Intentionality around language development at La Paz

At dual language schools, educators teach discipline-specific content and language, simultaneously. They consistently attend to language development and plan lessons that leverage multimodalities to convey meaning around dense, academic concepts.  In addition to differentiating for the ways in which students learn, teachers in dual language classrooms carefully scaffold lesson sequences to ensure adequate linguistic support across English and Spanish proficiencies. 

At the onset of the lesson, teachers share the essential question to guide the learning endeavor. It is critical students understand why they are learning what they are learning.  Lessons designed with the dual purpose of teaching content and language have clear, measurable objectives to make visible the language functions required to accomplish the lesson's goals. The language functions connect the cognitive tasks of the lesson with the language necessary to accomplish such tasks.  In this example, a science teacher unpacks the key terms used in the learning outcomes to give her students a purpose for learning.

One way to attend to language development is to have students create bilingual word walls that include visuals to convey academic concepts.  Here are a few examples from teachers at La Paz rendered on poster paper, classroom windows, and with play dough:

Students created posters in this 8th grade science class, each pair responsible for a part of the cell, e.g. ribosomes, chloroplasts, mitochondria, etc. Spanish and English dominant students create their own posters that describe cellular
parts and their functions.

In this 9th grade math class, the teacher explicitly guides his dual language learners through the development of the specific register used to discuss perfect squares and square roots before the engage in the cognitive work of solving the equations that follow. This will help them access the content and negotiate meaning when interacting with their peers and with the teacher.