Elevating Strengths: Supporting Multilingual Learners Facing Adversity
Discover practical, strengths-based strategies for supporting multilingual learners facing adversity while fostering belonging, engagement, resilience, and high expectations.
Category: academic and social-emotional development
Searching for Belonging
What can appear to be student disengagement may actually be a search for connection. A powerful exchange with school resource officers offers an important reminder of how relationships can help us better understand multilingual learners and strengthen their sense of belonging.
Supporting Multilingual Learners Facing Adversity
Multilingual learners facing adversity may develop strengths that are not always visible in school. A strengths-based approach helps educators recognize these capacities and create conditions for belonging, agency, learning, and opportunity.
What Educators Do When Children Are Afraid
When children experience fear and uncertainty, learning and well-being are affected. Educators can respond by listening, protecting students’ dignity and safety, and creating the conditions children need to learn.
Empowerment, Agency, and Resilience
How can educators help multilingual learners develop empowerment, agency, and resilience? A strengths-based approach creates identity-safe environments where students can recognize their strengths, exercise their voices and choices, and develop the confidence to navigate challenges.
Choose Empathy and Strength Over Hopelessness
When multilingual learners face significant adversity, educators may feel unsure how to help. An empathetic, strengths-based approach shifts the focus from perceived deficits to students’ strengths, resilience, belonging, and potential.
Leading With a Culture of Caring: Ways to Create Identity Safe Spaces at Home and School
Creating identity-safe schools begins with a culture of caring, trust, and compassion. Educational leaders can strengthen belonging by welcoming multilingual learners and families, listening actively, and fostering caring home-school relationships.
How Schools and Families Can Honor Students’ Identities
When schools and families work together to honor students’ identities, they strengthen belonging, confidence, and agency. Identity-safe, strengths-based practices can help children recognize their strengths, navigate adversity, and advocate for themselves and others.
Teachers College Record Reviews Identity Safe Spaces at Home and School
Teachers College Record reviews Identity Safe Spaces at Home and School, highlighting its research-based, practical approach to identity safety, belonging, equity, and school-family partnerships.
Identity Safety at Home and School: Partnering to Overcome Inequities
Creating identity-safe environments requires meaningful partnerships among schools, families, and communities. Explore how strengths-based practices can foster belonging, agency, resilience, and positive identity development for all students.
Slow Down, Seabiscuit: Healing Is Not a Race
Recovery has a way of reminding us that healing cannot be rushed. After a total hip replacement—and repeated reminders to slow down—I learned the value of patience, perspective, and giving ourselves time to heal.
Recorded Webinar: Responsive Schooling for Culturally & Linguistically Diverse Students
This recorded webinar explores key ideas from Responsive Schooling for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students and practical approaches for creating responsive, inclusive learning environments.