Co-Teaching for Capacity Building

Whether you are a school or district administrator, a coach or fellow educator, you must have encountered a colleague who felt lost when assigned to teach English learners, overwhelmed by the challenge of addressing these students’ needs within the context of the general education classroom. English learners are an ever-growing subgroup of the US student population. There is growing consensus that students who need to develop English language proficiency should no longer be perceived as the sole responsibility of specially trained and certified faculty, often referred to as English as a second language (ESL), English language development (ELD), English learner (EL), or more recently multilingual learner (ML) specialists. Researchers and advocates agree that English learners belong to the entire school community and that all educators are charged with their academic, linguistic, and social–emotional development (Kibler et al., 2015).