Guideline 4: Incorporate students’ cultural backgrounds
Support for continuously drawing on and incorporating students’ cultural backgrounds and lived experiences in science learning
Specifications for Guideline 4
Specification 4A
Materials use phenomena that are of personal, cultural, local, and/or global significance and are engaging to students without essentializing.
Specification 4B
Materials include activities that connect to students’ prior knowledge, cultures, and home and community experiences, or activate students’ curiosity
Specification 4C
Teacher materials include relevant and practical suggestions for connecting science learning to students’ lives and/or interests and to their communities
Specification 4D
Materials offer opportunities for clarifying and building knowledge related to unfamiliar contexts and phenomena.
Guideline 5: Build on existing language resources
Guidance for inviting multilingual learners to use and build on existing language resources to communicate scientific ideas
Specifications for Guideline 5
Specification 5A
Teacher materials guide teachers to value multilingual learners’ written, spoken, and nonverbal contributions in co-constructing scientific knowledge, including all language that students bring.
Specification 5B
Materials provide opportunities and rationales for multilingual learners to use and integrate home language, everyday English, and nonverbal communication as they engage in scientific sensemaking and use language to communicate for specific purposes.
Specification 5C
Student materials are provided in multiple languages to support student sensemaking of scientific ideas.
Guideline 6: Make choices supporting multilingual learner engagement
Support for students to make choices so that multilingual learners are engaged in learning
Specifications for Guideline 6
Specification 6A
Whenever possible, materials provide opportunities for students to make choices in how they learn the material and/or how they demonstrate what they learned (e.g., topic, question, modality, etc.).
Specification 6B
Materials provide opportunities and rationales for students to make choices in topics that are relevant to their identity.
Specification 6C
Teacher materials provide guidance for structuring student choice in a way that promotes agency while also aligning with the goals for science and language learning.
