What Brought Us to the Same Planning Table
My co-teacher and I were looking at the same classroom full of learners and asking the same question: how do we build a writing program that honors every language background in this room and takes every student somewhere new as a writer? She had deep knowledge of the writing process and how to build a workshop that moves. I had WIDA proficiency-level expertise and years of understanding how multilingual learners enter academic tasks. Neither of us had the full picture alone. That shared question is what put us at the same planning table — and what changed the nature of our co-teaching from that point forward.
This post is for EAL specialists and classroom teachers who are already in a co-teaching partnership and wondering how to get more out of the time you have together. The shift I am describing is not a new program or a district initiative. It is a structural one: moving the EAL specialist's expertise from the delivery phase into the design phase, so the scaffolds are built into the materials before students ever touch them.
Co-Designing Around a Shared Goal
The unit we built together was called Neon City Architects — a project-based writing frame where every student designed their own city. The shared context was intentional. Every learner was working on the same high-interest, high-cognition project. The differentiation was in how each student entered the task, not whether they were included in it.
Co-designing meant building multiple versions of every prompt, every visual scaffold, and every feedback protocol before the unit launched. WIDA proficiency levels were the organizing framework from the first planning session, not a layer added afterward. A student entering at level one brought rich ideas and needed a visual anchor and a sentence frame that matched their current production range. A student at level three brought growing academic vocabulary and needed a partially completed model to extend from. A student at level five was ready for the same high-complexity task as any other writer in the room, with academic language explicitly surfaced so they could claim it — not assumed and left invisible.
Canva became our shared design space. Both of us could build and revise in real time, and the visual consistency across proficiency-level versions mattered: every student could see that their materials were the same task, designed for where they enter — not a lesser version, not a workaround.
Why the Writing Process Scaffolds Every Learner
Jim Cummins's distinction between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency is foundational here. Multilingual learners who communicate confidently in conversation are also developing the academic language register that written tasks demand. That development accelerates when the writing process itself — brainstorm, draft, revise, publish — has proficiency-level scaffolds built into every stage.
WIDA's approach to language development treats each proficiency level as a distinct entry point into the same academic task — not a lower bar, but a different path to the same cognitive work.
When a student brainstorms with a visual prompt and sentence frames, then drafts from that foundation, then revises with structured peer feedback, they are inside the same process as every other writer in the room. The scaffold is what makes the grade-level cognitive work accessible — and accessible is not the same as simplified. Every learner in that classroom is doing the thinking. The scaffold is what makes the thinking visible on the page.
What Opened Up Across the Whole Room
One of the things I value most about co-designing with linguistically responsive materials is what they unlock for learners we did not originally design them for. The visual scaffolds became anchor tools for students who needed image support to hold ideas before writing. The sentence frames gave students with strong oral language a structure to transfer what they already knew into print. The high-ceiling versions of the prompts gave strong writers a genuine challenge rather than more of the same.
Universal design works this way: build for the full range of learners in the room and you create conditions where everyone can enter with their strengths. When the EAL specialist is at the design table, that range gets built in from the start — because the expertise is in the room when the decisions are being made.
Making It a Repeatable Practice
One well-designed unit is a proof of concept. What made this repeatable was treating co-planning as a standing part of the instructional cycle — scheduled and protected, not something that happened around the edges of other commitments. My role shifted from adapting materials at delivery to shaping them at design. That is the structural change: not more time in the room, but more voice in what the room is built around.
Over time, we built a shared bank of proficiency-level scaffolds we could reach for across units — visual anchor templates, sentence frame structures, feedback protocols that could flex to any content. Each unit added to that bank. Co-planning got faster because we were building on a common design language, not starting from scratch. The expertise compounds when it is built into the cycle rather than layered on top of it.
If you are in a co-teaching partnership and want to try this, start with one unit and one question neither of you can fully answer alone. Build the proficiency-level scaffolds into the materials before the unit launches. That is the condition that lets the EAL specialist's expertise do what it is built to do — and it is a shift you can make with your next unit, starting from what you and your co-teacher already bring.