Casey Lang, Anaheim High School
Casey is an English and ELD teacher at Anaheim High School who is passionate about her work with newcomer students at Anaheim High School. As a teacher, she believes in continual growth and development, seeking opportunities to refine her craft, connect with her students, and expand her cultural knowledge, all while emphasizing social justice and student voice.
Redesigning Assessment to Embrace Plurilingualism
As a veteran teacher and department chair, Casey has always focused on building comunidad and confianza in her classroom, and stressed the importance of students maintaining their cultures and languages as they learned English. However, she noticed that many of her newcomer students seemed to equate academic success with monolingual communication in English. This led Casey to reflect on ways she inadvertently reinforced linguistic separation, and to change her overall approach to assessment: rather than focusing on students "getting it right" in English, she redesigned her ELD courses to intentionally center and uplift her students' translanguaging and plurilingual assets.
In the following unit, Casey illustrates how she adapted her ELA Project Soapbox unit for use with her newcomer and emergent plurilingual students. This unit, which is part of a schoolwide initiative related to student voice and agency, invites students to brainstorm, write, and present a speech about an issue in their community or society. Overall, Casey's goal was to support newcomer and emergent plurilingual students in not only researching their chosen issue, but using their unique voice and insider perspective to propose a solution and create a call to action.
Scaffolding Students Inquiry and Speechwriting
As Casey redesigned her unit, she focused on how to scaffold students' writing and communication; how to encourage students to leverage their full linguistic repertoires when communicating to their chosen audience; and how to assess students' strategic and creative approach to languaging. In the slides below, Casey highlights her learning goals for this project, approach to translanguaging in ELA & ELD, recommended resources, and key scaffolds.
Brainstorming Community Issues
As students prepared to write their speeches, they first brainstormed a list of who was included in their community, and what issues impacted their daily lives. To generate discussion, Casey asked students questions such as "What are you proud about in your community?" and "What would you change about your community?" As students offered responses in a variety of languages, Casey encouraged them to dive deeper and explain the issues they see or experience. Throughout, Casey encouraged her students to use translanguaging to explain their ideas and help Casey and other students learn from their perspectives.
Next, students created a series of "values posters" to illustrate their individual, community, and class values; these reinforced the importance of including everyone's perspectives and languages, and provided opportunities to think collectively about how to work towards community change.
Scaffolding Speechwriting
To help students prepare their rough drafts, Casey guided them in creating and evaluating a basic speech template. They then generated a series of sentence frames to draw upon as they began to write their speeches. Throughout, students considered how to build the speeches with maximum impact, considering how they could use their voice and vida (life) to engage and establish confianza with their audience.
Assessing Students' Plurilingual Languaging
To ensure students were thinking strategically about how to leverage their linguistic repertoires, Casey created a checklist for students to use when drafting, practicing, and assessing their speeches. This handout outlines the core elements of an impactful speech, and includes all the languages spoken by students in Casey's classes.
Casey also focused on how to ensure her own assessment valued students' linguistic assets, bravery, and experimentation. The image carousel on the right includes her revised rubrics, each of which include explicit criteria related to students' use of their full linguistic repertoire. In Casey's words, these changes forced her to think about the "heart" of her assignments, and how she could use assessment to support her students' growth and development.
These revised assessment resources also provided an opportunity to engage other members of the school community in thinking about the value of translanguaging; as Casey invited community members to act as judges for students' final speeches, she was able to engage them in dialogue about her - and students' - goals for their languaging within and beyond the classroom.
Student Examples: Verbal Bullying and Teen Suicide
The following examples illustrate the impact of Casey's revised approach to scaffolding this project. In the first example, a newcomer student in Casey's classroom chose a topic that had a great deal of personal importance (bullying), but his first draft of his speech was primarily in English and impersonal. As he worked with Casey to refine his speech, he pushed himself to "brave up" and tell his own story, using his full linguistic repertoire to express his personal connection the the topic.
Idea Draft
Rough Draft
JDR Bullying RD Soapbox Speech '23.pdfFinal Draft
JDR Final Draft Soapbox Speech.pdfThe following example from another newcomer student in Casey's classroom illustrates how a student challenged herself to learn English words and phrases that would convey the importance of her topic. Her first drafts were written primarily in Spanish. As she revised her work, the student considered what words and phases she wanted to translate to engage non-Spanish speakers, and how to strategically use translanguaging to express her ideas and effectively communicate with a linguistically diverse audience.
Idea Draft
Rough Draft
MTT Teen Suicide Soapbox Speech RD '23.pdfFinal Draft
MTT Soapbox Final Speech Teen Suicide.pdfAmplifying Student Voices
"My biggest shift has been a focus on student voice and power instead of getting it 'all right in English.' The biggest change is in how I assess. Before, if students wrote chunks of answers/essays in another language - then I would tell them to rewrite. This pushed them into translating instead of communicating. The result would be the use of very simple "correct" English, but [their writing] was not very powerful. Now students are writing more and taking more risks because... they found a confidence that will serve them in the future... [and] learned that they have a lot to bring to the table and that their voice matters.