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Guiding Question: How can I group students for equity and diversity?

Explore

In quality multilingual schools and classrooms, students are grouped and regrouped

across the school day for a variety of purposes. Since schools can be understood as sites of

social reproduction (Alim, Paris & Wong, 2020), the decisions about these groupings and

regroupings need to be carefully examined and thoughtfully made to disrupt issues of inequity

around language, race, class, culture, gender, able-bodied-ness, etc. There is no one best way to

group students. In multilingual schools and classrooms, the variety of students’ languages is an

important factor in decision making about student grouping for equity and diversity. Accounting

for students’ language proficiencies, uses and opportunities for development in deciding who

gets to work with whom in which context also opens up the opportunity to achieve pluralist

learning outcomes that position a variety of knowledges and ways of being as valuable. Further,

each way of grouping students provides opportunities, as well as puts constraints on both

teachers and students as active participants in teaching and learning processes. Therefore, it is

important to make careful decisions that allow for a variety of student groupings in order to

meet a variety of important learning goals.

Grounding

Flexible grouping for equity and diversity, particularly with language in mind, is intended

to foster students’ ability to critically engage with the content of the curriculum, strengthen and

grow their linguistic repertoire, and develop flexible interactional skills. With these abilities,

students can engage in a variety of democratic, pluralistic social ecologies where diversity is

positively productive. At all levels, grouping for equity and diversity with language in mind

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means considering who is working together and the complex language profiles of the learners

including the interplay of various elements of students’ linguistic repertoires. In this book, we

focus on how students are grouped in contrast to advocating for one particular type of program or

model to support multilingual student learning. By attending to how students are grouped,

particularly across the whole day and whole school (not just within one classroom), policy and

practice decisions can be made that center students’ abilities, multilingualism and cultural

perspectives as well as produce pluralist learning outcomes that disrupt inequitable power

relationships.

Multilingual Student Linguistic Repertoires. There are a variety of theories about how

language develops, particularly additional or second (or third, fourth, etc.) (Vanpatten et al.,

2020). While most of these theories provide useful ideas and perspectives that can guide

teachers’ work with multilingual students, emphasis recently has been put on sociocultural

theories (Hawkins, 2019) particularly in connection with complexity theory (Larson-Freeman,

2020) and a “multilingual turn” (May, 2014). Valdés, Poza and Brooks (2015) offer a “socially

oriented” perspective to multilingual language development that helpfully illustrates the current

direction much research and theory is heading in the field (p. 62). They focus on learners

developing the ability to use language in a variety of contexts for a variety of purposes to

successfully engage in real-life communication. They suggest such ability is developed through

experience and use with language. Since language development is grounded in real-life

communication, use, and experience, they also suggest that language learning never ends, but is

constantly an effort to grow and change linguistic repertoires.

In addition to this focus on language development that is complex and viewed through a

sociocultural lens, more researchers are focusing on viewing language itself as a complex social

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construct and the language practices of multilinguals as valuable and unique within themselves

rather than in comparison to monolingual language practices (Kleyn & García, 2019). Thus, the

growth in popularity and attention to the idea of translanguaging (see the Translanguaging

module in this book for more information). From a translanguaging perspective, multilingualism

is viewed not as two (or more) distinct monolingual language systems within a particular

speaker, but rather as a unitary language system, or a linguistic repertoire (Kleyn & García,

2019). Linguistic repertoires are developed through the various communication needs and

contexts people engage in across their lifetime. For multilinguals, their linguistic repertoire will

include two or more named languages (e.g., English, Spanish, etc.) and likely a variety of

dialects and registers within those named languages. However, the practice of deciding which

aspect of a speakers’ linguistic repertoire to employ in which context is centered around

communicative need as well as responsiveness to the linguistic repertoire of the person(s) with

whom a speaker is seeking to communicate. Therefore, classrooms are vital spaces for expanding

monolingual and multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires through communication, use and

experiences with a variety of language practices. These important opportunities to use language

are often facilitated through how students are grouped across their school day.

