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Meeting the Need for Professional Development

Whether online or face-to-face, teachers are benefiting from training that targets the ELL population.

In out-of-the-way places like Circle and Warden, Montana, teachers are tuning in to professional development that will help them better serve their English language learner students. Connected by videoconferences and interactive online discussions, teachers in remote communities are able to take advantage of a unique, 11-week course that blends two research-based approaches: Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI), an approach to mathematics instruction that helps teachers understand children’s intuitive mathematical thinking, and Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP), a lesson preparation and delivery model that helps teachers promote students’ English language development through subject matter instruction.

The class, called “Mindful Math,” was jointly developed by the Montana Migrant Education Program and the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. It’s part of Project MATEMATICA—an eight-state consortium that focuses on improving math proficiency and graduation rates for migrant students. The project, funded through a federal Migrant Education incentive grant, also aims to strengthen the knowledge and skills of teachers working with students whose education is disrupted by frequent moves.

The Mindful Math course connects migrant educators in Montana, Virginia, and New York with professional development that integrates SIOP and CGI.

A Virtual Classroom

Linda Griffin, a NWREL math expert, deftly switches from camera to VCR as she shares a lesson with two dozen teachers who are located in schools 3,000 miles apart. Today’s session is on children’s problem-solving strategies. Teachers have prepared for the class by reading chapters in Children’s Mathematics, watching video clips on a CD, analyzing student samples, and accessing ELL resources on the Web. That’s all “homework” assigned during the two-week period between the videoconference classes.

Griffin asks the teachers to brainstorm possible content objectives for a math lesson, such as understanding fractions and using measurement tools. Then, she asks a tougher question: What language objectives can be tied to the math content? In her two-hour class, Griffin tries to “walk her talk.” She notes, “I’ve been trying to apply SIOP strategies in my own work—posting content and language objectives in the videoconference classroom and modeling classroom practices that increase student engagement such as the use of response cards.”

Griffin will finally meet her students in a face-to-face session at the end of the course. In the meantime, technology provides a rich environment for discussion. Posting comments online in response to a reading assignment, the teachers share deep reflections about how CGI and SIOP have affected their teaching: “Since I have adopted CGI with my third grade Latina ELL student, she has made amazing progress. She views herself as a problem solver and is quickly acquiring more efficient procedures. I smiled as she put down her pencil to begin to count on her fingers, then quickly picked up her pencil commenting to herself that she did not need to count on her fingers, she knew the answer already. I always ask her to explain to me how she acquired the answer. This gives her the opportunity to use academic English as well as clarify the answer to herself.”

The Need for Training

Tapping into professional development—whether online or face-to-face—can be critical for teachers faced with the challenge of boosting ELL students’ academic achievement. The 2000 school and staffing survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics showed a dearth of training targeted to teachers of ELL students. The 62,810 Northwest teachers who reported one or more Limited English Proficient (LEP) students in their classes, only 20.6 percent said they’d received eight hours or more of professional development on how to teach such students in the last three years. Only about a third of teachers who had 10 or more ELL students in their classes had received such training.

For many smaller school districts, consortia led by Education Service Districts are stepping in to fill the void—especially to meet the requirements of Title III of No Child Left Behind. The primary purpose of Title III is to help English language learners (ELLs) gain English language proficiency and meet the same challenging academic content standards as other students. Title III funds, flowing through state education agencies, support noncompetitive grants to local school districts or consortia of districts. The amount of a grant award depends on the number of ELL students that a district or a consortium serves.

To qualify for a Title III formula grant, a school district must have a sufficient number of identified ELL students to receive a grant award of at least $10,000. Currently, in Oregon, Title III provides an allocation of roughly $94 per ELL student, which means that an Oregon district with fewer than approximately 106 ELLs must join a consortium if the district wishes to access Title III–funded services.

One ESD’s Response

In response to the expressed needs of constituent school districts, the Willamette Education Service District (WESD) established a Title III Consortium in 2002–2003. Guided by a steering committee of representatives from each of the 12 member districts, the WESD consortium sponsors and coordinates a variety of research-based professional development programs. For example, the consortium has been supporting professional learning programs in GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Design) since summer 2003. GLAD is a carefully validated and intensive professional development program intended to help teachers enhance their skills in teaching ELLs both English and high-level academic content. The GLAD program consists of two days of theory and research and four to five days of demonstration teaching. During the demonstration lessons, teachers observe a certified GLAD key trainer implement strategies introduced during the earlier theory and research component. A GLAD instructional coach guides the teachers’ observations and helps deepen their understanding of how strategies work together to maximize students’ success. Each afternoon, after the demonstration lessons, teachers work on applications of GLAD strategies to their own instructional units, with technical assistance from the GLAD trainer.

This summer, the consortium will offer three GLAD professional development classes, for approximately 75 regular classroom teachers. Also, the consortium is working for the second consecutive summer with the founder and director of GLAD, Marcia Brechtel, and her teaching partner, Susan McCoy, both of the Orange County Department of Education, in California, to prepare, support, and certify 13 key trainers in the ESD service region. “Becoming a certified GLAD trainer is a highly rigorous process in which teacher leaders are required to meet exacting performance standards,” says Glen Fielding, director of curriculum, assessment, and research at Willamette ESD. “Once certified, the trainers will take the lead in offering GLAD-based professional development in their districts and in the ESD’s region as a whole.”

The WESD Consortium also sponsors classes in SIOP, a sheltered instruction model (see NWREL Training Blends SIOP and Equity Components). This summer and fall, the consortium is offering training on a focused approach to English Language Development (ELD) that Susana Dutro, who has served as a statewide ELD consultant for California, has authored. Fielding notes that “a cornerstone assumption underlying this approach is that teachers need to give explicit attention to teaching the forms and functions of English. Forms and functions are at the heart of Oregon’s English Language Proficiency Standards and Oregon’s new statewide, computer-aided English Language Proficiency Assessment (ELPA).”

An Ambitious Program

Another WESD offering is a collaborative effort with the Center for Language Minority Education and Research (CLMER) at California State University-Long Beach. The five-year program focuses on expanding the number of rural Oregon teachers with ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) endorsements and helping paraprofessionals meet the associate degree requirement of No Child Left Behind.

The ESOL course currently offers a mixture of online and face-to-face sessions to three dozen teachers at 10 schools. “We looked at the research and found that the whole idea of a cohort was important because if there are good, established relationships in a building, the work feeds on itself,” says Susie Lee, Willamette ESD’s manager of professional development services. “The cohort leans on each other, and members also go to people who went through the program in previous years.”

Lee says one of the key ingredients of the course is packing it into one school year, beginning with online courses in the summer and face-to-face instruction in the fall and winter. Teachers participate in a practicum in the spring with a mentor observing their classroom performance. Lee points out that the teachers learn good practices that work not only for the ELL population, but for all students. “We just keep trying to find inventive ways to deliver the course and always are sensitive to the fact that teachers have so little time,” she says.