A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Model Strategies in Bilingual Education: Professional Development - 1995

Preparing New Teachers

Once candidates have made a commitment to become bilingual educators, their progress toward professional competence depends on the adequacy of their preparation program. According to research on learning to teach and recommendations of professional groups, several program features may be critically important. (See, for example, discussions by Genzuk & Hentschke, 1992; NABE, 1992; the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, 1991.) Some of these features deal with logistics, others with the foundations of learning, and others with the content of professional education.

Helping Teacher Candidates Overcome Obstacles to Continued Enrollment

Although re-entry of nontraditional (i.e., adult) learners has been raising the age of the average college student in all areas of study in recent years, many adults find it daunting to accommodate the multiple demands of work, family, and studies. It is therefore not surprising that districts with degree programs for language minority assistants, who cope with schooling presented in a highly formal version of their second language and who often are the first in their families to attend college, report mixed success. In addition to their regular work, bilingual professionals and paraprofessionals are often recruited for parent outreach or service integration activities--and they feel compelled by a sense of community responsibility to accept. On top of heavy work demands, they face teacher education programs with newly raised standards and increased field work requirements. One weary aide commented, "There has to be a balance, and it takes a long time to find. . . . Last night I was up until three in the morning finishing all I had to do." Analysis of program problems suggests that stabilizing wages and benefits and coordinating arrangements among schools, districts, and institutions of higher education can promote retention and completion of assistants in programs (California Department of Education, 1991a).

When one project planning team was trying to discover what their recruitment design should include, it surveyed schools whose aides had unusually high rates of professional education program completion. According to the director, "We found that those schools offer more informal support--lots of it!" Districts in Arizona, California, and Texas--to name three--have launched successful projects using a broad spectrum of support strategies to recruit and retain teacher candidates among bilingual aides. Reducing unnecessary role conflicts, coordinating work and course schedules, and dovetailing resources can make an enormous contribution to their success.

Participants in the Latino Teacher Project (LTP)--who are also teaching assistants in Los Angeles public schools--are surrounded by supporters whose supervisory responsibilities are well coordinated. Unions, service agencies, universities, and other organizations that often battle over educational issues "leave their swords at the door"--as one advisor put it--when they work together on the project. As a result, participants can focus on the important work of weaving their employment experiences and course work into a sturdy professional fabric. Despite the complications and competing priorities that afflict the Los Angeles school system--like most other urban systems--representatives of agencies on LTP's governing board insulate participants from the worst of the confusion. School district and teachers' union administrators work together to restrict the impact of reassignments arising from budget cuts, program redesign, and related terms of negotiated agreements. College representatives divide their responsibilities for support services--one providing a writing workshop, another offering test preparation for all interested candidates--according to their available resources and the interests of participants. As each new college term approaches, participants benefit from advisors who steer them toward the best schedule of classes in light of their needs. Because the shortage of slots in required classes at CSU campuses hindered their progress, participants receive priority status on both campuses. The same advisors review participants' progress early in the term to make sure they are on track and to prescribe LTP-funded tutoring if indicated. One successful participant said, "It's not the money--it's the support group that . . . helped me succeed." Another referred to the LTP advisory board as "a family of helpers."

Fontana's Career Ladder Program provides similar support for its participants. A grateful teacher candidate reported that the program opens ". . . all the doors for us. We go to the university, sign up for classes, and pay nothing. We go to the bookstore and don't wait in line. We just pick up our books and sign for them." Staff from BECA at CSU, San Bernardino, provide career counseling, course advising, and individual student support. At monthly meetings of Career Ladder participants, supervisory staff and participants share information and arrange for new resources and support. As testing dates approach, candidates receive assistance in registering for and preparing to take the tests. Participants' working hours are arranged around college course work. District, community college, university, and school personnel work closely together to help Career Ladder candidates succeed.

