December 2021

By Carrie Parker, Sara Rutherford-Quach and Elisa Garcia

Welcome to SRI Education’s Multilingual Learner program! We are excited to present our work focused on expanding educational opportunities for culturally and linguistically diverse learners. To improve educational experiences for students of all ages, we collaborate with our SRI colleagues across program areas, including early childhood, disabilities, student behavior and well-being, teacher quality, STEM and computer science, digital learning, and college and career pathways. You can see some of our current and past projects on our projects page.

In all of our work, we merge SRI staffs’ deep content expertise with a commitment to high-quality, equitable education that celebrates all that students bring with them to their learning. In our research, evaluation, and technical assistance, we begin with self-reflection, examining our own biases and the assumptions that we bring to the work. We focus on concrete results for students and educators, whether in research, evaluation, or technical assistance. We work with educators and administrators from states and districts to design instructional frameworks for multilingual learner programs, we help teachers implement evidence-based instructional principles and practices, and we encourage school communities to include student and family perspectives in their instructional approaches.

Together, we ask questions to continually reflect on and improve our work. What does rigorous research look like that authentically includes the voices of multilingual learners and their families? How can practitioners use evaluation data to improve practices and programs for all learners? How can we center our technical assistance services by listening to our stakeholders? How can we continuously learn from multilingual learner communities and practitioners, embedding their voices and expertise into our work, and disseminating findings to increase discussion and learnings? Take a look at what we are currently writing about on our resources page.

Check back for future blog posts describing our research on identifying disabilities among multilingual learners, examining the bilingual teacher pipeline, and working with early childhood educators.

Want to learn more? Connect with us.