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A third project, the Teachers' Learning Community Center (TLCC), was initially funded to strengthen recruitment efforts that targeted bilingual high school students. However, it was expanded to become the home of an international network of educators who are developing ways to apply the principles of effective cooperative learning to their work in the schools of the El Paso area and across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Teachers from both cities meet periodically to share professional development experiences related to cooperative learning and to trade insights about teaching Spanish and English as second languages. In the 1994-95 school year, the center was replaced by Johns Hopkins University's Leadership Enhancement Academy, which sponsors and hosts activities that serve a full range of professionals, from those who aspire to teaching to those who are still acquiring new skills after years of practice.
TLCC focused on promising bilingual seniors attending high schools within a 50-mile radius of campus. To participate, students had to demonstrate interest in careers in bilingual education and fluency in English and Spanish; have earned a cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 on a four-point scale in high school; and commit to attending four Saturday workshops with their parents prior to enrolling in UTEP. More than 40 students were involved in TLCC recruitment activities in the spring of 1993.
CIRC. The original, monolingual English version of Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition was developed by researchers at the federally funded educational research center at Johns Hopkins. In its most familiar form, CIRC uses a structured, multiple component lesson format with a basal reader. Lesson elements include discussing the context of each story, introducing and learning the meaning of new vocabulary, reading silently and to a partner, analyzing the story's literary features, writing about the story, and practicing word recognition and spelling to the point of mastery. Curriculum materials that include "Treasure Hunts"--questions designed to stimulate students' examination of a selection's literary "treasures"--are available for some commercial basal series.
Students engage in these activities individually, in small cooperative groups with structured assignments, and in whole group lessons led by the teacher. As in other Hopkins-developed cooperative learning strategies, students earn recognition based on improvements in individual achievement that are calculated as a team score. CIRC has produced reliable gains in students' reading skills and in their ability to work productively alone and on teams, in social and academic settings in many kinds of communities. In the past few years, CIRC curriculum materials have been written to accompany novels and nonfiction books at various grade levels in response to increased use of literature-based reading programs.
In bilingual CIRC, students participate in most of the same activities, but they focus more on interactive language development and writing. They may spend up to twice as much time on each story in bilingual applications as they spend in the original English version. (However, other CIRC studies have shown that teaching all the skills in a reader--not necessarily teaching all the stories--leads to desired rates of growth, so that pacing in bilingual CIRC is not an issue.) In both the Ysleta and El Paso use of bilingual CIRC, students work with Spanish and English editions of basal readers and trade books at the appropriate levels of difficulty, guided by locally developed Treasure Hunts.
In Ysleta, bilingual teachers in grades 2-4 participate, with up to two hours a day allocated for reading in second grade. Most instruction in second grade is in Spanish; as students progress, they spend more time with English language materials, using the familiar CIRC format. In El Paso, one classroom at each grade level from first to fifth uses bilingual CIRC. Two teachers work with each class--one conducts instruction in English and the other in Spanish, both using the same CIRC format but with text and lesson development materials in different languages. They take turns teaching, one working through a full cycle of story-related activities in Spanish, followed by the other teaching a full cycle in English to the whole class.
Professional development. Ysleta teachers attended weekly afterschool training sessions with project leaders during the first year of the project. (If they wanted to complete extra work and pay tuition, they could receive three university credits for the experience.) During these sessions, project staff modeled the CIRC techniques and provided opportunities for practice. University staff visited participants' classrooms during reading lessons to observe, offer feedback, and make videotapes for subsequent joint analysis. In each school, participants formed peer coaching teams, observing each other and offering critiques of the videotapes.
El Paso teachers participate in 45 hours of weekly professional development activities, covering team teaching, cooperative learning, whole language, multiple intelligences, and alternative assessment. About one-third of the training focuses on CIRC. In addition, teachers receive two full-day sessions each semester on related topics, including portfolio assessment. A Title VII grant pays the tuition for them to earn three credits per semester for this work. Teachers on the same team coach each other. Participants are expected to spend about six hours each semester at the TLCC for further reinforcement of skills in peer coaching and portfolio assessment.