Because many teacher candidates enrolled in these projects are the first in their families to attend college and because the demands of school--or, for many, school and work combined--greatly restrict their ability to function at home the way they did before enrollment, many projects include components that specifically cultivate family support. The Latino Teacher Project, the Educational Leadership in Bilingual Education program for undergraduates, and Project Adelante are among those that regularly invite families to special events. At these events project leaders may explain some aspect of project activity, a prominent guest speaker may elaborate on a project-related issue, or participants may be honored for their outstanding performance. The formal program is only part of these events, however; social functions, supplemented by food or entertainment, help families visit college campuses and meet with project staff. Participants report that those who now shoulder the child care, housework, or other family responsibilities that used to be theirs are often won over to the professional agenda by such activities. One young teacher candidate with two preschool children reported, "My family used to mind that I was gone so much, but they help me with everything now. They feel my education will belong to all of them, and when I graduate, it will be their degree, too." In two projects, these family events have attracted the enrollment of additional family members. The Latino Teacher Project now enrolls several married couples, and the Teacher Learning Community enrolls several pairs of parents and their adult offspring.

Providing Academic Enrichment and/or Remediation

Like specialists in other fields, members of the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) and the Teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) have developed standards for preservice education programs for candidates who aim to work with LEP students. These standards build on general program standards, such as those advocated by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the National Council for Accreditation in Teacher Education, adding requirements related to their special work. Language minority students may enter the professional pipeline suffering the ill effects of poor early educational opportunities. For example, Hispanics, the largest language minority group, have the lowest educational attainment of any group in the country, and like many minorities are overrepresented on the poverty rolls and underrepresented in early childhood programs (National Council of La Raza, 1991). NABE (1992) calls for academic remediation and enrichment so candidates can meet reasonable admission standards. NABE's standards require program personnel to be familiar with the particular obstacles to success faced by language minority students and to provide candidates with ongoing assessments at designated checkpoints to ensure timely identification and resolution of problems. Some candidates need help to meet program admission expectations, pass tests in their second language, or maintain steady progress. Offering extra tutoring, workshops, and other experiences that build competence facilitates later success while supporting appropriate standards for professional performance.

Many bilingual teacher candidates find it difficult to pass the qualifying examinations in English and Spanish language proficiency for a variety of reasons. The Fontana Career Ladder Program, BECA, and the Latino Teacher Project provide routine assistance with preparation for teacher certification exams. LTP offers special workshops and followup tutorials in math, reading, computer literacy, and English writing, which is particularly problematic for some. Project Adelante provides middle- and high-school-age participants with academic assistance, counseling, and peer support for succeeding in school and graduating with the skills and disposition to complete college. All express concern about whether current gateway assessments give language minority candidates a fair chance to demonstrate their actual levels of proficiency, but as a practical, short-term strategy, project personnel have directed some part of their efforts to helping candidates pass the tests as they are currently written. These test preparation activities focus both on raising skill and knowledge levels to acceptable professional standards and on boosting test-taking skills.

Promoting Attainment of High Standards of Skill and Knowledge in Content Areas and Pedagogy

In line with new conceptions of K-12 schooling, educators have invested in new designs for teacher education that ensure adequate expertise in the disciplines that candidates will teach, in the developmental characteristics that affect students' learning, and in the knowledge and skills of pedagogy. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (1991) characterizes highly effective professional teachers as those who demonstrate: (1) commitment to students and their learning; (2) mastery of the subjects they teach and the best methods of teaching them; (3) skill in managing and monitoring student learning; (4) ability to reflect systematically on their practice and to learn from experience; and (5) active participation in professional learning communities. Effective teacher preparation programs promote this complex vision of professional life and help candidates move towards competence with respect to those dimensions. To meet the demands of new K-12 curricula, teachers must learn more than ever before about the core disciplines to provide the basis for good lessons (see Kennedy, 1991).

A hallmark of alumni of American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) is their predilection for launching into highly technical and insightful discussions about language acquisition, language planning, linguistics, and bilingual and ESL teaching. Regardless of their levels of formal educational attainment or professional status, they display a keen grasp of concepts related to the courses taken at AILDI and applications to their work with Native American students. The AILDI faculty includes full professors and visiting scholars, and all applicants may and do enroll in any courses that interest them through an open admissions policy that accepts all comers. Participants report working hard during the four-week summer sessions, earning up to six university credits for courses that meet three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon five days a week. They stay late on campus to hear the presentations of guest lecturers and then return to their dorm rooms or temporary lodgings to finish homework before the next day's classes. Despite good-humored, pro forma complaints about the workload, many return summer after summer, finding ingenious ways to accommodate family responsibilities and fund the experience.

