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Scaffolding is building upon ELL earners’ existing understanding, skills, and what is more STRENGTH. Scaffolding is like running by a child who has just learned how to bike. It is giving learners a hand but only when it is necessary and in the way it is required. In a supportive environment as learners progress and take ownership of their learning, a facilitator gradually fades away enabling learners to challenge themselves INDEPENDENTLY with new and exciting journeys and tackle increasingly difficult task aspects on their own.

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Scaffolding is building upon ELL earners’ existing understanding, skills, and what is more STRENGTH. Scaffolding is like running by a child who has just learned how to bike. It is giving learners a hand but only when it is necessary and in the way it is required. In a supportive environment as learners progress and take ownership of their learning, a facilitator gradually fades away enabling learners to challenge themselves INDEPENDENTLY with new and exciting journeys and tackle increasingly difficult task aspects on their own.

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How can I efficiently meet such diverse, unique, and changing needs of my ELL learners and provide enough challenge for each one of them?

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How can I efficiently meet such diverse, unique, and changing needs of my ELL learners and provide enough challenge for each one of them?

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How can I as a teacher appreciate students’ strengths making them a jumping off point to success?

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How can I as a teacher appreciate students’ strengths making them a jumping off point to success?

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How do I step in and provide a voice for those who have not yet developed their own voice?

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How do I step in and provide a voice for those who have not yet developed their own voice?

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How can scaffolding assist in preparing students for independent learning?

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How can scaffolding assist in preparing students for independent learning?

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I started connecting the information from my readings to the assessment practices by asking some basic questions:
- What are my students language resources and how do they use them while learning?
- Which responsive adaptations can I incorporate in my assessments and why?
- What can I learn about the students' language practices and what can I do to support their language development as a result of what I learn about them?

After starting to ask these questions, I realized it's not just an individual teacher's responsibility, we need to think of the necessary changes as a school, so the questions transformed into:

- What it would be like if we built upon the students' language resources as a school?
- What would change if we adopted some responsive adaptations across our grade?
- Suppose we want to offer our ELLs language-based supports?
- How would it look differently if we considered our students' whole linguistic repertoires?

I realized we have a long way to go, we as a school are just starting to move away from "English only" philosophy, I hear less of "no Russian", but other past practices strongly influence our assessment, data collection, and everyday functioning: we do not as a school provide accommodations to emergent multilingual during standardized assessments because "we need a baseline", classroom teachers do not speak Russian to clarify their students' understanding even though the majority of teachers are Russian because of the current political situation, because "English is our language of inclusion".

As a "promoter of change", I can do the following to advocate for change:

- familiarize and provide my team with multilingual resources I have access to (books, articles, etc.)
- try to get more information about how my students learn by trying to incorporate the ideas from this week readings (summary in two languages during the reading assessment to see whether the student needs to work on comprehension or vocabulary, analyzing the students' miscues to learn where reading difficulties originate from (pronunciation/vocabulary), etc.
-promote the use of scaffolds not only during instruction but also during assessments.

(Based on the articles by L. Ascenzi-Moreno and D. Staehr Fenner) and the book Pedagogical Translanguaging by J. Cenoz and D. Gorter.

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"We can assess students from a strengths-based perspective, valuing their emerging bilingualism, instead of a deficit perspective where we only consider what they don't know and can not yet do." (Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, 2018)

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"We can assess students from a strengths-based perspective, valuing their emerging bilingualism, instead of a deficit perspective where we only consider what they don't know and can not yet do." (Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, 2018)