Grouping Students. Policy and practice decisions about how students are grouped across

the entire day need to be centered around advancing equity and promoting diversity. Hawkins

(2019) argued that teachers should put equity at the center of their educational design and

decision-making by attending to grouping and participation patterns as well as a variety of

discourse patterns. She asserts that, “The ways in which schools are organized, and how students

are categorized, scheduled, and treated within them, determines students’ sense of school, their

place within it, and their identification with learning” (p. 21). To create stronger learning

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opportunities, Hawkins recommends that teachers attend to social relationships by integrating

students from diverse backgrounds to be able to work across a variety of social stratifications so

that all students can know, value and respect their peers across all of their differences. Such work

is a direct opportunity to disrupt issues of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, etc. in our schools

and society.

In 2000, Tharp and his colleagues from the Center for Research on Education, Diversity,

and Excellence at the University of California Berkeley published a book called “Teaching

Transformed: Achieving Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion and Harmony.” This book was the

results of expansive research in diverse classrooms seeking to understand the most successful

ways learning is promoted and achieved in classrooms with students from a variety of

backgrounds, particularly multilingual students. One of the base arguments in their book on how

to transform teaching is that “to work together is to teach and learn together and to understand

the world together” (p. 66). They further argue that “the effective design of instructional activity

produces education through action, talk, work and relationship. Social, intellectual, and

community growth are enabled or crippled by patterns of joint productivity” (p. 66). They argue

for educators to attend to the affinity groups that students are automatically drawn to for their

similarity around various identities. But Tharp and colleagues also show the possibilities when

students are put into collaboration with students from varying affinity groups and how the work

of jointly producing together can help break down various social barriers that exist both inside

and outside of school. Therefore, they argue that “the most reliable quality criterion for

instructional activity is that it should be patterned to produce diversity: of task, groups, roles,

power, and language genres and codes” (p. 67). Grouping students for equity is grounded in

decisions that produce diversity in all the ways Tharp and his colleagues describe.

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Schools have a long history of tracking and segregating students based on perceived

academic abilities (Oakes, 2005). This includes a great deal of segregation for multilingual

populations in schools as well (Nieto, 2000; Estrada et al., 2019; Valdés, 2001). Most

multilingual students in U.S. schools, are instructed in English throughout the school day. Nearly

all of their instruction is in heterogeneous groups. In many schools, there is designated time for

English Language Development (ELD) or English as a Second Language (ESL) during which

the students are organized by language proficiency level (Wright, 2019). Multilingual learners

rarely get to engage in learning through their home language in school, with the exception of

students in bilingual programs who represent only a small portion of the multilingual learner

population. Further, monolingual English speakers typically receive no second language

instruction until middle or high school. These classes are often grammar based and not taught as

a means to learn academic content or interact authentically in the target language on a daily

basis.

Based on these issues, grouping students for equity and the opportunity to produce

diversity has to be more than just decisions within one classroom. Attention needs to be given to

multilingual students learning experiences across the whole school day (Soto, 2012).

Multilingual students should have the opportunity during every school day to work in three

different language groupings: home language groups, second language groups, and

heterogeneous language groups, recognizing that in some schools attended by multilingual

students there are no other students who share a home language for them to be grouped with.

Home language and second language groups actually have some amount of homogeneity.

Monolingual English speakers often spend a great deal of their school day grouped with other

monolingual English speakers. The benefit of creating that same opportunity for multilingual

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students is immense. Brisk and Tian (2019) argue that grouping students who share the same

home language is an opportunity to take full advantage of students’ expansive language skills. In

home language groupings, students can use their full linguistic repertoire to share their ideas and

work to co-construct understandings. Alim, Paris, and Wong (2020) argue that the opportunity to

use home languages in the classroom should not just be for the purpose of promoting traditional

academic achievement, rather for “producing learners that can interrogate what counts as

‘acceptable’ or ‘canonical,’ what language varieties are heard as ‘standard,’ and what ways of

knowing are viewed as ‘academic’” (p. 263). Monolingual speakers of English can also learn

these things when their multilingual peers are thoughtfully grouped for equity purposes and to

produce diversity.

Another somewhat homogenous grouping arrangement that can be beneficial for

multilingual students is being grouped with other students who are learning English. Students

from varying language backgrounds can support one another in learning about the codes and uses

of English as well as engage in communicative practices that are both accessible in terms of

language demand and create the context for ongoing language growth.