Students in all four programs of UTSA's Educational Leadership in Bilingual Education project work overtime to extend their mastery of content and pedagogy beyond minimal certification requirements to actual competence with respect to their career stage. Preservice candidates must make several seminar presentations every year on topics related to their education, as well as engage in self-selected outside activities that expand their knowledge and experience of community cultural events. Upperclass students must take an advanced methods course taught entirely in Spanish. Project admission is controlled by high standards, and project leaders have sometimes left slots unfilled rather than accept applicants with mediocre credentials. The university has developed a special interdisciplinary major that is the foundation of teacher education programs to ensure both broad and deep study of core subjects.

Promoting Attainment of High Standards of First and Second Language Proficiency

Facility in using standard language forms is essential for communicating clearly in the wider society, in English and in other languages. Teachers must be able to model how to speak, write, and read appropriately in any language targeted for student proficiency (Collier, 1985). Prospective bilingual teachers must complete advanced course work in two languages of instruction and demonstrate high levels of proficiency in both, a requirement also often made of ESL teachers, to ensure their familiarity with issues of second-language acquisition and to expand their language repertoire. In some states where the large size and wide dispersion of the LEP population make it inevitable that most teachers will be called upon to show competence in meeting the needs of LEP students, preservice education programs for all prospective teachers are adding course work in language development and second-language acquisition. Experienced teachers facing this particular challenge for the first time may learn the principles of language development as well as other content that helps them adjust their practice in continuing education programs (Collier, 1985; Milk, Mercado, & Sapiens, 1992).

Ambitious projects set two types of goals for bilingual proficiency. First, they expect teacher candidates to be conversant with the special terms and language structures in both languages of instruction associated with the subjects they will teach. Second, they expect teacher candidates to be able to communicate with peers about technical aspects of pedagogy in both languages of instruction. Project developers use a variety of strategies to achieve these goals, and to raise participants' awareness of the vast difference between being able to carry on a highly contextualized informal conversation with a child or family member and being able to function as a competent professional.

Fontana's Career Ladder Program requires applicants to demonstrate proficiency in Spanish or to enroll in college-level Spanish classes until they can pass the proficiency test at a high level--which they must do by the end of their third year in the program to be allowed to continue. As part of its bilingual program, the district itself offers formal and informal Spanish language instruction at the introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels for all district employees. The High Intensity Language Training course offered in two three-week summer sessions is modeled on residential language experiences popular in Mexico. For about four hours in the morning, participants attend classes with a participant/teacher ratio of six to one and a focus on highly interactive conversation. Then they adjourn for lunch, each participant reporting to a family whose primary language is Spanish for a two-hour "practicum." The families receive a stipend for providing these lunchtime sessions, during which they serve a meal, and extended family members, including children, engage the participants in further conversation. Teachers find this a pleasant and very productive way to learn both language and culture.

In Educational Leadership in Bilingual Education, students must take courses and pass tests that demonstrate both oral and written proficiency in English and Spanish. They attend and organize events conducted in one language or the other. They study the social and cultural aspects of language use. Their mentors coach them in appropriate use of each language in the context of their professional work, and they become confident models of effective bilingualism. Latino Teacher Project candidates enrolled in any of the three participating universities take some of their content and methods courses in Spanish to ensure that they can communicate fluently using appropriate technical language.

Extending and Monitoring Field Experiences to Strengthen Theory and Practice

Opportunities for clinical practice supported by high-quality, focused supervision improve all aspects of teacher candidates' performance, according to a recent review of research on field experiences (Darling-Hammond, 1991). Early practice can be substantially improved by preservice and induction-year internships that help teacher candidates identify the conceptual lessons of practice, learn how to apply sound professional principles, and resist the normal developmental tendency to respond to early failure by adopting ineffective, authoritarian methods. Novices eager to be in charge of their own classes press for practical, how-to-do-it advice, but they are not well served by programs that give in to this pressure and focus too narrowly on technique. Reflecting on her own experience, one project participant stated emphatically, "Exposure to research is key. [In my case,] it dispelled misconceptions about language acquisition and learning." Such misconceptions may limit what candidates can learn from experience and thus limit their initial competence.

Exemplary preservice education programs for prospective teachers of LEP students usually feature extended field experiences, often situated in schools that serve as professional development centers, supplemented by seminars that emphasize the issues of language acquisition that influence teaching. Because teaching language minority students presents a special set of circumstances, candidates may need additional field experience to learn the expanded repertoire on which they will depend. These experiences should provide models of good practice for candidates to emulate, and supervision should address the conceptual as well as the practical lessons.

