Last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of a milestone US Supreme Court ruling, Lau v. Nichols (1974), which set the groundwork for equitable learning opportunities for students designated at the time as limited English proficient (and who are now referred to as English learners (ELs) at the federal level). The Lau decision in tandem with the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which was enacted by Congress later the same year, required that all public schools implement remedies to ensure students with “limited English proficiency” could participate meaningfully in their education. And yet, despite five decades of attempts to make classroom experiences meaningful for this significant subgroup, we still find ourselves struggling to design educational programs that succeed in developing students’ academic expertise while at the same time meeting their language-learning needs. Why might this still be the case? From a policy perspective, the Lau decision only required “appropriate action to overcome language barriers” but did not specify a particular educational approach or program. A subsequent court case, Castañeda v. Pickard (1981), attempted to define the criteria by which a program might be considered, but the lack of original specificity in the Lau decision “has plagued efforts to identify the essential components of equity with regard to the education of English learners,” according to language policy experts.
With various degrees of success, educators have sought to resolve the dilemma programmatically by offering transitional bilingual education, dual language immersion, and even full English immersion programs. Extensive research has found that students in well-implemented dual language bilingual educational (DLBE) models outperform those in programs taught in English alone, but in reality, most EL-designated multilingual learners still do not have access to DLBE programs in their home or community languages. Instead, they learn both language and academic content largely through the medium of English.
Language and Content Integrated Instruction Through Collaboration
One of the greatest challenges in English-medium schools that enroll EL-designated multilingual learners is the shortage of teachers who are well prepared and certified to effectively integrate content and language instruction, either in secondary (grades 6–12) content-area courses or in elementary (K–5) content-area lessons within general education classrooms. A similarly vexing problem is a reliance upon standalone language classes that are not tied to core content. At the elementary level, these “pull-out” classes are challenging because students are removed from their classrooms and miss the lessons happening there. At the secondary level, standalone language classes are problematic because they often only count for elective (rather than required-for-graduation) credit and are not necessarily tied to other academic content. Taking these courses usually means that students miss out on taking other courses they may need or want to take.
One way around these issues is through implementation of language and content integrated instruction that involves collaboration among ELD and content teachers. One approach, known as co-teaching, calls for two teachers to work together side by side to plan and teach lessons. The content teacher has a credential in a specific content area (at the secondary level) or multiple content areas (at the elementary level); the ELD teacher is a language specialist who is certified to teach ELD to EL-designated multilingual learners. Other approaches that aim to provide content and language instruction simultaneously include:
Consulting, in which an ELD teacher consults with students directly in a content class (“direct consultation”) and/or with a content teacher as they co-plan learning targets, resources, and strategies for the content teacher to implement in their lessons, which are typically delivered without the ELD teacher present (“indirect consultation”); and
Dually endorsed teaching, in which a single teacher is certified in one or more content areas and in ELD and provides integrated language and content instruction on their own. In this model, teachers often collaborate with other ELD and/or content teachers for additional support but may not always do so.
To prevent the linguistic segregation that often takes place in schools with large numbers of EL-designated multilingual learners, students in such classrooms are often a mix of fluent multilinguals, English monolinguals, and EL-designated multilingual learners. In this sense, language and content integrated courses can integrate peers of different language backgrounds and proficiencies together.
Our own research shows that these options may be relatively common nationwide: in a survey we conducted in May 2021, over 70% of the responding districts indicated that they used some form of teacher collaboration to provide integrated language and content instruction for their secondary EL-designated multilingual learners. Professional guidance on these models has grown significantly in the last 20 years, and recently districts themselves have started to provide guidance for each other in defining, developing, and improving instruction through collaboration. However, the design and implementation of these programs has not been explored extensively by researchers, especially when considering district-level policy and implementation.
What We Did
We were interested in learning more about what happens when districts develop these collaborative language and content integrated programs and implement them in their secondary schools. For example, how do district-level policies on language and content integrated instruction shape instructional opportunities for EL-designated multilingual learners at the school level? How do school administrators respond to and navigate the implementation of these policies? We hoped that the answers to these questions could help us better understand the potential of these programs for addressing the long-standing difficulties our educational system has experienced in trying to respond to the Lau decision.
To that end, in 2021–22 and 2022–23 we conducted interviews and observations across three different school districts: one of which had a long-standing language and content integrated model, using co-teaching in particular (Mountain View School District, a pseudonym), and two of which had recently begun implementation of their collaborative models (Woodside and Deerfield School Districts, also pseudonyms). After more than 50 interviews with administrators and teachers and 80 hours of classroom observations, what did we discover?
