By Dr. Daniel Velasco, President and CEO, Ensemble Learning
I worked with a district in Texas that was getting a tremendous amount of attention and support. New resources, new interventions, new strategies, new partners. Everyone was trying to help, but before one intervention could take hold, another was introduced.
I call it the Christmas tree effect. You keep adding ornaments until you can’t tell which ornament is doing anything.
It’s a problem I’ve seen throughout my career in education. Districts invest in research-backed approaches, train their teachers, and anticipate results. When student outcomes don’t improve quickly enough, the search begins for something new. I was a multilingual learner myself, so I take these questions personally.
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What if some of the achievement gaps we see among multilingual learners are implementation gaps?
It’s a question I wish more district leaders asked. When scores come back low, the instinct is to look at students: what they’re missing and what they need more of. Much less often do we look at ourselves and ask whether the plan we wrote showed up in classrooms the way we imagined it.
- Did teachers get the training, or just the PDF?
- Did the schedule leave room for the strategy, or did it get squeezed out by October?
- Did anyone check?
Consider what happens when a district adopts high-quality instructional materials. The curriculum may be grounded in strong research and aligned to grade-level expectations. But that doesn’t guarantee that multilingual learners are experiencing the instruction as intended.
A teacher might simplify a challenging assignment because they want to make it accessible to a student still developing English proficiency. Their intentions are good. But without the right language scaffolds, they’ve lowered the academic demand when what the student really needed was more support accessing it.
Maybe that student needed additional time to think before responding, an opportunity to draw on their home language to make sense of a new concept, or a sentence stem to help them participate in a discussion about a complex text. The goal isn’t to make the work easier. It’s to make rigorous instruction accessible while students are developing the academic language to engage with it.
Teachers want to do right by their students. Before we decide those students are falling short, we need to make sure we’ve shown teachers how.
What the data isn’t telling us about multilingual learners
District leaders have no shortage of student performance data. They can examine proficiency levels, compare schools, and track changes over time. Those measures matter, but districtwide averages can hide what’s happening in individual classrooms.
Let’s say third-grade multilingual learners are struggling with science across a district. The numbers point to a problem, but they don’t necessarily tell us what’s causing it.
Now imagine one classroom where those same students are making meaningful progress.
I’d want to know what’s happening in that room.
How is the teacher introducing academic vocabulary? Are students getting opportunities to explain their thinking aloud to develop their English oracy? What happens when a child understands the science but struggles to express that understanding in English?
Excellence often happens inside schools that, on paper, appear to be struggling. We should be studying those classrooms just as closely as we’re studying the ones where outcomes fall short.
At Ensemble Learning, our landscape analyses and needs assessments look at more than achievement data. We conduct empathy interviews with educators, students, and administrators. We may follow a student through the school day to understand what their experience looks like. What we learn helps us tailor our professional learning and coaching to the specific instructional needs, strengths, and priorities of each school.
We might discover that both native English-speaking students and multilingual learners have very few opportunities to practice spoken language. Or that a particular grade level is struggling with foundational numeracy. We may also find a teacher down the hall who’s figured out how to address that very challenge.
We need better ways to make excellent teaching visible.
I also believe we have to understand the realities district leaders are navigating. One of the first things I want to know when working with a school is, “Where does it hurt?”
For example, a charter school approaching renewal may have specific performance measures it needs to improve this year. We can’t walk in and tell that leadership team to spend the next three years working on long-term instructional improvement without acknowledging what’s immediately at stake.
We have to help schools address those pressing needs while building the capacity for lasting change—both matter.
We have to give effective instruction time to work
School improvement doesn’t happen on the same timeline as buying a new curriculum.
When I worked in school turnaround years ago, we were implementing a model with 118 different components. Each required changes in how educators and school leaders worked. None of those changes happened simply because someone introduced a new expectation.
Teachers needed opportunities to learn unfamiliar practices, try them, and gradually become more proficient. It takes repeated learning cycles. Changing how an entire school operates can take three to five years, even when meaningful improvements in classroom practice begin much sooner.
Yet we routinely expect major improvements in six months or a year.
That pressure helps explain why districts sometimes abandon strategies before they’ve had a reasonable chance to succeed.
Before making another investment, I’d encourage leaders to look back at the last several years. How often has the district changed direction? Which instructional approaches have remained consistent? And, perhaps most importantly, were those approaches ever implemented as intended?
When a strategy calls for ongoing coaching and teachers receive only an introductory workshop, it has not been implemented as intended.