The Latino Teacher Project (LTP) initially targeted the area of South Central Los Angeles that has the highest concentration of LEP students in the country and recruited bilingual teaching assistants who lived and worked in the community, hoping to develop a stable workforce. Project leaders take several measures to ensure continuity between participants' work experience as TAs and their teacher education classes. First, they cluster participants in schools where skilled bilingual teachers and a supportive principal provide strong instructional guidance. Then, they train teams of mentor teachers and administrators in the strategies to use with the TAs. The TAs join in the training to further develop shared language and expectations. Mentors receive a small stipend, release time to attend conferences, and access to an e-mail network, along with adjunct faculty status at the University of Southern California, which entitles them to the campus facilities and services that regular faculty enjoy. Mentors are closely monitored, and those who do not meet expectations of the principal and the university faculty member assigned to the site are replaced with more appropriate teachers. Although the educational bureaucracies involved in LTP appear too large to ensure an integrated experience as a matter of formal policy, the individuals involved in LTP oversee the details of individual cases whenever they can. As a result, every participant has as coherent a professional preparation program as possible; none have dropped out, despite confronting very complex demands, and those who have finished their coursework have accepted teaching positions in the schools that trained them.

Participants in ELBE's undergraduate program work as much as possible in the classrooms of ELBE's masters candidates and the schools of the ELBE administrative cohort in San Antonio. Professional development at all levels focuses on six factors that promote bilingual program effectiveness: (1) a diverse repertoire of active teaching strategies, (2) high expectations for academic success, (3) use of both English and the primary language, (4) content-based second language instruction, (5) use of students' culture to mediate learning, and (6) use of research and reflection to improve teaching practice. The undergraduates' field assignments are more extensive and diverse than are those of the regular education majors, and their programs require additional extracurricular professional work, such as attending cultural events and conducting seminars.

In Project Adelante, bilingual college students enrolled in the teacher education program spend Saturdays and summers practicing their pedagogical and language skills. Their mentors, who teach the courses for younger students, model the use of English and Spanish to promote young students' mastery of both content and language. The novice teachers learn how to tap students' language resources by observing how the mentors apply principles of language acquisition and then applying those principles themselves.

Cultivating a Professional Attitude toward Career Development

The ways that candidates learn about teaching must prepare them for lifelong learning. As the role of teacher expands to encompass more responsibilities and expectations of schooling, including high achievement for all students, continuous professional improvement will be an essential part of teachers' work lives. Furthermore, the fluid, on-the-spot instructional decisionmaking and peer leadership expected in restructured schools requires sophisticated pedagogical training (see Little, 1992). Sound preparation programs lay strong foundations for high-quality professional practice. Good programs do not teach only the relevant body of professional knowledge; they also teach the rules of knowledge development and the critical evaluation strategies that help professionals recognize and use new knowledge effectively (Milk, Mercado, & Sapiens, 1992).

The Latino Teacher Project involves participants in a full range of professional activities from the very beginning. In addition to working in schools three hours a day and taking at least nine quarter hours or 12 semester hours each term, they attend workshops, seminars, and special events during evenings and weekends. Some of these experiences are geared toward beginners--to boost basic skills or improve Spanish literacy, for example. However, many are enrichment activities to which their mentor teachers and principals are also invited, where prominent guest lecturers address issues of general professional interest. Participants attend local and regional professional conferences, sometimes as presenters, which, in the words of one candidate, "gives us the feel of the profession." The extent of commitment expected of them is matched by the commitment modeled by project leaders, who organize, attend, and/or make presentations at the same events.

Hispanic students recruited through the outreach activities of the Teacher Learning Community Center at the University of Texas, El Paso, soon find that they are part of an extended family of education professionals from the greater El Paso and Juarez areas. They share the Center's resources with senior colleagues and often attend the same professional meetings and special events. Their experiences at the Center show them a view of professional life that makes clear the expectations of continuing education and commitment to excellence.

ELBE participants at every level attend city, state, and regional conferences and professional events. They make regular presentations to peers. Although faculty provide a community of support to help them overcome obstacles to their success in the program--many, for example, are parents with other responsibilities--they are expected to use that support to achieve high standards of professionalism.
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