What We Learned
Policies and their lengths of implementation were different in each district, but at each site, we saw district and school leaders carefully weighing options and making thoughtful decisions. Yet none of the districts found “the solution” for successful implementation of language and content integrated program models. Such a reality is hardly surprising, given the complexity of these models and the challenges of addressing Lau’s mandate. What we did notice, however, were common underlying tensions across these three different districts that were strikingly similar.
Financial Tensions
The first set of tensions we encountered—focused on districts’ inevitably limited financial resources—are probably the most familiar to educators. A truly integrated model would imply that every teacher in a school is ready and able to provide high-quality instruction for EL-designated multilingual learners at all proficiency levels, but linguistically and culturally responsive educators remain in short supply in US schools. Furthermore, hiring enough ELD teachers to collaborate with all content teachers through a co-teaching model would be a very expensive proposition. Financial decisions were particularly fraught because newly arrived immigrant students often enroll after initial staffing decisions have been made, increasing the demand on staff time. Requests for additional resources for these students (e.g., separate “newcomer” language courses, or funding for additional sections of those courses) were reasonable, but districts had to balance these demands against the need to fully implement an integrated model, which meant assigning ELD teachers to as many content-area courses with EL-designated students as possible. Such was the case even in Mountain View School District, which had a long-standing integrated model. These financial tensions suggest that although some issues in implementing integrated language and content instruction models can be solved through additional funding, such as hiring teachers to reduce class size or add class sections, limited instructional capacity clearly burdens districts’ financial systems. In other words, without having 100% of teachers qualified to educate EL-designated multilingual learners, districts are forced to make difficult choices that at least to some extent rely upon a limited supply of ELD-certified teachers.
Tensions of Competing Priorities and Realities
The second group of tensions we found could be best described as “trade-offs”: situations in which districts and schools faced competing priorities and realities. One clear example was district policies about how to place students in integrated language and content courses. All three districts set a maximum for the percentage of EL-designated multilingual learners to be “clustered” in one class, ranging between 40–50% depending on the district. The integration of EL- and non-EL-designated peers within integrated language and content classes is not mandated by Lau, but districts described a commitment to creating linguistically heterogenous classrooms—avoiding unnecessary segregation, as recommended by the Office of Civil Rights—where EL-designated multilingual learners are not segregated by language proficiency and instead have access to a range of language users, including fluent multilingual and English-monolingual students. Schools took this guidance seriously when scheduling students into integrated language and content courses and tried to stay within these guidelines.
However, what schools found is that the less students were clustered—in other words, the more they were dispersed into the school overall—the harder co-teaching or consulting ELD teachers’ jobs became: they had more classrooms and teachers to serve, more complex schedules, and less time to meet with each individual content teacher. On the other hand, grouping students together in a limited number of classrooms made teacher collaboration easier but could not provide EL-designated multilingual learners with sufficient access to English-fluent peers. Educators were genuinely committed to reducing segregated environments for multilingual learners, but they also wanted to ensure students were receiving linguistically responsive instruction.
Another trade-off was that serving EL-designated multilingual learners was still fundamentally “optional” for content teachers: given student clustering, it was never the case that all content teachers had an ELD teacher as a co-teacher or consultant each year. Even when it was an expectation (particularly in the district with the long-standing model) that all content teachers would collaborate at some point in their careers, not all were doing so at a given time, and not all were enthusiastic volunteers. School administrators had choices in terms of which content teachers were assigned to serve EL-designated multilingual learners, and they saw a trade-off between prioritizing this expectation to collaborate, with its goal of building school-wide instructional capacity, and placing students with content teachers who genuinely welcomed these students (and ELD teachers) into their classrooms. One school administrator we interviewed, for example, explained, “There are times where I hesitate… is that really what’s best for the kids if I put [an ELD teacher] in with the teacher who doesn’t want them there anyway?” She described needing to actively mediate between teachers in some such instances but explained that teachers were gradually becoming more accustomed to the idea of collaboration and working with EL-designated multilingual learners. Such examples suggest that school administrators are at the forefront of many trade-offs related to language and content integrated instruction: in making decisions about student placements and teaching assignments, they play a key role in deciding how access, integration, segregation, and shared responsibility for EL-designated multilingual learners are addressed at their school sites.
