Posted on November 6th, 2025 

Picture this: A teacher is planning a lesson. The curriculum guide is open, the text is rigorous and engaging, the tasks are thoughtfully designed. This is exactly the kind of high-quality instructional material the district invested in - and it's exactly what students need.

But then a pause. The teacher is thinking about the multilingual learners in the class. The language demands in this text are significant. The discussion prompts assume a level of academic vocabulary ML students are still building. And the question surfaces: How do they make this work without watering it down?

Sound familiar? This is the tension so many teachers navigate every day.

Districts have made significant investments in high-quality instructional materials over the past several years. These materials are designed to be rigorous, standards-aligned, and engaging - exactly what all students need access to. But here's what we're seeing: When we're not sure how to make grade-level HQIM accessible to multilingual learners, one of two things tends to happen. Either students struggle because the linguistic demands are too high without appropriate support, or we start pulling back on the complexity - lowering expectations or moving ML students to "easier" alternatives while their peers work with the actual curriculum.

Neither option serves students well.

The real question isn't whether multilingual learners can handle high-quality instructional materials. It's whether we're equipped with the tools and capacity to use those materials in ways that maintain cognitive demand while strategically reducing linguistic barriers.

Understanding the Instructional Core

Here's what often happens: A district invests in high-quality instructional materials - rigorous, well-designed curriculum that should lead to better outcomes. And then we wait for the results.

But learning doesn't happen because of curriculum alone. Richard Elmore and his colleagues describe what they call the "Instructional Core" - think of it as a triangle with three interconnected points:

• Content: The level and rigor of what's being learned
• Teacher: The knowledge and skill we bring to teaching that content
• Student: How actively engaged students are and the meaning they're making during the learning

At the center of this triangle is the task - what students are actually being asked to do. If the task is low-level (like filling in blanks or memorizing terms), that's the ceiling for learning, no matter how good the materials are. High-quality instructional materials are designed to ensure students engage in rigorous learning tasks that lead to deeper understanding.

It's the dynamic relationship between these three elements - not any single element on its own - that determines whether that task is rigorous and deeper learning actually happens.

When districts invest in one lever (the curriculum) without attending to the other two, we get stuck. We have excellent materials, but if teachers don't have the knowledge and skills to make those materials accessible to multilingual learners, or if we're not responsive to what students actually bring and need, the materials alone won't get us where we need to go.

So what does navigating the Instructional Core actually look like in practice? When students move through a learning experience with HQIM, there are three key phases where teachers make critical decisions about how curriculum, their practice, and student needs come together: accessing new learning, processing that learning deeply, and showcasing what they've learned. These are the moments where responsive instruction makes all the difference for multilingual learners.

The Student Learning Journey: Three Key Decision Points

ACCESS: How do we get students' brains ready and make content comprehensible while maintaining rigor?

Before students can engage deeply with content, they need to be able to access it - not by lowering the bar, but by strategically removing linguistic barriers that might block their thinking.

Strategic moves at this decision point:

Build background knowledge strategically. HQIM often assumes certain prior knowledge or cultural references. Before diving in, activate what students already know and build connections to the new content. This might mean previewing key concepts, using visuals to establish context, or making connections to students' lived experiences.

Pre-teach essential vocabulary. Not every word needs to be pre-taught, but some are essential for understanding the core content. Identify 3-5 terms that are crucial to the learning target and introduce them in student-friendly ways - with visual supports and opportunities for students to interact with the words before encountering them in text.

Make text comprehensible. This doesn't mean rewriting the HQIM text. It means providing supports that help students access it: read-alouds with think-alouds, chunking longer passages, using graphic organizers to show relationships between ideas, or providing bilingual glossaries for complex terms.

Frame the learning clearly. Share the learning target in student-friendly language. Give students the lesson's "itinerary" so they know where they're headed. This reduces cognitive load by helping students understand the purpose and structure of what they're about to learn.

The goal at this decision point isn't to make things easier - it's to prepare students' brains for learning and remove the linguistic barriers that might prevent them from engaging with grade-level thinking.

PROCESS: How do we meaningfully engage learners in thinking deeply about the content?

HQIM is designed to push students into complex thinking - analysis, synthesis, evaluation. This is where we're supporting students to make connections, extend their understanding, and do the cognitive work that leads to real learning.

Strategic moves at this decision point:

Provide sentence frames and stems strategically. When students are asked to compare and contrast, explain cause and effect, or make claims with evidence, they need the language structures to do that thinking. Sentence frames give students the linguistic scaffolding to express complex ideas without lowering the cognitive demand.

