When Being a Warm Demander is Not Working

Art: “The Warm Demander” by Jeena Ann Kidambi

I was recently casually talking to a middle school teacher-friend of mine. Her urban school has a large percentage of emergent bilingual students and low test scores that the school  is trying to raise. They are also considering hosting a Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) program. She told me how her principal advocates for teachers to be “warm demanders.” I was excited to hear this as the concept of teachers being warm demanders is inextricably linked to the success of emergent bilinguals in all multilingual programs and to the success of all DLBE students. 

However, when I began asking how she was scaffolding grade level expectations, she told me that her students were not capable of high-quality work and that her principal cautioned them against pushing the kids too hard. “Our students just can’t do it, and we get into trouble with [the principal] if we try to teach them grade-level standards,” she said. I asked what her principal meant by “warm demander.” She explained that it meant being kind but also demanding that they come to class on time,are seated, and are quiet during instruction. In other words, she defined a warm demander as someone who was nice and required compliance from their students.

This is a common but costly mistake that many well-meaning educators make when interpreting what “warm demander” means. Zaretta Hammond (2015, 160) defines a warm demander as “a teacher who communicates personal warmth toward students while at the same time demands that they work toward high standards [emphasis added].” She also states that teachers should “Provide concrete guidance and support for meeting the (grade level) standards, particularly corrective feedback, opportunities for information processing, and culturally relevant meaning making.” Warm demanders ensure that students know that they are cared for, that teachers believe in them, and that their teachers will provide the right amount of support to ensure that their students maximize their potential.  

I often include in my list of strategies for working with language learners, especially with emergent bilinguals and newcomers, the strategies of smiling and using a kind tone of voice. Smiling and using a kind voice are universal signs of warmth and can help decrease the affective filter, or the level of fear that students have of learning a new language. This in turn allows students to experiment with both the new language and any new content. It also helps them better respond to other, more directed language acquisition strategies such as the use of visuals, graphic organizers, and vocabulary introduction. Learning about students’ cultural backgrounds and learning about their own interests and strengths can also help build relationships that can then be leveraged for learning.

But in addition to the obvious strategies of being warm, you have to believe in your students, foment their goals, and demand high levels of work with the appropriate Goldilocks-levels of scaffolds. While students very early in their language development may need more support with survival skills in the language, students should quickly be given grade-level content with scaffolds such as chunking, text engineering, and sentence stems that are designed to push them forward. Scaffolds should be just right to make the work challenging but not frustrating.  In other words, there needs to be a productive struggle where students are challenged at just the right level. And finally, as students get stronger in their language proficiency, language-oriented scaffolds should be adjusted or taken out completely so as to not lose the rigor of the assignment.  

One reason why many teachers who try to be “warm demanders” fail is because they do not understand the “demand” portion of the “warm demander.” We are not demanding compliance; while setting behavioral expectations is important, we are demanding our students to meet their academic potential. When we do not push our kids to reach that potential, we are communicating to them that we do not believe in them. And when we communicate that we do not believe in our students, the relationship we think we have built is for naught. After all, when someone does not believe in you, will you consider yourself to have a good relationship with that person?  Will you see that person as warm? And worse, when teachers do not believe in their students, often the students give up and stop believing in themselves.   

The concept of being a warm demander when properly understood is important regardless of whether the student is an emergent bilingual in an English-only program, a multilingual learner (emergent bilingual or a learner of the Language Other Than English) in a DLBE program, or a multilingual learner in a World Language program. In summary, all language learners need to be challenged and supported simultaneously for them to have high academic achievement and become bilingual and biliterate.  

If you would like support in learning how to ensure high academic achievement and language acquisition through the use of scaffolds, please reach out to me at Language & Equity at arm977@mail.harvard.edu or at 786-390-2100. 

Author: Aradhana Mudambi

Dr. Aradhana Mudambi is the founder and Chief Advocate for Students at Language and Equity Education Solutions LLC, a consulting firm that supports schools and school districts to build and improve their multilingual programming, especially their Dual Language Education programs. Through Language and Equity, she provides professional development, consulting, and coaching. For the past few years, Dr. Mudambi has run her popular blog, Social Justice and Education. She has taught several courses such as Intercultural Communications, TESOL Methods, and Assessments for Bilingual Students at Eastern Connecticut State University. Furthermore, she serves as the Director of Multilingual Education at Framingham Public Schools in Massachusetts where she oversees Dual Language programs in Spanish and Portuguese. Additionally, she worked as the Director of Bilingual Education at Windham Public Schools, not only overseeing and restructuring Windham’s Two-Way Dual Language program, Compañeros, but also founding and building Dos Ríos, New England’s first One-Way Dual Language program. Dr. Mudambi has served as a building leader, a Dual Language teacher, an ESOL teacher, and a Spanish teacher. She has worked in India, Mexico, France, England, and The United States. You can reach Dr. Mudambi at arm977@mail.harvard.edu.