Transatlantic Symposium Report: Improving Instruction for Immigrant and Refugee Students in Secondary Schools

Students with a migrant background often fall behind their nonimmigrant peers in academic achievement due to a lack of host-country language and literacy skills. This gap is especially large for language minority (LM) students who migrate during their secondary school years.

Improving Instruction for Immigrant and Refugee Students in Secondary Schools summarizes the ideas and strategies discussed at a June 2015 Transatlantic Symposium of 30 policymakers, educators and researchers from the United States and Europe. The report explores how school environments can adapt to the growing enrollment of students without strong host-country language skills. Administrators must help educators acquire the skills necessary to support the language development of LM students and to understand their diverse cultural backgrounds. The report contains links to the papers and presentations prepared for the Symposium and also examines the role that state, national and supranational governments can play in developing, sustaining and scaling programs that respond to migrant students’ unique needs. The report recommends the sharing of best practices among educators, legislators and administrators; the creation of policy priorities such as federal discretionary funding tied to state outcome targets to encourage high-quality instruction for LM and migrant students; and the monitoring of LM students’ academic and language development. (Sophia Mitrokostas for The Immigrant Learning Center Public Education Institute)

Download it here or view it online.