Breaking Down the Wall: Essential Shifts for English Learners’ Success

It was a dark and stormy night in Santa Barbara. January 19, 2017. The next day's inauguration drumroll played on the evening news. Huddled around a table were nine Corwin authors and their publisher, who together have devoted their careers to equity in education. They couldn't change the weather, they couldn't heal a fractured country, but they did have the power to put their collective wisdom about EL education upon the page to ensure our multilingual learners reach their highest potential.

Proudly, we introduce you now to the fruit of that effort: Breaking Down the Wall: Essential Shifts for English Learners' Success.

In this first-of-a-kind collaboration, teachers and leaders, whether in small towns or large urban centers, finally have both the research and the practical strategies to take those first steps toward excellence in educating our culturally and linguistically diverse children. It's a book to be celebrated because it means we can throw away the dark glasses of deficit-based approaches and see children who come to school speaking a different home language for what they really are: learners with tremendous assets.

The authors' contributions are arranged in nine chapters that become nine tenets for teachers and administrators to use as calls to actions in their own efforts to realize our English learners' potential:
1. From Deficit-Based to Asset-Based
2. From Compliance to Excellence
3. From Watering Down to Challenging
4. From Isolation to Collaboration
5. From Silence to Conversation
6. From Language to Language, Literacy, and Content
7. From Assessment of Learning to Assessment for and as Learning
8. From Monolingualism to Multilingualism
9. From Nobody Cares to Everyone/Every Community Cares

Read this book; the chapters speak to one another, a melodic echo of expertise, classroom vignettes, and steps to take. To shift the status quo is neither fast nor easy, but there is a clear process, and it's laid out here in Breaking Down the Wall. To distill it into a single line would go something like this: if we can assume mutual ownership, if we can connect instruction to all children's personal, social, cultural, and linguistic identities, then all students will achieve.

Dr. Margarita Espino Calderón, born and raised in Juárez, is a Professor Emerita/Senior Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Her research and development projects have been funded by the US Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Labor, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, and various State Offices of Education.

One of her empirical studies "The Bilingual Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (BCIRC)" is featured in the What Works Clearinghouse. The Carnegie Corporation of New York funded her five-year study to develop Expediting Comprehension for English Language Learners (ExC-ELL) to train math, science, social studies, language arts, and ESL teachers on integrating language, reading, and content in core content middle and high school classrooms. With a Title III National Professional Development grant, she implemented "A Whole-School Approach to Professional Development with ExC-ELL" in Loudoun County, VA. She replicated this approach in 29 schools in TX and NC. She served on the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth, the Carnegie Corporation of New York Panel on English Language Adolescent Literacy Panel, among other panels and national committees. She has over 100 publications on language, literacy, and professional development.

Maria G. Dove, Ed.D, is currently a Professor in the School of Education and Human Services at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, New York. Prior to working in higher education, she spent over thirty years as an English-as-a-second-language teacher in public schools and adult English language programs. She is well-known for her professional development work across the United States, focusing on culturally and linguistically diverse students. Dove′s work has led her to publish books, articles, and chapters on collaborative teaching practices and instructional strategies for English learners. In collaboration with Andrea Honigsfeld, she has co-authored four best-selling Corwin Press books including Collaboration for English Learners: A Foundational Guide to Integrated Practices (2019).

Diane Staehr Fenner, PhD, is the president of SupportEd (SupportEd.com), a woman-owned small business located in the Washington, DC, metro area that she founded in 2011. SupportEd is dedicated to empowering multilingual learners and their educators. Dr. Staehr Fenner leads her team to provide ML professional development, coaching, technical assistance, and curriculum and assessment support to school districts, states, organizations, and the U.S. Department of Education. Prior to forming SupportEd, Dr. Staehr Fenner was an English language development (ELD) teacher, dual language assessment teacher, and ELD assessment specialist in Fairfax County Public Schools, VA. She speaks German and Spanish and has taught in Berlin, Germany, and Veracruz, Mexico. Dr. Staehr Fenner grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and is a proud first- generation college graduate. She has written eight books on ML education (and counting), including coauthoring Culturally Responsive Teaching for Multilingual Learners: Tools for Equity and authoring Advocating for English Learners: A Guide for Educators. She is a frequent keynote speaker on ML education at conferences across North America. She earned her PhD in Multilingual/Multicultural Education at George Mason University
and her MAT in TESOL at the School for International Training. You can connect with her by email at Diane@SupportEd.com or on Twitter at @DStaehrFenner.

Margo Gottlieb, Ph.D., is a staunch advocate for multilingual learners and their teachers. As co-founder and lead developer of WIDA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, Margo has helped design and contributed to all the editions of WIDA's English and Spanish language development standards frameworks and their derivative products. Being a bilingual teacher, facilitator, consultant, and mentor across K-20 settings, she has worked with universities, organizations, governments, states, school districts, networks, and schools in co-constructing linguistic and culturally sustainable curriculum and reconceptualizing classroom assessment policy and practice.

Margo's passion has always been assessment in its many forms, starting with her dissertation, a K-12 multilingual test in Spanish, Lao, and English that integrated content and language. Since then, she was appointed to national and state advisory boards, served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and was honored by the TESOL International Association in 2016 for her significant contribution to the field. In her travels, Margo has enjoyed keynoting and presenting across the United States and in 25 countries. Having authored, co-authored, or co-edited over 100 publications, including 20 books and guides, Margo′s 3^rd edition of her best-selling book, Assessing Multilingual Learners: Bridges to Empowerment, is the latest addition to her Corwin compendium.

Andrea Honigsfeld, EdD, is Professor in the School of Education at Molloy University, Rockville Centre, New York. Before entering the field of teacher education, she was an English-as-a-foreign-language teacher in Hungary (Grades 5-8 and adult) and an English-as-a-second-language teacher in New York City (Grades K-3 and adult). She also taught Hungarian at New York University. She was the recipient of a doctoral fellowship at St. John's University, New York, where she conducted research on individualized instruction and learning styles. She has published extensively on working with English language learners and providing individualized instruction based on learning style preferences. She received a Fulbright Award to lecture in Iceland in the fall of 2002. In the past twelve years, she has been presenting at conferences across the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates.

She coauthored Differentiated Instruction for At-Risk Students (2009) and co-edited the five-volume Breaking the Mold of Education series (2010-2013), published by Rowman and Littlefield. She is also the co-author of Core Instructional Routines: Go-To Structures for Effective Literacy Teaching, K-5 and 6-12 (2014), published by Heinemann. With Maria Dove, she co-edited Coteaching and Other Collaborative Practices in the EFL/ESL Classroom: Rationale, Research, Reflections, and Recommendations (2012) and co-authored Collaboration and Co-Teaching: Strategies for English Learners (2010), Common Core for the Not-So-Common Learner, Grades K-5: English Language Arts Strategies (2013), Common Core for the Not-So-Common Learner, Grades 6-12: English Language Arts Strategies (2013), Beyond Core Expectations: A Schoolwide Framework for Serving the Not-So-Common Learner (2014), Collaboration and Co-Teaching: A Leader's Guide (2015), Coteaching for English Learners: A Guide to Collaborative Planning, Instruction, Assessment, and Reflection (2018), Collaborating for English Learners: A Foundational Guide to Integrated Practices (2019), Co-Planning: 5 Essential Practices to Integrate Curriculum and Instruction for English Learners (2022). She is a contributing author of Breaking Down the Wall: Essential Shifts for English Learner Success (2020), From Equity Insights to Action (2021), and Digital-Age Teaching for English Learners (2022). Nine of her Corwin books are bestsellers.