For both groups, school-based Teacher Learning Communities at each site meet regularly--about once a month--to enable participants to solve implementation problems, coach each other, and extend their learning. These meetings usually include the presentation of new ideas from research, discussion of how (or whether) these ideas fit into participants' understanding and experience, and application of the ideas to familiar scenes and activities. Camaraderie arising from common study has spilled into other areas; participants meet outside of class for social occasions, in addition to attending periodic meetings with university staff, teachers, or teacher aspirants associated with CIRC or TLCC projects.
TLCC. Staff of the UTEP Teachers Learning Community Center identified and recruited bilingual seniors to consider a career in teaching. Outreach began with contacting school principals and counselors at schools that had bilingual students and arranging to make presentations about UTEP's programs to those who were interested. The center coordinator followed up with personal meetings, in which he answered questions from the students and their parents. TLCC hosted college workshops for these seniors and their families. Prominent members of the university faculty and the wider community spoke about the value of bilingual education and college attendance in general; and admissions staff explained how to apply, what the criteria for acceptance were, and what funds were available to pay expenses. (TLCC did not offer financial assistance, but it did help students find resources earmarked for applicants like them.) The center had use of a college van and a driver to transport students and their parents to campus for the Saturday workshops.
TLCC--now replaced by Johns Hopkins University's Leadership Enhancement Academy--has become the hub of a series of informal activities shared by teachers on both sides of the border who are interested in using cooperative learning to promote bilingual literacy. Through regional networks of professional educators, middle-school teachers of English as a Second Language in Juarez learned about the bilingual cooperative learning efforts in El Paso and asked to be included. They met monthly with the director of the UTEP projects to explore applications of cooperative learning to their own classes. Out of these meetings grew new projects and alliances, culminating in a regional cooperative learning conference held late in the spring of 1993. Most of the international activities are operated on a shoestring budget, although participants seek support for further work. Because of immigration patterns in these adjoining border towns, public school teachers share many students during the course of a year.
Funding and support. The Ysleta CIRC project is funded through the Johns Hopkins Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students, which supports two research projects that are evaluating the effects of bilingual applications of CIRC as part of its five-year research agenda. (The second project is located in Santa Barbara, California.) The El Paso CIRC project is supported by a three-year Title VII grant to develop a two-way bilingual program. TLCC received support from the Texas Education Agency and the Exxon Foundation.
In addition to being measured by standardized tests, student achievement is documented in portfolios that provide a record of progress in bilingual literacy. Once a month, students in Ysleta add their favorite writing sample to their writing portfolios. They may choose a sample written in English or Spanish, which they simply staple on top of the previous month's work. Portfolios also include other work samples that illustrate emerging literacy skills. The project's strong emphasis on concept development, identification of supporting evidence, and written expression is perhaps most evident in the unusually high quality of students' written work in both languages. In Ysleta and El Paso, students are also growing measurably in social skills and in their ability to work together independently and purposefully.
However, the process of adaptation required considerable skill; the new model had to accommodate the special demands of LEP students without compromising the integrity of key components of the original model. The reason for choosing CIRC was its high rate of success in monolingual English settings, but its original form was not adequately responsive to the language development needs of second-language learners. As they created new versions of the CIRC model, project leaders and participants had to attend carefully to preserving the rigor of the original model in order also to preserve its effectiveness.
Thorough initial training, supportive follow-up coaching, and videotape critiques are necessary to keep implementation faithful. The weight of tradition and influence of surrounding practices are forces that can erode teachers' care in maintaining small but essential details of the CIRC program. Without the thoughtful comments of peers in the project, teachers sometimes lose sight of the need to form balanced learning teams, promote student discussion about work-related issues, and concentrate on meaning more than on mechanics. Maintaining skill in using CIRC properly continues to be a demanding aspect of project management. Participating principals indicated high regard for the projects and their impact on students and teachers. However, when asked whether use of CIRC would continue beyond the initial funding period, one principal hypothesized that the teachers themselves would persist without need for special support. Such a comment indicates a lack of awareness of the organizational arrangements that currently provide support--for example, CIRC teachers' schedules are arranged to allow for peer observation and coaching sessions--and this has implications for overall school staffing and scheduling.
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