From Access to Excellence: Three Differentiation Moves You Can Use Tomorrow

December always asks a lot of us.

Grades are coming due, winter concerts are humming, family responsibilities pull hard, and your multilingual and multidialectal learners still show up every day needing rich, rigorous literacy experiences.

Many of you wanted to join my last webinar live but simply couldn't make it. The good news is that you can download the full webinar and watch it on your own time—pausing, rewinding, and trying the strategies when they actually fit your schedule.

To continue learning, watch Dr. Berry's Webinar " Building Bridges: Culturally Responsive Literacy for Multilingual Learners" now! 

From "Access Only" to Excellence

In the webinar, I shared a continuum many of us know intuitively:

Access Only ➡️ Access with Support ➡️ Excellence.

Access only is where we hand learners a simplified text, a vocabulary list, or a translation app and hope it's enough. Excellence is where multilingual learners and learners who speak African American English, Chicano English, Puerto Rican English, Hawaiian Creole, and other English varieties engage deeply with grade-level literature, supported by intentional scaffolds—not lowered expectations.

The Emergent Bilingual Resource Guide in Connections is designed to move us along that continuum with three strategic moves:

1. focused vocabulary work,
2. purposeful grouping, and
3. Cultural Bridges that invite learners' own lives into literary analysis.

In the webinar, I modeled these with “The Golden Spike,” but the same three moves transfer beautifully to “Block Party 145th Street Style” and to any other text you're teaching.

Move 1: Strategic Vocabulary

Move 1 is about choosing a small set of words that unlock meaning and teaching them well. In the webinar, we kept the list to 5–7 high-impact words and used routines from the Resource Guide to make those words stick.

With “Block Party 145th Street Style,” you might choose words like borough, plantain, righteous, landing, or expressions like “chump them off” for focused attention. In the recorded session, you'll see how the routines work step by step and how to connect those words to learners' home languages and varieties, instead of treating vocabulary as a copy-and-forget list.

Move 2: Multilevel Grouping with Purpose

Move 2 is about who works with whom, when, and why. The webinar highlights four grouping structures from the guide:

• Mixed proficiency groups,
• Same primary language or ethnolect groups,
• Different primary language groups, and
• Short-term skill-based groups.

Each structure serves a different purpose

• background building,
• stretching into School English, or
• targeting specific needs.

“Block Party 145th Street Style” is a powerful text for same-language and same-variety talk before you shift into mixed groups.

Learners who speak African American English, Chicano English, Puerto Rican English, Hawaiian Creole, Spanish, Haitian Creole, or other languages can first process Peaches's voice, the humor, and the neighborhood dynamics in the language that feels most natural, then move into mixed groups to analyze character and theme.

You'll see concrete examples of these structures in the webinar recording.

Move 3: Cultural Bridges and Differentiated Response

Move 3 invites learners' lived experiences into the text. In the session, we framed Cultural Bridges around questions of immigration, language, discrimination, and home knowledge as power. The same stance applies to “Block Party 145th Street Style” as learners consider why Peaches is so upset, what she fears losing, and how relationships and family structures shift over the course of the story.

The webinar walks through three differentiated response options based on learners’ language proficiency levels:

• A more visual response for beginners,
• Structured paragraph writing for intermediate, and
• Open-ended analysis for advanced

while keeping the cognitive demand the same:

• Identify a theme,
• Support it with evidence, and
• Connect it to lived experience.

The blog gives you the outline; the recording shows you the scaffolds in action.

One Possible Week with "Block Party 145th Street Style"

Here's how you might put the three moves together across a week with “Block Party 145th Street Style.” Use this as a flexible template, not a rigid script.

• Monday: Vocabulary and Background
  Choose 5–7 unlocking words from the story and use Display & Pronounce plus visuals, movement, and home-language connections to introduce them. Build quick background on Harlem, rent parties, and block parties, inviting learners in same-language or same-ethnolect groups to share what block gatherings look and sound like in their communities.
• Tuesday: First Read with Mixed Groups
  Form mixed proficiency groups. Assign roles such as Reader, Summarizer, and Feelings Tracker. The Reader handles the aloud reading; the Summarizer restates key events in everyday language; the Feelings Tracker notes Peaches's emotions at key Think About It points and why she might be feeling that way. Rotate roles over time so every learner practices each skill.
• Wednesday: Close Reading with Moves 1 & 2
  Begin with a brief whole-class close reading model of a short excerpt—for example, Peaches watching her mother with Big Joe or the moment she talks about being "replaced." Think aloud about vocabulary, textual clues, and Peaches's internal conflict so learners see how the three moves work inside a single paragraph.
  Then, use purposeful small groups to continue close reading: some groups annotate another passage with sentence frames and vocabulary supports, while you pull a small skill-based group (for example, newcomers or learners needing decoding support in English) to read a shorter section together with extra scaffolds. Everyone is working on close reading; the level of support varies.
• Thursday: Cultural Bridges Conversations
  Use short prompts like: "Think about a time when a family change (a move, a new partner, someone leaving) made you feel some type of way. How is that similar to or different from Peaches?" Offer options for learners to talk first in pairs or small same-language/same-ethnolect groups before sharing with the whole class. The goal is not disclosure of personal trauma, but connection to the themes of change, loyalty, and fear of replacement before sharing with the whole class—a psychologically safe space for connection, not confession.
• Friday: Differentiated Written Responses
  Ask every learner to answer a version of the same question: "What is one important idea or theme in ‘Block Party 145th Street Style,’ and how do Peaches's actions help you see it?" Provide different pathways based on language proficiency: a comic-strip storyboard of key moments with brief captions, a paragraph using a Claims–Reasons–Evidence organizer, or a fuller essay comparing Peaches to someone in their own life. The thinking stays high; the language scaffolds vary.

Troubleshooting December Realities

December comes with constraints, so let's name a few and connect them back to the three moves.

• "I only have two or three days."
  Combine Monday/Tuesday into one block (quick vocabulary + first read), then merge Thursday/Friday (Cultural Bridges prompts that flow directly into a short, written response). Keep the focus on one clear theme and a small handful of key quotes.
• "My learners are tired and checked out."
  Use Think About It questions as quick-writes or pair-shares instead of full-class discussions, and let learners lean into drawing, storyboarding, or spoken responses before writing. The three moves are about access, not perfection.
• "Most of my multilingual learners speak African American English, Chicano English, Puerto Rican English, or Hawaiian Creole."
  Name those varieties explicitly as resources, not problems. Encourage same-variety small groups where learners can talk through Peaches's voice, humor, and frustration in their own ways of speaking, then support them in translating that deep understanding into School English only when it's critical to meet an ELA or language proficiency standard.

What Comes Next

This blog is the trailer, not the feature. The full experience—seeing routines modeled, watching how questions are sequenced, and hearing how language varieties are honored in real time—lives in the downloadable webinar and in future live sessions.

I invite you to try at least one week with “Block Party 145th Street Style,” another Connections text, or any literature you're already using, organized around these three moves. Then, watch for next year's webinar series, beginning with “Why Culturally Responsive Literacy Matters for Multilingual Learners,” with dates to be announced soon.

Together, we can keep moving from access to excellence for every learner in every language they bring.

Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. Joyous Kwanzaa. Have a safe and productive new year.

Dr. Almitra L. Berry serves as the bilingual/multilingual consultant for Perfection Learning's Connections: Literature program for middle school. Her work focuses on supporting educators who serve learners speaking languages other than English, including ethnolects such as African American English and Chicano English.