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ELBE participants are leaders on campus and in several local and regional professional associations. Participants at the junior level serve as recruiters for promising community college students, taking them on campus tours and introducing them to good advisors and resources. Other upper-class students have prominent roles in the Bilingual Education Student Organization (BESO), which has received university awards for its excellent programs and which is itself a leader among similar organizations around the country. The association regularly nominates students for campus-wide roles and awards to maintain its visibility. ELBE participants have presented papers and symposia at national and regional meetings. All ELBE programs are organized to promote participants' understanding of the role the school environment plays in their work, their sense of responsibility for contributing to a supportive school environment, and their acquisition of the knowledge and skills to do so. ELBE project developers work closely with school- and district-based leaders to ensure that participants' assignments encourage them to apply their learning. An extraordinarily busy elementary principal who completed the administrative program had nothing but praise for its effect: "I was reinvigorated! I went to class, read, wrote, did projects, put together a parent survey in English and Spanish, and presented a paper at NABE [National Association for Bilingual Education]."
Project INTERACT participants are selected in part on the basis of their potential to provide instructional leadership in their schools. Principals nominate likely candidates and send letters promising to use them as ESL resources. Others with knowledge of the teachers or their situations also feed into the decisionmaking process to ensure identification of those committed to providing better service to LEP students and willing to act as lead teachers. Project leaders pay particular attention to factors that increase the probability that participants finish the program and effect change in their own schools. For example, teachers who had already begun taking courses in ESL or who showed exceptional initiative in schools with small but increasing LEP populations were given priority for admission to the first cohort.
Because of intensive and extended staff development, Balderas faculty members have become model innovators in Fresno. Those with sufficient training and experience become mentors and peer coaches for their colleagues at the school. Cadres of Balderas teachers also serve as coaches and presenters at other schools. The district-appointed personnel committee that hired the school's first principal selected her for her record of providing strong instructional leadership. She in turn has created conditions under which many faculty members now serve as instructional leaders around the district, and together they have created a school that serves as a professional development center for CSU teacher preparation programs in Fresno. "When the principal sets the tone," reported one teacher, "Everyone else gets excited."
In order to ensure that administrators were able to support teachers' development in teaching LEP students effectively, assistant principals became the lead learners in Dade County schools during the first round of inservice training. They worked with central office and university experts to master the material in the new ESL courses and then taught them at their own schools, using supplementary videotapes and the support of the experts.
Recognizing the challenge of this work, the DLL project admits only certified bilingual teachers with at least three years of experience in bilingual primary classrooms. They see it as an advanced technique best suited for practice by proficient teachers. Applicants must earn their principals' recommendations to be considered for training, and most are mature professionals who are highly regarded by their colleagues. According to one participant, "It's the most intensive staff development I've ever been involved in."
When Balderas Elementary School was almost ready to open, the newly appointed principal actively recruited top-rated teachers from the district. She personally reviewed applications and observed applicants' teaching. Before extending offers, she outlined plans for the challenging and stimulating professional environment that she hoped to cultivate at Balderas, encouraging teachers to consider the choice carefully. Teachers who received and accepted offers to join her did so in the face of a paradox: Having been chosen because they were highly qualified professionals, they were expected to launch immediately on a major professional development activity designed to improve their teaching. All teachers participated in the extensive program provided by the university; most who needed to do so applied for and received the Language Development Specialist credential; and many extended themselves a bit further to earn 15 graduate credits for their work.
Recruitment for the CIRC project was specifically designed to obtain a diverse array of participants; the range of their experience and expertise was quite broad because one goal of the project's research agenda was to test the approach for rigor. After three years, performance reveals no correlations with prior professional skill: All participants implement the CIRC model skillfully and with notable results, adapting effectively--but within limits that keep the model identifiable--to accommodate differences in students' language proficiency. Most have become Teacher Leaders in their schools, helping colleagues who were not in the original cohort to learn the CIRC methods and materials. In one dramatic example of the transforming effect of the project, a teacher who described herself as uninspired at the beginning of the project won a regional award for excellence in teaching at the end of project year two.
The Funds of Knowledge for Teaching project has been adopted by at least one school as a core element of its Title I schoolwide model. The whole faculty participated in training, scheduled during regularly planned staff development sessions and at other convenient times. Home visits for the purpose of interviewing are part of a monthly rotation of faculty activities. Several faculty members have pursued advanced training, and they now serve as advisors to their colleagues. Working alongside teachers during interviews and class sessions, university researchers collaborate on strategies that use new knowledge of culture and community life to revitalize teaching methods as well as lesson content.
Dade County administrators use a data-management system that tracks teachers' progress in acquiring the necessary ESL training. As each teacher successfully completes an ESL course, the information is entered into the system. As each student enrolls in a district school, the appropriate designation is made with respect to English proficiency, and the information is logged into the data management system. Every LEP student must be assigned to a teacher who has special ESL training. If no slots are available with a trained teacher, the teacher to whose class the student is assigned must enroll in the ESL training program. The school system cuts the funding for teachers who have LEP students in their classes but who do not have the required training.
Project INTERACT, based at Southeast Missouri University, uses a broad-based support system that takes advantage of existing initiatives and resources and responds effectively to the personnel needs of participating school systems. The project fills teacher workforce gaps identified by state and regional ESL and Migrant Education agencies and organizations, and mutual cooperation facilitate coordination with their activities and agendas. For example, the project supports participants' attendance at state and regional meetings for ESL teachers. In addition, the provost, the university president, and deans from the three university divisions affected by the project support the integration of the project's academic offerings into regular university programs.
