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AILDI offers courses in American Indian linguistics, bilingual-bicultural education, and language- and culture-based curriculum development. Courses emphasize interactive teaching strategies that build on students' prior knowledge and promote bilingual literacy and critical thinking. One school-based project that grew out of AILDI has created a library of materials in Hualapai, a newly written language, and developed computer hypercard programs to supplement Hualapai literacy development. Another spin-off activity resulted in the development of curriculum units about Yaqui history that will enrich middle school social studies classes in the Tucson area. In the related Southwest Memory Project, participants studied Arizona's Native peoples--their histories and oral and written traditions--and developed an anthology of materials to support instruction. Such activities promote more widespread understanding of differences in communities' ways of knowing, which, teachers report, helps them better assess students' entering knowledge and skill when framing lessons. For example, familiarity with a tribe's animal mythology can suggest story-telling or art projects tied to concept development and vocabulary extension.
Descubriendo La Lectura (DLL) provides already proficient bilingual teachers with the knowledge and skills needed to be superior teachers and Teacher Leaders in school-based Reading Recovery programs for Spanish-speaking students. DLL, like its English counterpart, focuses on teachers' close observation of students' reading behaviors, accurate descriptions of students' strengths, and productive instruction in more successful reading strategies in daily, one-to-one tutorials. The language of instruction is Spanish. For Teacher Leaders, the first year of training includes attending six hours of course work and one reading laboratory session each week, and conducting individual tutorials with four students every day under the supervision of highly trained mentors. The goal of this apprenticeship is to provide Teacher Leaders with thorough grounding in the factors that influence learning to read and to leave them with well-practiced skill in applying sound principles to their instruction. DLL training enables teachers to make insightful assessments of students' work and to provide support that teaches the skills used by proficient readers. Even experienced and successful teachers find the training transformative. Said one, "I'm in a different world! After 14 years of teaching, I'm finally able to see the child for who he is." Many teachers report that their new skill in observation and analysis improves teaching in other subjects, too.
In the Funds of Knowledge for Teaching project, participants learn how to be effective learners about their students' culture and family life and how to use that knowledge to make lessons more meaningful. Participants learn how to conduct ethnographic interviews with family representatives. The teachers choose the families of a few students and ask their cooperation in the process. Parents welcome the teachers' interest and respond openly to questions about the family's structure; the labor history of its members; regular activities and chores; language use; and parents' ideas with respect to education, economics, religion, parenting, ethnic identity, and the like. Teachers use the methods and constructs of ethnography to guide inquiry, and this, combined with their honored status as teacher of the family's children, generates information sharing that makes both the teacher and the parent more aware of the family's resources. This information provides the foundation for future lessons, applications of academic skill, and collaborations with parents in new activities of benefit to the students.
Staff members at Balderas Elementary School also conduct family interviews as part of a broader effort to learn about students' cultures. Graduate courses developed especially for Balderas' staff provide a cultural overview of the recent immigrant families' countries of origin. In addition, the courses use science and social studies activities as the basis for developing knowledge in content and language. Teachers learn to engage students in observing demonstrations, generating hypotheses, conducting experiments, discussing findings, and writing or drawing reports. Teachers develop multidimensional presentations and experiences using videotapes, computers, kits, and literature, supported by primary language aides and peer tutoring to ensure that students understood lesson content. Up to the second grade, teachers offer reading and language arts instruction only as part of content-based lessons. After that, they use few textbooks of any kind and weave literacy lessons into every subject.
Project INTERACT participants also develop instructional units that use whole-language approaches and cooperative learning strategies to teach content units in math and science appropriate for LEP students in the grades they are teaching.
In an effort to provide better support for LEP students who are not enrolled in bilingual programs, the Dade County, Florida, school district requires every teacher with LEP students to take courses in ESL strategies. The training program provides teachers with a variety of tools to expand their repertoires. Two of the project's core courses introduce new methods and materials that engage students in activities based on shared experiences and demonstrate how to adapt regular methods and materials to promote LEP students' success. Course materials include, for example, practice in multiple presentations of content through role playing, games, music, group drill, and visual aids. The curriculum course helps teachers learn to adapt a variety of materials to accommodate LEP students' needs. The courses also use simulations and role-plays to help teachers understand how it feels to encounter lessons taught in an unfamiliar language. As a result of this concerted effort, one district leader commented, "Teachers are no longer afraid to deviate from the textbook. They use other approaches if it's appropriate for the LEP kids. More teachers use peer tutoring, visual aids, and charts now." Broadening the dimensions of accountability and offering alternatives to traditional methods have given teachers more opportunity to promote student success.