The final grouping that is important for multilingual students to engage in is one that is

linguistically heterogeneous. When bilingual education is kept in the “basement” (Nieto, 2000)

or multilingual students exist in linguistic isolation in schools (Valdés, 2001), equitable learning

opportunities are not being afforded multilingual students. It is important that students have the

opportunity to engage with monolingual English-speaking peers, not just for the opportunity to

have access to English speakers as models for their own language development, but to achieve

what Tharp and colleagues (2000) argue for in terms of fairness, inclusion, and harmony.

Taking Action

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Based on the research described above, educators have the opportunity to create strong

learning opportunities for students by grouping for equity and to produce diversity. The

grouping configurations described below grew out of a cycle of lessons called the Concept

Development Strategy (Miramontes et al, 2011) implemented in one of the first dual immersion

bilingual schools in the country in San Diego. Over the years the ideas have been refined and

expanded with the understanding that teachers in all kinds of programs, even where instruction

is delivered only in English, can use these understandings to guide their planning. While we will

focus on opportunities to take action within in the classroom, we strongly suggest that the kind

of attention to grouping for equity described here is attended to at the school level as well.

The three ways of grouping students with language in mind provide different

opportunities and put different constraints on both teachers and students as they engage in

teaching and learning. Each offers only part of what is needed to develop multilingualism in an

academic setting and no single way of grouping students is sufficient if multilingual learners are

to reach their fullest potential. The opportunities of each grouping can be summarized as follows:

When working in their home language, students can more easily deepen their conceptual

understandings. Groups where all the students are learning the new language provide

opportunities for multilingual learners to focus on language forms and functions, as well as

vocabulary related to the important new concepts in a lower stress environment. Heterogeneous

groups provide the best opportunity for interactive engagement among students from different

backgrounds and language profiles as they engage in learning together.

Home Language Grouping. In home language groups, the students all speak the same

home language and are working in that language. English speaking teachers teaching

monolingual English speakers, Spanish literacy instruction for native speakers or an Arabic

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speaking volunteer working with a small group in Arabic to review key concepts about a science

unit are all examples of home language groups. When students are able to work with someone

who is fluent in their language, it is easier to go deep into concepts, tap into students’ funds of

knowledge and access information through a wide variety of channels. It is also more likely that

teachers and students in home language groups share certain cultural understandings, experiences

and practices.

Home language groups may seem ideal for both the teacher and the students as they

allow for greater flexibility in which teaching approaches to use. But if multilingualism is

desirable for all students, then spending time learning content only in the home language can also

have negative consequences. If students are always in a home language group, they will not have

the opportunity to develop an additional language, resulting in students remaining monolingual

speakers of their home language. This is the case for most native English speakers in the U.S.

who typically do not receive opportunities on a regular basis to be exposed to, or become fluent

in, a language other than English. In addition, if students are always working in their first or

home language with other speakers of that language, they likely won’t have many opportunities

to interact with and learn from students who come from different cultural backgrounds.

In classrooms where English is typically the medium of instruction, there may be no

existing home language groups for multilingual learners, but the opportunity to continue

conceptual development through the home language is still important and can be supported and

nourished both by what you do in the classroom and how you connect with the community.

Because these are the kinds of opportunities least available to multilingual students, it is

especially important that you pay special attention to what you can do to provide them. Even if

you are not fluent in the home languages of your multilingual students, there are still many ways

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you can support students’ learning by building on their home language(s) and creating structured

opportunities to deepen understandings and further conceptual development about the topics of

instruction.

The focus of home language groups, whether they are alongside a teacher or done

independently, should be on higher levels of abstraction and deepening students’ understanding

of the interrelationships of the concepts under investigation. Creating these home language

opportunities can be as simple as allowing students to turn and talk in their home language in

heterogeneous group discussions. For students with literacy skills in their home language, you

could also provide reading materials in those languages to use in class, on their own or with

family members. At any point when grouping decisions are being made for students to

collaborate with one another, you could choose to create home language groups.

