Test the Way We Teach: The Need for Bilingual Approaches to Data-Driven Practices

• In Event: Centering Teacher and Student Voice in Classroom Assessment Design: Possibilities and Tensions Between Research and Reality

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framing
This study explored three bilingual teachers’ efforts to align assessment, curricula and instruction to meet the needs of their bilingual students. In bilingual spaces there continues to be a deep misalignment between assessment policies, curricular resources and bilingual instructional practices (Menken & García, 2010). Even when teachers are allowed to teach bilingually, they are consistently tasked with assessing their students monolingually (Menken, 2008). Common best practice has become to assess bilingual students in both of their languages (e.g. Spanish and English), but this practice operates on the notion of parallel monolingualism (Hopewell & Escamilla, 2014) where students are assessed as two monolinguals in one (Grosjean, 1989). This approach not only contributes to over testing, but without designated time to analyze the two assessments side-by-side, they still only offer a partial view of what bilingual students can do (Butvilofksy et al., 2020; Escamilla et al., 2017).
Despite the limitations of monolingual assessments, teachers can negotiate assessment policies in ways that center their students’ bilingualism through their classroom practice (Menken & García, 2010). Bilingual teachers, in particular, can disrupt monolingual assessment practices through utilizing holistic bilingual approaches that more accurately capture what bilingual students know (Zúñiga et al., 2018). This study paired a figured worlds framework (Holland et al., 1998) with a policy acting lens (Coburn, 2001; Cohen & Hill, 2001; Varghese & Snyder, 2018), to explore how three bilingual teachers in a transitional bilingual program negotiated monolingual assessment policies and practices in their school.
Method
The study relied on qualitative, ethnographic methods in the form of a vertical comparison case study (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2016). With observations, interviews, and focal group data, the vertical comparison case study design offered understandings about how three teachers negotiated and adapted monolingual assessment policies and practices in context. Data analysis was iterative and recursive (Miles & Huberman, 1994), beginning with start codes that were established before data collection, and then expanded into broader themes in relation to the research questions.
Findings
Findings suggest that the teachers and their students faced an unwavering emphasis on data that worked to perpetuate English hegemony in the school--through both the structure of Data Meetings specifically, and the pervasive discourse of data in the school space more broadly. In response to these data driven approaches that did not capture or acknowledge what their bilingual students could do, the three bilingual teachers continued to leverage their students’ bilingualism in their classroom-based instruction and assessment. That is, instead of aligning their instruction to the existing monolingual assessments and curricular resources, they modified and adapted those materials to align to the bilingual practices of their students.
Significance
This study affirms extant research that calls for holistic bilingual approaches to bilingual student assessment and expands on that body of knowledge through centering the experiences of teachers making agentive assessment decisions through their classroom practice. If we truly seek to align standards, curricula, and assessment, we must use approaches that reflect the practices of the students and teachers they purport to serve.

Author

• Deena Gumina, University of Colorado - Boulder