This is especially important in professional learning. Teachers can leave a training with a strong understanding of an instructional approach and still struggle to apply it when they’re back in front of students.
They need opportunities to practice in low-risk environments, observe demonstration lessons, and receive feedback without feeling that every attempt is being evaluated.
That’s why I’m such a strong believer in job-embedded, non-evaluative coaching. We should be giving teachers the same kinds of opportunities to learn that we know benefit students.
Professional learning also needs to fit into the work teachers already do. When multilingual learner instruction becomes one more training added to an already crowded schedule, participation suffers. Too often, only educators with large numbers of multilingual learners in their classrooms engage deeply.
But academic language development is part of science instruction. It’s part of mathematics. It’s part of learning to read and write across the curriculum.
Every teacher needs these skills.
We’ve seen encouraging evidence of what can happen when professional learning continues into the classroom. In Manor Independent School District, Ensemble Learning offered two-day professional development across district elementary schools, while educators in partner schools received ongoing classroom coaching.
An analysis by Ensemble Learning, independently verified by a third party, found that emergent bilingual students in participating partner schools demonstrated reading growth ranging from 20% to 75% above a year’s expected growth. Those findings are correlational, so they don’t establish that coaching alone caused the improvement. They do, however, reinforce the importance of examining what happens after teachers leave a training session.
That follow-through matters.
And while annual assessments remain important, leaders shouldn’t have to wait for the next testing cycle to understand whether instruction is changing. Classroom observations and evidence of how teachers are applying new practices can help show whether implementation is moving in the right direction.
Why multilingual learner success is a districtwide responsibility
In too many districts, a relatively small group of specialists or program leaders remains responsible for multilingual learner success. Those educators are essential, but they often have limited authority over the instructional decisions and resources that affect students across the district.
I believe multilingual learner instruction should be part of every school system’s academic backbone. It should shape how we prepare teachers, support instructional leaders, and approach literacy and mathematics.
Think about a third grader whose first language is English. That child is still learning unfamiliar vocabulary, developing grammar, and figuring out how to communicate increasingly complex ideas. Effective language scaffolds can help that student, too.
Multilingual learners are navigating these same academic demands while also developing English proficiency, making intentional language support especially important.
When teachers know how to make demanding academic content accessible to multilingual learners, they’re better prepared to teach increasingly diverse classrooms.
I also wonder how much more confident new teachers would feel if they entered the profession prepared to teach students who are still learning English. We talk constantly about the teacher pipeline and retention. That conversation should include helping teachers experience success with the students in front of them.
Building that capacity also means thinking about who enters the teaching profession and how we prepare them to serve multilingual learners. At Columbia Heights Education Campus in Washington, DC, Assistant Principal Edward Diaz described a bilingual educator pipeline that begins in middle school. Students can eventually enter a high school Bilingual Education Academy, where they take courses that introduce them to teaching as a profession.
The hope is that students will pursue careers in education and return to serve their own communities. Some former students are already becoming teachers at the school.
That’s the kind of long-term thinking we need. It recognizes that improving multilingual learner outcomes requires building the systems that make strong instruction possible year after year.
Why multilingual learner outcomes matter beyond test scores
I’m a multilingual learner myself. I was born in Peru, grew up in Venezuela, and my family eventually immigrated to the United States. My first job was cleaning houses alongside my mother.
I know people with stories very similar to mine who never had the same opportunities I did.
So when I talk about multilingual learner outcomes, I’m not thinking only about achievement data. I’m thinking about whether students are prepared to reach pre-algebra by eighth grade so they can take higher-level mathematics in high school. I’m thinking about their opportunities to become engineers, doctors, and other professionals who will strengthen their communities.
For regions like Houston and the Bay Area, educating multilingual learners well is inseparable from developing the workforce and economic opportunity those communities will depend on in the years ahead.
We have research to guide many of the decisions schools need to make. We know a great deal about effective instruction, and we should continue investing in credible research that helps us understand what works across different communities.
But evidence doesn’t implement itself.
We have to understand each school’s circumstances, support educators in applying what research tells us, and allow enough time for meaningful improvement to take hold.
The next time multilingual learner outcomes fall short of expectations, I hope district leaders resist the immediate urge to introduce another initiative.
Instead, visit the classrooms. Look at where students are succeeding and find out why. Ask teachers whether they’re getting the support they need to use the strategies the district has already invested in.
And before deciding something isn’t working, make sure it’s actually happening.
Are your multilingual learner initiatives translating into everyday classroom practice? Let’s explore where targeted professional learning and coaching could support your district’s priorities.
