What is our definición of success?

As an ELD teacher, Elyse has always encouraged students to embrace their plurilingualism.  However, she is quite critical of her first years as a teacher, when she pushed students to exclusively use English in her classroom; thinking that doing so was necessary in order to ensure students were prepared for their transition out of ELD.  In the years, since, Elyse has come to embrace translanguaging, and routinely includes English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese in her classroom introductions and lesson materials.  Since shifting her pedagogy, she has seen a dramatic change in her students, noting that her students "get excited when they see their first language and other languages they are interested in. We learn the new languages together and it brings us together."  Elyse has also noticed students have a greater interest in exploring linguistic complexity, as well as more empathy for one another; as she has embraced translanguaging pedagogy, her students have come to value the use and development of their own full linguistic repertoire.   

In the following lesson, designed for her English 4 class, Elyse challenges students to leverage their plurilingualism as they explore the concept of success.  She begins by inviting students to read and analyze their choice of mentor texts related to success; while all the texts are in English, Elyse explicitly models translanguaging in her analysis, providing multilingual examples and scaffolds to support students in making meaning of their reading.    The slides below illustrate Elyse's approach, and include examples of mentor texts, students' analysis, and a plurilingual Frayer Model Elyse uses to support students' critical engagement with key concepts.

Student Examples

The culminating project for this lesson was a digital product detailing each students' individual definition of success and what it means to them.  As students built their projects, Elyse conferenced with them, challenging them to be strategic in their approach to imagery and languaging; this intentionality is also built into the rubric Elyse used to assess student work. Students' final projects (below) display complex and creative approaches to languaging and metacognition, as highlighted in the three examples below. 

Scaffolding Confianza: How Braving Up Impacts Students

As Elyse reflected on her work, she was struck by the dramatic impact her pedagogical shifts had on her students.  The example on the left was created by one of her students before Elyse began to model translanguaging.  In it, her student describes her career goal of being a police officer, offering little critical analysis and submitted exclusively in English as written by Google Translate; when presenting her work, Elyse's student appeared "weary" and "closed off."  The example on the right was created by the same student, after Elyse began modeling translanguaging in the classroom.  In this example, the student moved fluidly and naturally between English and Spanish, using examples from her personal life and experience to illustrate and complicate key ideas; Elyse noted how much her creativity and confidence emerged as she was encouraged to leverage her full linguistic repertoire.