Balderas teachers form classes of students from several primary language groups and use strategies that encourage students to communicate in English. For example, after a general presentation in English on a social studies unit, during which students in same-language study groups have opportunities to elaborate ideas and coach peers on the main ideas, students work in multilingual cooperative learning teams. They apply new learning to a set of exercises or activities that engages them in conversation and analysis conducted in English. In one extended unit, a sixth-grade class developed a defining framework for the story of "Cinderella" after reading versions developed by different cultures. Their culminating activity was to work in same-language groups and devise a new English version of the story that clothed the framework with details from the group's shared culture.
Through Funds of Knowledge (FKT) activities, teachers become acquainted with aspects of student community life that provide stimulating themes for academic work. For example, one teacher discovered that a student who frequently visited relatives in Mexico brought back a favorite Mexican candy to sell to classmates who could not buy it locally. Conversations with the student and family led to the development of an interdisciplinary unit on candy making and marketing that engaged students in lively discussions about nutrition, economics, and cooking and provided opportunities for new learning in writing, computing, and representing information in graphs. FKT raises teachers' awareness of the many dimensions of students' lives and, as one said, "It changes how you talk about a child."
In two projects based on the Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) program originated by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, teachers in El Paso and Ysleta, Texas, promote proficiency in both English and Spanish. Teachers learn how to use intensive language development activities as part of the CIRC "story cycle," which typically includes introducing the story's context, reviewing new or interesting vocabulary, reading aloud by the teacher or student partners, discussing some questions about the story in cooperative learning groups, writing answers, and following up with cooperative learning activities based on story content. For example, in one second-grade classroom, students first developed some ideas about a story's plot in their small groups, and then a reporter from each group told the rest of the class what the group had discussed. There followed a heated (but orderly) debate about the merits of each position in a moral dilemma--which was first identified and articulated by a student--and this in turn was followed by a perceptive student critique of the debate itself. In another second-grade class that was continuing development of lessons from a story the class had just read, each learning team used chart paper and markers to make a long list of the personality traits of one assigned character. Teachers demonstrate skill in using students' primary language resources to develop new ideas, extend vocabulary, and build reading skills, cultivating bilingual literacy by about fifth grade among students with every variety of entering proficiency.
As a direct result of the work of AILDI, several tribes now have written languages, and home-grown bilingual teachers know how to promote first- and second-language acquisition effectively. Non-Native members of the teaching workforce--still the majority in tribal schools--study Native languages and cultures as part of their preparation for earning the ESL credential that is increasingly required as a condition of employment. The development of Native American literature, language learning materials, and methods and materials that promote Native cultural literacy have increased both awareness of primary language and culture and a disposition to teach them along with other subjects. "Before the institute," said one non-Native participant, "all Native Americans were just Native Americans to me. Now they are Yaqui, Hopi, Navajo." Native American participants were happy but for different reasons. They displayed evident pride in their role as cultural specialists and language instructors, able to articulate knowledgeably the benefits of assuming such roles in their communities.
At Balderas Elementary School, students who speak a language other than English are called "LGPs"--linguistically gifted persons--because they already know one non-English language and will become bilingual by adding English to their repertoire. Teaching assistants and parent volunteers fluent in students' primary languages use their skills and knowledge to promote bilingual literacy as well as mastery of the regular curriculum. For example, during story time in the kindergarten classes, students in several classes reorganize into primary language groups and hear stories read or told in their own language by a teacher or aide. Students learn the conventions of print and the elements of a story, extending primary language development and building a sturdy foundation for second-language acquisition. In upper grades, students spend part of many lesson periods in primary language groups, where they discuss and apply the main ideas of the teacher's presentation in English. A third-grade teacher explained the organization of a typical lesson: "First I lead a preview of the content in students' primary languages. Then I do lesson development in English. Afterwards, students use primary languages to review."
After school, students meet with same-language schoolmates from two other grades, in triads formed of first, third, and fifth graders or second, fourth, and sixth graders. Each threesome works together for an hour after school all year, finishing homework assignments; occasionally, the classes get together during the school day for special events. Four days a week, a second afterschool hour is filled with primary language classes taught by community volunteers and attended by about one-third of the student body. "Linguistic giftedness" is so highly valued at Balderas, according to one teacher, that one of her monolingual English students secretly enrolled in an off-campus afterschool Spanish class to surprise his friends. "Everyone else speaks two languages," she said, "He felt deficient." Two days a week, adult education classes in both English and primary language literacy are offered in the evenings. Parent education classes and parent/teacher association meetings are held in concurrent primary language sessions that usually attract about 80 percent of the parents. The agendas are set and plans coordinated by bilingual representatives of each group to ensure school unity.
