The beginning of a new school year offers an important opportunity to consider the conditions that help students—and the educators who work with them—grow and thrive. As we welcome students and learn more about the strengths, experiences, interests, and aspirations they bring, we can also consider how our professional growth and evaluation systems support us in creating the conditions for their continued learning and development.

A strengths-based approach begins with the understanding that, like our students, we bring valuable knowledge, experiences, commitments, and capacities to our work. When this understanding grounds the evaluation process, we can recognize what is working, reflect thoughtfully on our practice, and continue to learn and grow in ways that benefit our students.

This invites an important question: How can we shape professional growth and evaluation systems that build on the strengths and experiences of students and educators and support continued learning and development for all?

Beginning with What Students Bring

All students bring valuable linguistic, cultural, familial, and experiential strengths to school. These resources may align with the language and literacy conventions schools expect in different ways.

Every student comes to school with ways of communicating, making meaning, solving problems, and learning that have developed through experiences with family and community. These may include oral language, gesture, storytelling, observation, and collaboration, as well as reading and writing in one or more languages, depending on students’ ages and prior opportunities. For some students, these practices closely align with school expectations and are readily recognized and used in academic settings. For others, equally valuable practices may be less readily recognized because they differ from those traditionally privileged in academic settings.

When students’ practices differ from school expectations, they draw on their existing knowledge and resources as they develop and expand their academic language and literacy practices. They engage with grade-level content while learning new vocabulary, language structures, communication patterns, and expectations. The difference lies not within students or their families but in the degree of alignment between what students bring and the particular conventions schools expect.

How does this connect with teacher evaluation? Through evaluation, we can consider not only how instruction aligns with curriculum, standards, and effective practices, but also how it builds on what students bring and creates meaningful access to learning. Looking through both lenses provides a fuller understanding of effective teaching.

Four Dimensions for Understanding Academic Language Learning

Academic language learning involves much more than teaching vocabulary. It is a multidimensional process that can be understood as:

Sociocultural: grounded in students’ and families’ personal, social, cultural, linguistic, and community experiences.

Developmental: responsive to students’ evolving language and literacy development while providing appropriately challenging and well-supported opportunities for continued growth.

Academic: connected to students’ prior knowledge and learning and guided by clear, understandable learning goals.

Cognitive: designed to engage and extend students’ thinking, their approaches to learning, and their understanding of themselves as learners.

These four dimensions can provide a meaningful foundation for professional growth, supervision, and teacher evaluation. They invite us to examine how our practices draw on students’ experiences, respond to their development, clarify academic expectations, and foster increasingly complex thinking.

When evaluation systems attend to these dimensions, they can make visible not only what occurs during a lesson but also how effectively instruction creates opportunities for students to access, participate in, and learn through instruction.

A Professional Continuum for Growth

Our professional knowledge and practices continue to develop throughout our careers. We benefit from sustained opportunities to expand how we support multilingual learners, students experiencing adversity, and students whose language and literacy practices may differ from conventional school expectations.

Much as English language development standards describe language learning along a developmental continuum, a strengths-based professional growth system can show how our knowledge and practices deepen over time. Such a continuum begins with what we already do effectively, identifies observable evidence of practice, and helps us see what we might explore or strengthen next.

The continuum might include the following descriptors:

• Emerging
• Developing
• Enacting
• Integrating

The continuum can help us recognize what we already do effectively and consider how our practices might continue to develop.

Questions That Support Professional Growth

A strengths-based professional growth system can invite us to consider questions such as:

• How do we build on students’ linguistic, cultural, familial, and experiential strengths through our instruction?
• How clearly do we communicate learning goals and expectations?
• What opportunities do we provide for students to speak, listen, read, write, think, and collaborate?
• How does our instruction respond to students’ evolving language and literacy development?
• What helps us understand how effectively our instruction supports students’ access, participation, and learning?
• How can reflection and conversation help us recognize what is working and decide how we want to continue learning?

Educator Agency

Professional growth is most meaningful when we have agency in shaping it. Agency means having authentic opportunities to identify goals connected to our students and teaching contexts, to pose questions about our practice, to choose relevant evidence to examine, and to pursue pathways for continued learning. Our experiences, reflections, and professional judgment help us interpret that evidence and decide how we want to continue growing.

In a strengths-based system, evaluation becomes a collaborative process that we help shape. Through thoughtful conversation and feedback, we can reflect on what we are learning and decide how we want to strengthen our practice.

When professional growth systems build on our strengths, honor our professional judgment, and enable us to exercise genuine agency, evaluation can become a shared process that strengthens teaching and expands opportunities for every student to thrive.

This article draws on ideas presented in Zacarian (2023), Transforming Schools for Multilingual Learners: A Comprehensive Framework for Educators (Corwin), and Zacarian (2013), Mastering Academic Language: A Framework for Supporting Student Achievement (Corwin). Its framework is informed by research on language and literacy development, child development, and family-school partnerships with culturally and linguistically diverse learners.