by Sarah Ottow

When we think about the term "ELL" we often think about the students we serve--our English Language Learners.  ELL students comprise the fastest growing subgroup of students in our country and come from richly diverse linguistic and cultural groups. However, what if we flip "ELL" around to mean the practices that educators need to implement in order to be successful with these students? What if we reframe "ELL" as Equity, Language and Literacy, and thus, put more emphasis on the practices that WE need to own in order to make a difference for our students?

At Confianza, we believe that it all starts with relationships and that, as the adage says, "Kids don't care what you know until they know that you care." We believe that the achievement gap is largely an opportunity gap of underprepared educators working hard to serve an increasingly diverse population, often unsure how to build on strengths and how to teach with a 'language lens'. We know important it is for all of us, no matter how long we have been in education, to continuously be inquiring, reflecting and improving in order to serve our students and their families more and more effectively. More than anything, we know that all students deserve access to an engaging education that gives them choices in college, career and life.

Language and Literacy for ELLs  Much of our content is built on language and literacy practices grounded in evidence-based language development standards and strategies. As evident by the major shifts of career and college readiness standards, including oral language, reading complex texts and writing across the curriculum, many can agree that all learners are academic language learners.  

The Current State of Inequity for ELLs  Unfortunately, as a group, ELL students are largely underserved and underachieving in our schools. What's more, this incredibly diverse group of students and their families may be largely undocumented, stigmatized and otherwise misunderstood in their own schools, neighborhoods and, unfortunately, at the larger national level. Clearly, Language and Literacy practices are critical for reaching this group, so we've got the two LLs of ELL. But what about the E for Equity? Language and literacy practices alone are not enough to close the gap. We need to ensure that professional learning practices focus specifically on increasing equity.  We need to recognize and stand up to exclusion, to bias, to injustice. We need to move beyond superficial ways of simply honoring diversity into recognizing how power and privilege influences relationships between identity groups. We need for educators to teach children to respectfully learn about similarities and differences and to speak up when someone is wronged. 

Equity for ELLs   We are pleased to announce that Confianza’s Director, Sarah Ottow, is a Certified Learning for Justice (formerly known as Teaching Tolerance) (TT) Trainer. If you're not already familiar with this organization, it is important to know that TT provides education resources for social justice out of the Southern Poverty Law Center. I have enhanced their knowledge base and toolkit by becoming trained in TT's anti-bias, literacy-based curriculum that is grounded in Social Justice Standards. Learning about the anchor standards of Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action has been eye-opening for Confianza as we continuously deepen Confianza's toolkit to more explicitly include equity-based practices. Moving forward, we are now pointing leaders to Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education and showing teachers how the library of diverse texts can help anti-bias curriculum. We also think it's important to share The Moment which highlights how to teach key issues facing our society and schools.