In the CIRC classes in El Paso, both Spanish- and English-speaking students experience the role of being language informants and guides. In the two-way language learning project, English speakers and Spanish speakers alternate as experts. In the developmental language learning project in Ysleta, students develop literacy first in Spanish and then build on that foundation to acquire literacy in English. Students keep portfolios of writing samples and other examples of their work through the year. Given a choice of language for their work for portfolio collections, they write alternately in Spanish and English, showing steady improvement in the quality and quantity of production of work in each language during the course of the school year. According to one Ysleta teacher, "These children don't act like disadvantaged children!"
In Dade County, the required training includes courses for teachers of non-English languages to provide them with effective, research-based strategies for promoting literacy. For example, those who teach in Spanish and Haitian-Creole have learned to apply whole-language approaches to reading and language arts to their work. They use primary-language big books to engage their beginning readers in lessons about the conventions of print and story telling.
As Project INTERACT ended its first year in Missouri, participants in the southeast and southwest corners of the state--most affected by immigrant streams with large numbers of Spanish-speaking students--requested language training in Spanish. As a result, project personnel began planning to provide such opportunities in the second year, in addition to the ESL-oriented courses that formed the original program.
Among the courses offered in AILDI sessions are linguistics, language acquisition and development, the structure of Navajo, bilingual reading and writing, bilingual language arts, language policy and planning, and applications of language and literacy. Participants' individual projects, sometimes completed and reviewed during the school year following attendance, demonstrate their skill in applying new learning to their teaching assignments.
Similarly, in the Dade County program and in Project INTERACT, teachers study language acquisition and its applications to teaching in several core courses, and they may take advanced courses that focus exclusively on this topic. In Dade County, one training strategy involves teachers in role playing exercises in which they must decipher stories and tasks presented in an unfamiliar, invented language--both individually and in cooperative groups. They soon learn the value of peer tutoring and use of "comprehensive inputs" through this exercise. In Project INTERACT, participants are required to articulate theories of language acquisition in their own terms, using their own experience as second language learners and/or their observations of others. The professional portfolios that they develop in project classes will include specific analysis of their students' language acquisition struggles and a collection of assessment instruments appropriate for their students and situation.
During the year after it opened, all teachers at Balderas Elementary School participated in a 180-hour professional education program offered after school and on Saturdays. Its goal was to enable participants to earn the state's Language Development Specialist certificate, required for all teachers of LEP students. The participants' program went well beyond certification requirements, involving them in comprehensive curriculum planning and implementation of new content-based ESL curricula and methods.
A key component of training in Descubriendo La Lectura--as in Reading Recovery (RR)--is the "behind the glass" session, scheduled as a weekly laboratory experience. Participants take turns working with a student in front of a one-way mirror, behind which sit fellow trainees and the DLL instructor. The trainees identify and evaluate each instructional decision made during the episode and follow up with an extended discussion with the participant who conducted the session. Such sessions are held at least once a week. Through them, participants learn how to apply DLL/RR principles, explain their own choices during a lesson, and comment on a peer's lesson. "Peer support and feedback are necessary to keep developing," said one participant.
Project INTERACT teachers will complete a supervised practicum in which they demonstrate the ability to apply ESL principles to curriculum design, including development of lessons and units; provide effective instruction in English communication skills; and use an expanded repertoire of strategies that include whole-language approaches, content-based instruction, and cooperative learning. Videotaping and peer coaching support the application of new learning.
Teachers participating in the CIRC project in the El Paso area use videotaping and peer coaching to assess their own performance and help others improve. At one site, teachers team-teach, providing each other with on-the-spot assistance and feedback about the match between the lesson and the model. At the other site, teachers meet informally to discuss lessons and review tapes. The project director uses tapes to document progress and reflect with participants on their evident strengths and areas of need. So open have some teachers become to feedback that compares actual lessons to the desired model that they encourage their students as well as their colleagues to maintain a critical stance with respect to process. After one lesson observed in the study, a young student commented politely on the teacher's failure to engage every cooperative group in the collective discussion, thereby allowing some to avoid participating. The teacher commended the child's perceptiveness and agreed with his analysis, later referring to this incident as an example of "peer scrutiny."
ELBE's participant-led seminars require undergraduates to present new lesson ideas to each other and demonstrate how they work. Peers then review the lessons and offer suggestions.
The evidence suggests that possession of these competencies is not by itself sufficient to ensure that students will benefit from them. One project director indicated that a key ingredient for effectiveness is "...creating an ecology for professional growth and institutional improvement, where everyone plays a positive and constructive role." Working conditions at school significantly affect teachers' willingness and ability to apply the competencies to their own situations.
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[Providing a Context That Supports Professional Growth]