The Challenge

With a school population of 90% Latinx students, St. Martini Lutheran School needed to embed language and literacy strategies across grades and disciplines to better serve their students.

The Solution

Through coaching, workshops, and sharing of practical tools, Confianza helped content teachers differentiate instruction and provide access to the mainstream curriculum for language learners at all levels.

The Story

Now in her sixth year of teaching at St. Martini Lutheran School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, fifth grade teacher Liz Swarczewski worried about her students’ lack of performance on grade level. The school had been implementing a new curriculum that was showing some increased results, but in a classroom with 15 Latinx of 17 students, two of which were recent arrivals to the United States, Liz wondered how her multi-level students might better access the new curriculum.

Embedding Language and Literacy Across Grades

In 2018, new Principal Carly Hertel identified the challenge of a school with 90% Latinx population that did not have an EL teacher. Instead of simply hiring an EL teacher and expecting the challenges to be solved in a siloed way, she sought support from Confianza to embed language and literacy strategies into all K-8 classrooms.

Shifting Educator Viewpoints

Liz chose to teach at this school in particular because of its large Latinx population and her interest in Spanish language and languages in general. While she and her peer educators often collaborate to ensure multilingual student access to curriculum, Confianza’s deep dive into equitable, culturally, and linguistically responsive practices “allowed us to check our filters and preconceived notions we had before, and really value what our students bring to the table,” said Liz. Because of this, Liz now embeds concrete language and literacy tools and routines into the curriculum such as differentiating for levels of language needs as opposed to only reading level and routinely scaffolding with sentence frames and starters. Now, Liz says, the students have come to expect to see the sentence frames and starters.

Increasing Academic Access

A hand-written 4-paragraph persuasive essay titled ‘Dogs are better than cats.’

While the work with Confianza is on-going, Liz is already noting key shifts in her students’ growth. For example, through her work providing sentence starters when she asks students to discuss their reading or writing, Liz notes, “they feel more confident in where to start an academic conversation, are better able to focus on the thinking instead of just whether the words are coming out right, and are producing higher level conversations.”

Liz was also particularly surprised when one of her newly arrived immigrant students produced a full page-worth of writing on an opinion and reasoning free-write activity. “For nearly three months, she was unable to write any English words, nor produce complete full sentences, and this activity was honestly the first time I let go of the reigns. I was blown away by what she was able to do. Now, she’s writing a whole entire page with paragraphs and transitions. It was really cool for me to see and gave me an extra boost of confidence.”

St. Martini Lutheran School