Educators from the Luxemburg-Casco School District this month took part in a professional development training program – Project RESPECT – designed to assist them in effectively teaching multilingual learners, a growing part of the L-C student population. Participating teachers and staff represented different grade levels from K-12 and a variety of academic content areas.
Approximately 35 teachers and staff took part in the initial training session, held Oct. 8 at Luxemburg-Casco, with a facilitator from WIDA, Dr. Terri Mossgrove. WIDA is an educational services organization within the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education.
WIDA was recruiting small, rural districts in Northeast Wisconsin to participate in Project RESPECT, and L-C originally was approached to join a cohort of area districts. In the end, because of the district’s size and its high interest in the program, Luxemburg-Casco became a stand-alone district.
Project RESPECT is an acronym for Rural Educators Self-Reflecting and Practicing Equity-Centered Teaching for English learners (EL). The program, which launched in 2021, is funded through a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
“Our overarching goal is to increase the capacity of rural K-8 teachers to provide effective and equitable literacy instruction for multilingual learners,” says Elizabeth Cranley, principal investigator of Project RESPECT for WIDA.
Nearly 70 percent of school districts in the state, including Luxemburg-Casco, are considered rural, according to the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance.
“The number of multilingual learners at L-C is increasing each year, and meeting the needs of these learners adds another degree of complexity to teaching,” says Jo-Ellen Fairbanks, Ph.D., Luxemburg-Casco superintendent. “We are being proactive in providing this opportunity to teachers, giving them the specific tools and strategies to help these learners reach their full potential.”
The Luxemburg-Casco School District served 66 multilingual learners during the 2023-24 academic year among approximately 2,000 enrolled students. The multilingual learners were spread across six different levels of English proficiency, ranging from newcomers to proficient.
Multilingual learners are a growing segment of the student population in rural school districts, according to WIDA, but historically many of the available professional learning resources cater to teachers serving multilingual learners in urban and suburban schools.
As many as one out of every seven students in the United States is enrolled in a rural school district, according to Rural English Learner Education, a June 2020 research paper published in conjunction with the American Educational Research Association (AERA). AERA this month shared that English learning students represent the fastest-growing student group in the U.S. over the last two decades, and that the number of EL students has soared in “new destination” states in the Midwest and South.
At Luxemburg-Casco, both regular classroom teachers and EL teachers work with the district’s EL students.
“Project RESPECT provides us with the valuable opportunity to focus on a frequently overlooked and underserved student population,
multilingual learners,” says Jodi Kinnard, EL coordinator at L-C. “It is truly inspiring to collaborate with over 30 mainstream teachers who have volunteered to be part of this project, dedicating themselves to prioritizing language development in their classrooms. I greatly appreciate my colleagues’ commitment to creating positive learning environments for all students.”
Project RESPECT aims to support teachers who are linguistically and/or culturally different from the students they serve, adds Cranley. Roles represented by teachers participating in the program include EL specialists, reading/intervention specialists, music and arts teachers, and classroom teachers.
“The vast majority of our classroom teachers were not taught best practices in college on how to teach English Language learners,” says Mike Snowberry, director of learning services for the Luxemburg-Casco School District. “We have students that transfer into the district at every grade level, so it is important for all teachers to understand how to best teach the multilingual learners. These teaching practices actually end up benefitting our entire student population.”
The same cohort of teachers and staff will participate in follow-up training sessions at Luxemburg-Casco scheduled for later this year (Dec. 17) and early next year (March 4) as part of a two-year professional learning program.
WIDA researchers also will be doing site visits to L-C. They will be meeting with teachers in the classroom on Nov. 8.
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