Why Do We Keep Calling It Collaboration?

By: Ms. Mirla

I am not against collaboration. In fact, I believe collaboration can be a powerful approach for supporting multilingual learners when the right conditions are in place. The problem is that the realities of many schools do not always provide those conditions.

One of the greatest challenges I have consistently encountered with the collaborative or push-in model is time. Content teachers and ESL teachers are expected to collaborate, yet they often have little or no common planning time. Without that time, meaningful collaboration becomes extremely difficult.

There also seems to be a misunderstanding of what collaboration actually means. Having an ESL teacher present in a content classroom is not, by itself, collaboration. Telling the ESL teacher what unit or lesson is being taught is not collaboration either. True collaboration requires shared responsibility. Teachers should have opportunities to co-plan, co-teach, co-assess, and reflect together on student learning. They should discuss not only what content will be taught, but also how multilingual learners will access that content and develop the academic language necessary to participate successfully.

When those structures are absent, the role of the ESL teacher can easily become reduced to that of an assistant or translator. The ESL teacher circulates around the classroom, explains directions, translates vocabulary, helps individual students complete assignments, and provides support wherever needed. Those actions may certainly help students, but they should not automatically be labeled collaboration.

This is where I believe we need to ask a difficult question: Why do we continue to insist that a collaborative model is being implemented simply because an ESL teacher is physically present in a content classroom?

Perhaps the issue is not whether collaboration is a good or bad approach. Perhaps the issue is whether schools actually have the conditions necessary to implement it with fidelity. Different schools have different schedules, staffing structures, student populations, teacher workloads, and levels of collaboration. A model that works effectively in one setting may not function the same way in another.

We have to be realistic. If a particular model cannot function effectively within the reality of a school, we should be willing to examine other approaches. Rather than continuing to force a model simply because it is the established model, we should study the reality in front of us, identify what our multilingual learners actually need, and give language specialists the opportunity to implement approaches that respond to those needs.

I believe the ESL teacher is one of the most powerful resources a school has for serving a growing multilingual population. Yet that expertise is not always being used to its fullest potential. An ESL teacher is not simply an additional adult in the classroom. The ESL teacher is a language specialist with specific knowledge of language acquisition, academic language development, scaffolding, differentiation, and the linguistic needs of multilingual learners.

So perhaps the conversation needs to change. Instead of asking, “How do we make this model fit every school?” we might ask, “What model best fits the multilingual learners and the reality of this school?”

That does not mean separating ESL teachers from content teachers or abandoning collaboration. Collaboration is still necessary, but perhaps we need to think about collaboration from a broader perspective. Collaboration does not have to mean that the ESL teacher must always be physically present in the content classroom. There may be other ways for language specialists and content teachers to share information, align instruction, discuss student needs, and support one another while still allowing the ESL teacher to provide intentional language instruction.

We should not make claims about collaboration that our structures do not allow us to fulfill. If there is no time to co-plan, little opportunity to co-teach, and no shared process for assessing and reflecting on multilingual learners’ progress, then we should be willing to acknowledge that what we are doing may not represent true collaboration.

And perhaps that acknowledgment is not a failure. Perhaps it is the beginning of something better.

What might that look like? What kind of model would allow an ESL teacher to fully function as a language specialist while still maintaining a meaningful partnership with content teachers?

That is a conversation for another article.