Formal instructional opportunities in home languages can be challenging to create in

school because of the numbers of students or languages or curricular mandates. They are,

however, possible especially when you reach out to the larger community for their support. For

example, small group activities in your classroom could be conducted by a parent, older students

in the building or community volunteers. This could include reading stories aloud or sharing

information orally about the topic of instruction. Especially at the secondary level, many school

districts have what are called Native Language Tutors, to help students with their content studies.

It is important that they know their job is conceptual development and not just getting a

homework assignment completed.

Classroom Snapshot #1. Creating home language opportunities in school

The 4th grade teachers at Miramontes Elementary want to assure that their multilingual

learners have planned opportunities to use their home languages to deepen understandings about

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content. As part of a schoolwide effort to solicit classroom volunteers for small group

instruction, they chose to search for people from each of the four languages other than English

spoken in their classrooms (Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Urdu). They reached out to the teacher

preparation program at the nearby university, local business partners, restaurant owners, and

parents who at the beginning of the year indicated they had time during the day to come to

school. They found enough volunteers to schedule a 45-minute block once every two weeks to

group students by home language across the three classrooms during Science.

They kicked off the effort with an after-school event where participants talked about why

they had volunteered and any concerns they had. Teachers shared their expectations and asked

for input from the volunteers. They explained that the work would mainly be oral – providing

students opportunities to talk about and make connections to the content in their home languages,

become familiar with how their home language names the concepts and to pose questions about

what they do and don’t understand to be passed on to the teachers. There are also opportunities

for the volunteers to read aloud when appropriate materials are available.

The small group work is centered around using visual images to elicit understandings and

get the conversations going. For each topic, volunteers are given a set of visuals created for the

unit. The solar system visuals include the planets and their satellites in orbit around the sun, a

group of families looking at the night sky standing near a giant telescope, the stages of a lunar

eclipse, and how night and day are caused by the rotation of the Earth. They can be downloaded

from the classroom web page and all parents are encouraged to engage in discussions in their

strongest language. There is also a to-scale model hanging in the hallway to give an idea of the

relative sizes and distances of the planets from the sun and each other.

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The volunteers are given recommended discussion prompts such as: What do students already

know about the sun and stars? Would they like to go into outer space? What would be the best

and worst thing about traveling to Mars? At first, the teachers worried that the students would be

reluctant to participate, or that the volunteers would drop out, but the response has been so

positive that they now hold the groups every week.

Another way to support conceptual development through the home language is to have

resources in languages other than English in your classroom. You can ask families to help you

identify websites, books, and information on their home culture. Even if you don’t speak the

languages of your students having the resources accomplishes two things: (1) it provides students

with access to the content even if they aren’t yet proficient in English; and (2) it demonstrates

your appreciation and support for their multilingualism. At the same time whenever you find a

resource, be sure to share it with families. Monolingual English speakers also receive the

message that being multilingual is valuable and the use of languages other than English in and

out of school should be promoted. Our Module Engaging Families goes more deeply into how to

share and make greater use of the resources you find.

As you work with families, a critical message to them is that they should engage with

their children in their strongest language. This message is underscored when home languages

play a meaningful role in classroom learning (see our module on Translanguaging for further

ideas). As you try things out around home language groupings, pay attention to how students

respond both academically, but also affectively. If you set the tone of celebration, affirmation

and promotion of multilingualism, students and their families will follow your lead.

Second Language Grouping. In second language groups as defined in this module, all

the students in the group are learning English as an additional language. They might all speak the

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same language other than English or represent a wide range of languages. There may be formal

designated times led by a language specialist or be configured through flexible grouping in the

content classroom.

Groups where everyone is learning the language of instruction can offer a safe place for

students to practice their new language at their own level of proficiency. They provide

opportunities to focus on aspects of language development not needed by students whose home

language is English. These groups can help students feel more confident because they don’t have

to compete with students who are already fluent in the language of instruction. Multilingual

learners can more easily shine among their peers, something not always possible in

heterogeneous groups. This can reduce the psychological stress experienced when learners have

trying to make sense of and communicate through a language they don’t yet speak well. They

can also foster risk-taking and help multilingual learners develop a sense of security that lends

itself to greater learning (Stevick, 1976).

