Supporting multilingual learners well is a big undertaking. Where do you even begin?
Instruction? Assessment? Staffing? Professional learning? Family and community engagement? Funding? Programming? District leaders have plenty of places to focus their attention, but these parts of the system do not operate independently. Decisions in one area will affect other parts of the system.
That interconnectedness is what makes systems change both important and difficult. When something doesn’t work out the way we planned, our instinct may be to focus on the part of the system where the problem is visible. For example, if multilingual learners have limited access to grade-level content, we might immediately look at classroom instruction. But what appears to be an instructional problem might also be connected to decisions about the master schedule, how staffing is organized, whether educators are properly prepared and have capacity, or decisions about how multilingual learner services are organized.
So, how do effective leaders outline their strategy for the education of MLs?
That answer, for many leaders, lies in developing Strategic Multilingual Learner Plans (which some call ‘frameworks’ or ‘roadmaps’). District and state leaders use this plan to articulate a vision, establish priorities, identify strategies, and help coordinate work across schools and departments. Developing a plan takes a lot of time, thought, and collaboration. Once the plan is finished, the next step might be obvious: put it into action.
But even the best-laid plans can’t anticipate everything that will happen once they meet the complexity of a district system. As a plan moves into practice, leaders inevitably begin to learn things they could not necessarily see during the planning and writing stage. A strategy that made sense on paper may work differently across schools. A new initiative may bump up against existing staffing structures or professional learning needs. Families, students, and educators may experience a program differently than leaders anticipated. And the system itself doesn’t stand still: students, communities, priorities, and conditions change over time.
That isn’t a failure, but a feature of working within complex systems. Our plans need to be able to evolve alongside the systems they are designed to support.
Rather than treating a multilingual learner plan as a finished roadmap to follow, what if we treated it as a tool for continuous learning and improvement?
Systems thinking asks us to zoom out before we act.
An existing multilingual learner plan is a useful place to start, but we can exercise systems thinking even before that plan is in place. Rather than organizing improvement efforts around visible problems, leaders can ask questions about how different parts of the system work together and what they might be learning from their current approaches to serving multilingual learners.
Some questions can help shift that perspective:
- Where does success in one part of our system depend on something else being in place?
- Where are we seeing differences between what we intend for multilingual learners and what students, families, or educators actually experience? Why?
- What assumptions are we making about how our programs and practices work that may be worth revisiting?
- Whose perspectives or experiences might be missing from our understanding of how the system operates?
- What needs to be true for our strategies to work as intended, and are those conditions in place?
Questions like these move us away from focusing only on whether individual programs or strategies are “working” and toward thinking of improvement as an ongoing process of learning about our systems and identifying opportunities for change.
From identifying an opportunity to learning what to do about it
Identifying an opportunity for improvement does not necessarily mean we know what should change.
Imagine, for example, that a district revisiting their multilingual learner data notices that multilingual learners are enrolling in advanced courses at lower rates than their monolingual peers. One response would be to encourage more students to enroll. A systems approach would step back and ask: Where and how might the ways we serve multilingual students create barriers? That question opens up opportunities to examine areas we may not immediately think of, like programming model, course placement practices and policies, and master schedules which work together to shape students’ access.
This kind of small, focused inquiry can make systems change more manageable. Leaders do not need to redesign an entire multilingual learner system at once. Instead, they can use what they are learning about their system to identify a meaningful place to focus their efforts.
Over time, returning to this cycle of reflection and focused inquiry can help leaders continually learn about their systems, refine their strategies, and respond to changing needs and conditions.
Creating space to do this work together: A new MLRC initiative
Of course, stepping back to examine a system is difficult when you are also responsible for keeping that system running. It can be especially challenging to question familiar assumptions, identify connections across different parts of the system, or determine where to focus among many competing priorities.
That is part of the thinking behind VisionLab, a new MLRC community of practice for district leaders launching next year.
VisionLab builds on the knowledge, experience, and planning work states and districts bring to the table. Whether participants have an established strategic plan or are just beginning to chart a path forward, they will work alongside other district leaders to examine their multilingual learner programming through a systems-change lens. Together, we will identify strengths, connections, gaps, and opportunities for improvement and pinpoint an area each district wants to explore more deeply.
Over the academic year, participants will learn about systems change and practice implementing it through a mini action research cycle focused on that area: developing an answerable question, gathering feedback and evidence from their communities, making sense of what they learn, and developing and implementing a strategy for improvement. Throughout the process, district leaders will have a collaborative space to learn from one another, challenge assumptions, share ideas, and think beyond the boundaries of their own systems.
Strong systems for multilingual learners are never finished. Students and communities change. District contexts change. Implementation teaches us things we could not anticipate. A strong plan gives districts a direction for that work. Systems thinking can help leaders keep asking what they are learning along the way and where that learning might take them next.
Interested in learning more about VisionLab? Fill out our interest form here.