Create protected time for discussion. HQIM often includes rich discussion prompts, but multilingual learners need structured opportunities to process their thinking. Use protocols like think-pair-share, provide wait time, and create expectations that everyone contributes. This isn't "extra" - it's essential for language development.

Teach language functions explicitly. When students need to compare and contrast, they need to understand not just the concept but the language patterns associated with it - signal words like "similarly," "however," "on the other hand." Teaching these patterns explicitly helps students both comprehend and produce academic discourse.

Incorporate multiple modes of processing. Let students sketch their thinking, create labeled diagrams, use graphic organizers, or explain concepts with concrete examples before moving to abstract written responses. These modes scaffold the thinking while still requiring engagement with the core content.

The key is that scaffolds support the thinking without doing the thinking for students. As students develop capacity, the supports adjust or come away entirely.

SHOWCASE: How do we create opportunities for students to show their learning, and how do we use what we see to help them improve?

This is where things get tricky with multilingual learners and HQIM. The assessments embedded in HQIM are often heavily language-dependent. A student might deeply understand photosynthesis but struggle to write a coherent paragraph explaining it in English. We need to gather accurate evidence of understanding while also giving students feedback that moves their learning forward.

Strategic moves at this decision point:

Offer multiple ways to demonstrate understanding. Not "easier" tasks, but different formats for showing the same learning. A student might create a labeled diagram with annotations, give an oral explanation, or write a paragraph - but all are demonstrating understanding of the same concept.

Provide clear success criteria. Let students know exactly what "success" looks like for this task. What are the essential elements? How will their work be evaluated? This helps students focus their energy on the learning target rather than guessing what's expected.

Give feedback that separates content from language. When assessing student work, be clear about what you're evaluating. Did the student demonstrate understanding of the concept? That's content. Are there language errors that don't interfere with comprehension? That's language development and requires different feedback. Both matter, but they're not the same thing.

Create opportunities for revision. Feedback is most powerful when students have the chance to act on it. Build in time for students to revise, refine, and improve their work based on specific, actionable feedback.

Why Intentionality Matters

Here's something we hear sometimes: "But aren't these just good teaching strategies? Don't all students benefit from clear learning targets, vocabulary instruction, and discussion time?"

Yes - and here's why that matters.

All students benefit from these approaches. But for multilingual learners, these strategies aren't nice-to-have enhancements - they're essential design elements. ML students are doing double the work: learning content AND learning the language to access and express that content. What might be helpful scaffolding for some students is often necessary infrastructure for multilingual learners.

The difference is in how intentional and responsive we need to be. We can't assume that if we use these strategies generally, they'll somehow reach the students who need them most. Instead, we design with our multilingual learners in mind from the start - anticipating where linguistic barriers might block access to thinking, planning strategic scaffolds, and building in the flexibility to adjust as students develop capacity.

This isn't about lowering expectations or creating a separate curriculum. It's about designing instruction that starts with our most marginalized students and builds from there. When we do that well, everyone benefits - but our multilingual learners finally get what they've needed all along.

The Capacity Question

The real challenge isn't the quality of instructional materials. Most HQIM on the market today is excellent - rigorous, engaging, well-designed.

The challenge is understanding how all three elements of the Instructional Core work together.

We need to understand how language acquisition works - that's about knowing our students and how they develop. We need to know the difference between lowering linguistic demand and lowering cognitive demand - that's about understanding the content and how to maintain rigor. And we need to recognize when scaffolds are strategic versus when they're over-supporting - that's about our practice and the moves we make in real time.

But here's the thing: these aren't separate skills. They're interconnected. When we change one element - say, we adjust how we're presenting the content - we have to think about how that affects what students can do and what we need to know to support them. That's the nature of the Instructional Core. Everything is connected.

This is ongoing work - not something we figure out once and check off the list. It's the kind of professional learning that happens over time, with opportunities to try things out, notice what students are actually doing with the content, reflect on what's working, and adjust our practice.

When districts invest in both high-quality materials AND ongoing capacity-building that helps teachers navigate the Instructional Core responsively, that's when we see real change. Because the materials are only as effective as our ability to use them in ways that attend to all three elements - the curriculum, our practice, and what students bring and need.

If you're navigating this work - if you're wrestling with how to make HQIM work for your ML students while maintaining rigor - you're asking exactly the right questions. This is complex, important work. And it matters deeply for the students counting on us to get it right.

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