Second language groups provide an important part of becoming academically successful,

but they do not provide all the opportunities students need to do so. If students spend all their

time only with other students learning English as an additional language, they will not have

regular access to fluent speakers as models and will miss out on opportunities to interact with

students from the majority language and culture. In addition, and unfortunately, teachers

sometimes overcompensate for students’ levels of language proficiency by watering down the

curriculum to make it “easier” instead of working to make challenging concepts understandable.

A final limitation is that if students are always being taught through their second language, they

won’t benefit from being able to use their home language to deepen their understandings of the

concepts.

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Students at all levels of proficiency in English, including advanced learners, can benefit

from participation in second language groups as long as they are tailored to build on their

existing language repertoires. In order to become fluent in a language, students have to practice a

lot. Second language groups are not the sole responsibility of a designated language teacher.

They can and should happen more informally during literacy and content instruction throughout

the day. This means creating spaces where students with similar levels of language proficiency

can review and practice the vocabulary, language forms and functions and communication

strategies they need to be successful in content instruction and to participate more confidently in

heterogeneous group activities. What happens in second language groups should be driven by the

question: What do students need to be able to do at the word, sentence and discourse level to

participate in the main activities of the content unit? This needs to be accounted for in everyone’s

instructional planning.

Classroom Snapshot #2 Using Proficiency Level Grouping in the Content Classroom

In the introduction to her unit on States of Matter, Ms. Miller sets up a whole

class demonstration in which she in turn boils water, melts ice, and captures steam in a plastic

jug where it then condenses. When the demonstration is complete, she tells students to turn and

talk with pre-assigned partners to describe what they saw. Students are reminded that they can

speak in the language they feel most comfortable in, and the pairs have been created with home

language in mind. As students report what they saw, Ms. Miller creates a chart with a list of key

vocabulary along with visual images. This chart will be available throughout the unit.

As at the beginning of every unit, after the initial presentation of new concepts,

students rotate through three activity centers to begin to explore the new concepts together,

grouped roughly by their level of development in English. These include a writing center, a

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reading center and an instructional conversation with Ms. Miller. At the independent centers,

there are written directions differentiated for the three groups and samples from previous units

available as models.

Reading Center: The reading center has several different non-fiction books from

publishers who have created themed materials at a range of reading levels about content topics.

Students in the most proficient group will review two or three of the books individually and then

talk in pairs to compare and contrast the information presented in the materials. Each pair must

come up with three similarities and one difference. Students in the intermediate group will do

basically the same task but can use a Venn Diagram to organize the information. Students in the

beginning group will use the materials to match the words / and pictures in the books to the class

chart and the sentences they created previously with Ms Miller.

Writing Center: The most proficient group goes first to the writing center where

each student will draft a short paragraph based on what they observed in the demonstration and

what caused the water to change states. They then exchange papers and discuss their ideas with a

partner using provided prompts. Students at the intermediate level work in pairs using a framed

paragraph with sentence starters to create a written description of what they saw and why it

happened. They can use books from the reading center as a support. Students new to English will

use the books, the class chart and the story they created with Ms. Miller to write their own

sentences about what they saw in the demonstration.

Instructional conversations: Ms. Miller first works with the students at entering

levels of proficiency. At her side, she has multiple pictures of water in different states that they

name and describe with her help. She refers to the chart created following the demonstration and

then together they write a 5-sentence co-constructed text about it that includes the basic

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vocabulary of liquid, solid, gas, melts, evaporates and space between molecules. They will take

the text with them to the reading and writing centers. Ms. Miller asks the intermediate group to

compare what they saw in her demonstration with what they discovered at the Reading Center.

She poses a series of questions to make sure that they are using the basic vocabulary and what

new understandings they got from their reading. In the more advanced group several students

read aloud what they wrote at writing center. They then discuss the ideas and ask any questions

they have.

Instruction in second language groups is most productive when it focuses on multilingual

students’ need to express their thinking around the topic under study when they are in

heterogeneous groups. Consider the demands of a debate where students not only have to know

the content of the subject, but also the very strict rules of format. Think now about participating

in the Science Fair where students need to explain their hypotheses, describe their data collection

methods, report out on the data, and explain their conclusions. They will also be required to

understand questions asked of them and spontaneously respond. Each step of this process

demands particular facility with language, as well as knowing the content of the science

experiment. Living museums, debates, science fairs – just about any activity – are perfectly

appropriate for multilingual learners still in the process of acquiring English. It will be necessary,

though, to provide them with time to prepare, to practice forms and functions as well as to

receive guidance in how to express their ideas effectively in English. You might pull a small

group of second language speakers aside for just 5 -10 minutes to rehearse a language structure,

so they can participate in a whole group activity with more confidence. Even better would be to

incorporate a focus on language development as one of a set of small-group centers that all

students participate in.

