By Sarah B. Ottow

One of the things I’ve seen throughout my career—from the classroom to coaching to district leadership—is how easily we can unintentionally lower expectations for students when they’re struggling.

We might think: They’re not ready for this yet. Or: This is going to be too hard for them.

So we might simplify the task. Reduce the amount of thinking required. Or give students something entirely different from what their peers are doing.

I’ve seen this happen far too often with multilingual learners. But this issue is not only about multilingual learners.

It can happen with any learner—or what I like to call any Academic Language Learner—who may still be developing the language, background knowledge, confidence, or experience needed to fully engage in rigorous learning at school.

And that’s where I think we need to shift the question. Instead of asking: “Can this student do this?”

What if we asked: “What does this student need in order to access and engage in this thinking?” That distinction really matters.

Holding high expectations doesn’t mean providing every student the same rigorous task and hoping they figure it out. It means maintaining the intellectual demand while intentionally strengthening access to the language, content, and opportunities for participation students need to be successful. It means keeping close the knowledge that every learner comes with something, every learner has funds of knowledge they bring to school.

To hold expectations, we may need to unpack the language demands of a task. We may need to explicitly build or activate to their background knowledge. We may need to give students opportunities to hash out their thinking or simply rehearse their thinking (thinking = language!) with a partner or in their home language/mother tongue. We may need to model how disciplinary language works. Or we may need to provide other scaffolds that allow students to do the thinking without doing the thinking for them.

This is a core idea behind the Language Lens™: When students struggle, we get curious about what may be getting in the way of access before we assume they aren’t capable of the work. We remind ourselves to keep dignity and mutual respect in mind. We build bridges, we don’t lower the bar.

Because sometimes the most important mindset shift we can make as educators is moving from: They can’t do this. to: How can I help them access this?

🔎 Ready to Put the Language Lens™ Into Practice?

Want to maintain rigorous expectations while strengthening access for all learners?

The Language Lens for Content Classrooms gives educators a practical framework for seeing the language demands already embedded in learning and making purposeful shifts that increase access, engagement, discourse, and rigorous thinking for all language learners.

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Be Careful Not to Unintentionally Lower Your Expectations for Multilingual Students