection.

These videos depict teachers as they engage in the core practices and discuss their use. Playlists for all six core practices are below.

Core Practice 1: Knowing your multilingual students	Core Practice 2: Building a positive learning environment for multilingual students

Core Practice 3: Content and language instruction	Core Practice 4: Language and literacy development

Core Practice 5: Assessment for multilingual students	Core Practice 6: Relationships and advocacy

And take a look at these videos if you want practice analyzing a full lesson.

As you watch, use these links to download lesson analysis template Table 7.1 and/or Table 7.2 and consider the following questions:

What does the teacher do well that would support MLLs' content knowledge and linguistic development?
What suggestions do you have to improve the teacher’s instruction for MLLs?

Full lesson video of Kendall	Full lesson video of Erica	Full lesson video of TC

In this lesson, Kendall is teaching a pull-out lesson with six 3rd-grade students who have intermediate proficiency in English. They are learning about how a character in a story overcomes obstacles, and examining the problems and solutions that the character faces in a biography about someone who started a community garden in a city.	In this lesson, Erica is teaching five 2nd-grade newcomers in a pull-out lesson on community helpers. She serves a largely Spanish-speaking population at an elementary school in a large urban area.	TC is a secondary ESOL Science teacher who teaches primarily 9th- and 10th-grade newcomer multilingual students. In this lesson, her students are giving presentations about their learning on the plant life cycle.

These videos are recordings of two webinars, presented by members of the research team, for the Multilingual Research Center (MLRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


Leveraging Core Practices to Support Teachers’ Humanizing Pedagogy with MLLs	Moving Humanizing Principles to Practice: How We’re Using Core Practices for Teaching MLLs
��	��
In this webinar, Madigan Peercy and team share an overview of the six core practices for teaching multilingual students that we have developed in collaboration with early career teachers. These practices emerged in response to the gap that Faltis & Valdes (2016) identified regarding the lack of direction offered to teacher educators about “the kinds of knowledge, skills, and inclinations teachers need to develop in order to be good and effective teachers and advocates for students who are speaking a language other than English” (p. 549). We highlight the core practices, share classroom examples, discuss how they support teachers’ humanizing pedagogy with MLLs, offer resources for teacher and teacher educator development, and describe our current and future efforts to further this research.	Peercy et al. have found that teacher educators often welcome opportunities to hear about the details of one other’s pedagogical decision-making, but rarely get to gather these insights. In this webinar, they discuss how they are using the core practices research and materials in their own teaching. They describe the pedagogical work the core practices entail and how approaching methods courses in this way has changed their teaching with different kinds of teacher populations. They also share empirical, theoretical, and pedagogical considerations and next steps in this work.