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Adapting instruction to account for students’ language proficiency is not about teaching

what is easiest. Rather it is making what is most important understandable. You should maintain

high expectations for students learning through their second language, while recognizing that

they may not understand everything. You can make abstract concepts come alive through the use

of visuals, models, and hands on activities which are also appropriate. Below is an example of

the kind of image that could be developed. Taken together the different images represent the

larger concept of “relationship.” Each section demonstrates how the same word has a slightly

different meaning in different contexts. The visual describes relationships in the context of

families, math, and the economy (cows producing milk, cheese and fastfood hamburgers).

With visuals as a support, students can develop the language of relationships appropriate

to the particular academic context at their level of English proficiency. Any visuals images or

models should also be used during heterogeneous and home language groups to help students

connect their understandings across their entire linguistic repertoire. The Module Making

Concepts Visible and Accessible goes into greater depth on this topic.

On final thing to keep in mind: while second language groups provide multilingual

learners the opportunity to focus on the forms and structures of a language, the work should

always be done within a meaningful context. Decontextualized skills worksheets, grammar

exercises or vocabulary memorization are not appropriate strategies to employ.

Heterogeneous Grouping. Heterogeneous groups are composed of monolingual or

fluent English speakers and multilingual learners with various profiles of language development

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working together. When students new to English join what was previously a group composed of

monolingual English speakers, it becomes a heterogeneous group. This is what has happened

across the country as multilingual learners enter previously all English-speaking schools. These

linguistically mixed groups can be challenging for teachers and can be the most difficult to teach

to consistently build on the learning assets of all of the students. Instruction must be both

comprehensible to the multilingual learners at a range of proficiency levels in English and

sufficiently demanding for the monolingual and fluent English speakers.

Heterogeneous groups may seem to be ideal because we want students to succeed in the

“regular classroom” and they set the stage for students from diverse backgrounds to work

together. However, without careful planning and instruction, there can be many missed

opportunities for the language and conceptual development of multilingual learners. Most

teachers treat heterogeneous groups as if they were home language groups and gear the delivery

content to the language levels of fluent or monolingual speakers of English. Some of the

positives include a focus on grade level content, teaching at a quick pace, and holding high

expectations. However, if teachers use strategies geared mainly to build off the strengths of the

fully proficient speakers of English, some aspects of the instruction may be beyond the grasp of

even advanced multilingual learners. Often when multilingual learners do understand their

lessons in the heterogeneous group, their attempts to speak English are thwarted by more

proficient monolingual English speakers who easily out compete them in whole group question

and answer sessions and discussion groups. In whole class groupings, multilingual learners not

yet fully proficient in English who know the answer may need extra time to formulate how to

express what they know. By the time they have some sentences ready, more fluent speakers

already have their hands up and often have shouted out the answer.

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If multilingual learners are always in groups (both whole class or small group) with fully

proficient speakers of English, they may not get the kind of practice with vocabulary, sentence

structures, and meaning that will benefit them. The flip side is that if teachers completely modify

their instruction to build off the strengths of multilingual learners who are still developing their

proficiency in English, there is the chance that monolingual and multilingual English speakers

and will not be able to continue their learning journeys at a sufficiently challenging pace or in

ways that are most responsive to their strengths.

In bilingual programs, it is also important to distinguish between home language and

heterogenous groups to assure that students who speak languages other than English have

substantial opportunities to deepen their conceptual understandings. Because of the external

power dynamics that privilege English, no matter the setting, instruction is typically orchestrated

to address the needs of the English dominant speakers in the programs. This can have the effect

of lessening the cognitive demand during heterogeneous groups and denying multilingual

learners the chance to go deeply into concepts of instruction.