Tensions of Flexibility
A final set of take-aways relates to what we saw as tensions of flexibility. All three districts intentionally provided some measure of leeway to schools in terms of how they implemented their language and content integrated models. For example, in Mountain View School District, their policy required co-teaching to be used in all schools and by all teachers, but the two districts newer to language and content integrated program models (Woodside and Deerfield School Districts) allowed for co-teaching, consulting, and dually endorsed teachers as options for serving students, which were decided by school-level administrators and teachers. District leaders in the newer programs felt that co-teaching would be preferable but realized that it was a more resource- and time-intensive option, and so purposefully allowed schools to have consultation and dually endorsed teaching as possibilities. What we found in our interviews and observations at the school level was that when offered the three options, many administrators and teachers tended to rely on consultation, which was easier to implement with current staffing levels and schedules. As a result, Woodside and Deerfield district administrators’ preferred option (co-teaching) was not fully implemented, at least in part because it was not required.
In efforts to allow schools to respond to their local contexts and needs, districts for the most part did not dictate specific staffing or scheduling arrangements, another area in which there was purposeful leeway. As a result, there was quite a bit of school-level variation in the number of content teachers with whom an ELD teacher was scheduled to collaborate: between one and eight teachers, depending on the specifics of co-teaching or consultation arrangements. This leeway allowed demographic and local differences to be accounted for, but it led to uneven scheduling and teacher-pairing practices. We saw differences within districts and even within schools, meaning that some ELD teachers had very different workloads from each other. What each was expected to accomplish in their workday was therefore also different in each setting.
A final area of district policy flexibility that was prominent in each district and in the experiences of schools and teachers was guidance provided around the allocation of co-planning time for collaborating teachers that was specifically designated just for their work together to serve EL-designated multilingual learners, rather than general planning or collaboration time allocated to all teachers. In all three districts, this designated co-planning time was not always available during the school day, although administrators and teachers typically tried to arrange the master schedule to allow for it. However, we saw differences between Mountain View and the other two districts in terms of their insistence upon co-planning time. Mountain View was unique in requiring shared collaboration time for co-planning. The amount was limited, however: just 45 minutes per teacher pair each week, which was usually (although not always) part of a designated co-planning time in the school day. By contrast, Woodside and Deerfield suggested, rather than required, designated co-planning time, but they offered paid extended contract time for teachers who wished to plan outside the workday.
So how were these policies implemented at the school level? In Mountain View, school administrators and teachers reported staying true to the 45-minutes-per-week mandate, and in cases in which teachers did not have a shared planning period, they tended to find flexible ways to work together, like during grade-level meetings, professional learning team meetings, or other collaboration times. In Woodside, there was variation in shared planning time, with some pairs having no designated shared time but others having up to 90 minutes per day. In Deerfield, shared planning times were relatively rare, as it was not seen as a priority and had not been supported by the district. In all three settings, teachers were aware of the inherent value of planning time, and those who had it tended to use it for that purpose.
Such issues of leeway and flexibility are not unique to the implementation of language and content integrated instruction, but they raise particularly important issues when considering the potential for such programs to meet their obligations to EL-designated multilingual learners.
What Are the Implications?
The tensions we described tell us much about the real challenges of meeting the promise of the Lau decision. Understanding these tensions clearly is an important first step for any district or school interested in developing or improving programs to serve their secondary EL-designated multilingual learners through language and content integrated instruction. To a large extent, addressing these tensions necessitates the clarification of values in each setting by the educators in that setting.
The beauty and danger of the Lau decision is its flexibility. Simply continuing educational programs despite evidence of unequal outcomes is unacceptable. At a certain point, districts and schools that choose to engage in integrated language and content program models must clearly articulate the tensions in this approach and embrace honest and principled discussions about them.
Amanda K. Kibler, PhD, is a professor at Oregon State University’s College of Education. Her research focuses on the interactional and ecological contexts through which multilingual children and adolescents develop language and literacy expertise, as well as the ways teachers collaborate and use inquiry to understand these processes.
Martha Castellón Palacios is a senior program associate with English Learner and Migrant Education Services at WestEd. She is an experienced researcher, evaluator, and provider of technical assistance to states and LEAs. Her work focuses on improving educational equity for multilingual learners throughout the system.
The research reported here was undertaken as part of the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners and is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, through Grant R305C200008 to WestEd.
