The highly anticipated WIDA 2022 Annual Conference, in-person for the first time since 2019 and with over 2000 participants from all over the United States, did not disappoint. The conference theme, “Advancing Learning Together,” speaks to the positive, hopeful, and collaborative atmosphere that we enjoyed in Louisville for three days of learning together. We are excited to bring new ideas back to our ALL4ELs project and to see where our project fits into the larger national conversation about equitable, accessible, rigorous, engaging, and multilingual education for our culturally and linguistically diverse students.
Leading our own session, a workshop for educators on equitable assessment through Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs), was an honor. We had over 70 participants from all over the United States learning together about IPAs for ELLs/MLLs and then creating their own IPAs. Educators from some states lamented the fact that they were unable to create or modify curriculum because of heavy handed state mandates to teach only the approved curriculum without any additions based on teacher discretion. Teachers left the session feeling empowered by an alternative form of assessment that allows ELLs/ MLLs to use their full linguistic repertoire as they show what they know and what they can do.
It was also wonderful to continue our own professional learning by attending others’ sessions. For example, the opening keynote featuring Juliana Urtubey, the 2021 National Teacher of the Year, established the tone for the conference and gave everyone a new term for the ELLs/MLLs we serve: linguistically gifted students. Ms. Urtubey noted that we need to find ways to promote a “joyous and just” education for all students; she described her community based garden project that allowed ELLs/ MLLs and their caregivers to learn science in an authentic context. Other presenters made a point of defining the term “equity” in an effort to help participants understand that equity extends beyond daily classroom instruction and needs to include assessment and policies for linguistically gifted students. We saw this explicit attention to the notion of equity – what it means and what it involves – in sessions we attended with Margo Gottlieb and John Hilliard (“Seeing Multilingual Learners’ Reflections en el ESPEJO”) and with Annela Teemat and Brandon Sherman (“Advancing Equitable Family-School Partnerships Through a Values Framework”). Likewise, Andrea Honigsfeld and Valentina Gonzalez showed how teacher collaboration can promote and support equity in their session (“Teacher Collaboration as a Pathway to Equity for MLs”). Furthermore, Lorena Llosa’s session (“Creating Supportive Science Classrooms for MLLs,”) added depth and nuance to our thinking about assessment with her impressive research findings related to “expanding what counts as evidence of learning.” She showed how students were able to demonstrate depth of thinking and understanding about science topics when engaged in conversation by a teacher about the topic and that this understanding was not always evident in traditional written tests.
The sessions we attended provided new insights and learning about assessment, family engagement, collaborative practices, and equity for all students in our school system. Several themes began to emerge as experts presented their research and work on these topics. First, we heard the theme of assessment as the driver of instruction. In our own session about IPAs, this was a point we made as well: creating equitable and open-ended performance based assessments will create more equitable instruction leading up to the assessment. Taken together, the keynote, various presentations, and our own workshop confirmed our understanding that unit planning and curriculum planning around open-ended, performance-based assessments, both formative and summative, provide opportunity and access, representative of true equity, for MLLs in content area classes that traditional assessments may not. All of this, however, requires a mindshift for educators and policymakers, another theme that resonated throughout the WIDA conference. Current thinking around standardized testing and data driven instruction needs to be revisited so that we ensure equitable practices for linguistically and culturally diverse students.
We were grateful for the opportunity to attend and present a workshop at WIDA 2022; now, we look forward to our next conference adventure with NYSTESOL in November.