Neighboring school systems and postsecondary institutions in the Fontana/San Bernardino area have formed a far-reaching, ad hoc network that identifies promising bilingual secondary students and district support staff and draws them into the teacher education pipeline. Borrowing from each other's most effective recruitment and retention practices, the organizations piece together programs that work. Fontana's Career Ladder scheme is widely replicated. Faculty in BECA work with community colleges in the area to ensure the continuity of teacher candidates' academic experience. Both the community colleges and the university collaborate with each other and with local districts to support Career Ladder participants' continued success.
AILDI and the Southwest Memory Project teach participants to recognize, use, and cultivate expertise in a number of ways. They consult tribal cultural experts in knowledge development activities. Participants learn how to gather information from elders and those proficient in Native American languages and then use modern tools of recording and organizing to make the information available to educators. They express deep appreciation for opportunities to learn from highly qualified experts, and they have demonstrated considerable skill in preserving language and culture. Asked about the highlights of their experience at AILDI, teacher aides who live and work in tribal communities repeatedly responded, "Famous people came to speak to us." They summarized what the "famous people" said and how it related to their own teaching. Prominent scholars and tribal elders play central roles in professional development, guiding the pedagogical and substantive knowledge essential for successful teaching in Native schools. One teacher aide, for example, learned how to assemble curriculum materials that supported instruction about tribal history without violating the confidentiality of certain tribal customs.
Descubriendo La Lectura and Reading Recovery supporters in the Tucson area funded the preparation of their university-based trainer at Ohio State University, the primary dissemination center in the country. Tucson's Title I program sent the district-based Teacher Leader to Texas Women's University for training. The premise of DLL training--as with Reading Recovery training--is that promoting the success in reading of the highest risk students requires considerable expertise. Districts used local funds to secure this expertise for their communities.
In the Funds of Knowledge for Teaching (FKT) Project, anthropologists and teacher educators provide technical support and work with teachers to refine the process of interviewing, recording data, and transforming cultural knowledge into facts, skills, and ideas to use in lessons. In addition, FKT identifies a second important source of expertise: parents and other family members. The project helps educators transcend biases about primary language, English proficiency, and family economic status to discover the resources that families provide their children. Family experts teach about topics such as construction, transportation, small business operation, cooking, clothing, and music. In a similar manner, Fontana's summer Spanish language seminars employ local families to provide a "residential" language lab experience, highlighting their minority language proficiency as a resource to be tapped by the English-speaking community.
In the CIRC projects in Ysleta and El Paso, teachers in each school form ad hoc learning communities that meet monthly to consult with each other about implementation and to expand their collective knowledge and skills with focused learning activities. The activities are designed to develop teachers' skill, confidence, and motivation. For example, the theme of one meeting was writing assessment. Teachers brought four writing samples from their classes: one they thought was excellent, a second that was average, a third that was inadequate, and a fourth that they found puzzling. In teams of four, the teachers first reviewed digests of research on assessment that included sample rubrics and standards. After discussing the research, they read all the writing samples provided by team members, tested various assessment strategies on them, and selected or devised a strategy that offered the most insight about students' work. "It's more than sharing," the project director explained. "It's profound learning, drawing conclusions, and making applications."
In DLL, teachers use a highly effective co-teaching model of implementation. Two teachers share a first-grade classroom, each spending half of the day in individual tutoring sessions and the other half teaching the regular curriculum. As a result, not only do the students most in need of highly skilled instruction benefit from the teachers' expertise, but so do the other students. Both DLL and Reading Recovery teachers report that the strategies they learn for observing, analyzing, and adapting enrich their teaching across the curriculum.
Dade County schedules convenient training and targets content appropriate for the practical demands that teachers will experience in the classroom. Teachers may take the courses in sessions spread out over several weeks after school or on Saturdays, or concentrated within a 10-day period during the summer when schools are closed. To ensure that teachers understand the purpose of the training and the reason it is mandated rather than simply recommended, every course in the ESL series reviews the history of the legal agreement and the statistical evidence indicating that LEP students' school success may depend on teachers' proficiency in ESL methods.
The administrative and resource staff at Balderas attend all professional development activities; they adjust the content of their supervision and advising to reflect a shared understanding of the kind of teaching that Balderas values highly. In formal observations and informal visits, those with official responsibility for evaluating professional performance demonstrate keen awareness of what is going well and what has required great effort to pull off with the appearance of ease. After committing to an extraordinarily full first year--"We had no social life," said one teacher ruefully, "We got together for learning parties!"--the staff decided to scale back to a half-size program in the second year: 90 hours of graduate instruction, focused on science teaching. During the 1993-94 school year, teachers concentrated on applying what they had learned, and the university's work with them--again scaled back--focused on infusing critical thinking skills across the curriculum. The university has continued to be an active, collaborative partner, adept at pooling resources with the school and the district in programs with multiple purposes.
In summary, effective recruitment programs target language minority populations as early as the middle school years and provide prospective candidates with coordinated support for their teacher preparation activities. Productive teacher preparation and continuing education programs provide opportunities for candidates and teachers to learn the requisite substantive and pedagogical content as well as the special skills and approaches to teaching that will enable them to promote LEP students' success. Effective schools for LEP students promote teachers' competence in using their bilingual pedagogical skills. The projects chosen for this study are distinguished by their skillful and insightful use of professional development practices based on this conception of program excellence. The next section of the report describes the projects in greater detail.
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[Chapter 3 Profiles of Professional Development Projects]