Heterogeneous language groups can provide multilingual learners with many

opportunities for both linguistic and conceptual development. To accomplish this, you want to

move away from teaching as if all the students are fully proficient speakers of the language of

instruction and consider language as a part of the equation. Instruction should reflect

understandings of second language acquisition while maintaining high expectations for

performance. Heterogeneous language groups are the time for students to work together across

language proficiencies to interact with and act on the big ideas and enduring understandings of

the topics of instruction. They are most successful when the activities are hands-on, interactive,

and address multiple modalities (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic). Collaborative learning

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strategies are ideally suited for heterogeneous groups as they involve every student in the

learning while building social and academic skills as well as intercultural competence. Activities

like shared and buddy reading, project-based activities, lab experiments, and small group

problem solving are all appropriate. Scaffolding the language demands of such activities using

sentence frames, visual supports, modeling and multiple examples can all be useful to ensure

multilingual learners can access the ideas that are being explored. For more information on

collaborative learning, please see the module Meaningful Collaboration.

In heterogeneous groups, you want to build on the opportunities created by students from

different backgrounds and language proficiencies working together. You can encourage

proficient English speakers in heterogeneous groups to act as models for students building their

English proficiencies and to help their peers represent their knowledge about instructional

concepts either orally or in writing. The emphasis should be on the communication of ideas and

knowledge with grammatical accuracy and language conventions taking a temporary back seat.

This will allow for the more natural engagement with both ideas and the varied linguistic

repertoires students bring to heterogeneous groups. Heterogeneous groups should also include

activities designed to help students get along with, affirm their diverse identities and life

experiences, learn from, and respect each other. In all subjects you can create specific

opportunities where students are given guidance and practice on how to learn together across

differences as a method of embracing those differences as positively productive for learning and

society.

Lecturing to the whole group, still the most common approach currently used at the

secondary level, is not effective in heterogeneous groups, especially for multilingual learners.

When most of the class is actively participating, and responding, teachers may be reluctant to

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slow down or stop to explain concepts and vocabulary in depth to a small group of students or

even realize that they need to do so. The students who are newest to English may be left out

completely. It is also essential that during heterogeneous groups students have access to

materials and resources related to the key concepts and understandings at a range of reading

levels and languages so that everyone can be working on the concepts at their own level of

language proficiency and literacy development. By including materials in languages other than

English, you can support students in connecting their learning across languages in school and at

home. This means taking an approach to planning that moves away from single sources of

information and textbook-driven instruction, and shifts to an emphasis on big ideas and concepts

that can be accessed in multiple ways through all languages. (See module Unit Planning that

Accounts for Multilingual Learners for further learning)

Examine the Organization of your Instruction. You can begin to take action by

examining how your classroom as is currently configured and decide whether the approaches and

strategies you are currently using are best suited to supporting strong learning for your students

that promotes equity and diversity. Even if you currently teach mostly heterogenous groupings

and have students who speak languages you don’t know, with careful planning and design, you

can create opportunities for your students to engage in all three language groupings explored in

this module.

The first step is to reflect on a variety of questions: Does the overall organizational

structure of my classroom allow for grouping and regrouping students with language demand in

mind? In what kinds of groups do my multilingual learners currently experience their school

day? What are the existing opportunities for my multilingual learners to deepen their

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understandings through their home languages? How do students whose home language is English

and multilingual learners from different cultural backgrounds interact and treat each other?

The next step is to consider when you are with a group of students: Who is in front of me

right now? How do I build on opportunities this kind of group offers for fostering equity and

diversity? For developing language proficiency, content knowledge and intercultural

competence? How can I minimize the limitations? What unites instruction across all three

groupings is the need for active engagement.

Finally, it is helpful to talk to your students about how you value multilingualism. You

can discuss how you intentionally plan different kinds of opportunities across the day to promote

both their linguistic and their conceptual development and increase their abilities to work with

people who are different from themselves. You will also need to create and draw on resources

that can be used in different ways in different groups for different tasks and learning outcomes.

In this way, together with your students you can advance equity and diversity by sustaining the

languages, cultures, identities and lives of students and their communities (Alim et al., 2020).

References

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Estrada, P., Wang, H., & Farkas, T. (2019). Elementary English learner classroom composition

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