A Vision for Professional Knowledge Required to Develop Educator Expertise to Offer ELLs Quality Learning Opportunities

• In Event: Building Professional Expertise for 21st-Century Teaching: The Imperative of Integrating Knowledge About Language Development

Abstract

Exploring how teachers put together their understandings about second language acquisition, theories about the learners they teach, and theories about the nature of their own learning and understanding is an enormous and consequential task that needs to be valued and supported. However, American teachers have very few opportunities to formally grow on the job and to make the multiple ideas that are often superficially presented to them into coherent integrated theories of teaching and learning (Wei & Darling-Hammond, 2010; Allwright & Hanks, 2009; Walqui, 2008). Teacher education and development has typically focused on "strategy” training, often with little or no reflection of reasons, purposes, moments and places in lessons where these strategies may be productive. As Lewin (1945) observed, “Nothing [is] as practical as a good theory.” It is through theoretical reasoning that teachers gain control of their practice, bring coherence to their teaching, and respond in the moment appropriately to learners.

Realizing the potential that English language learners take to school requires teachers who have the dispositions to see their students both for who they are at the moment, full of resources and immense potential, but also for who they will be at the end of a unit of teaching, at the end of a course, at the end of their school studies, in productive and responsible life in their communities, in proleptic ways (Walqui & van Lier, 2010). It also requires teachers’ depth of knowledge and their ability to translate dispositions and knowledge into action that builds students’ academic and linguistic strengths while fostering their agency and autonomy. The connection between knowledge, action, and impact and between teaching and learning is one that has not been problematized enough, although it has been reflected upon by a few language teaching scholars (van Lier, 2004; Harper & de Jong, 2009; Larsen-Freeman, 2010).

This paper unpacks the notion of teacher expertise to work with English language learners in contexts in which they are learning subject matter practices simultaneously with the language needed to express them. It argues that as students need to be perceived as legitimate and be provided with deliberate support during their apprenticeship, teachers similarly need to be considered capable and provided with on-going opportunities to develop their expertise.

The model of teacher expertise presented considers a process that takes teachers from newcomers to novices to experts in their understanding and action as they work in linguistically diverse environments, and it is applicable—with principled variations—across disciplinary fields represented in the school curriculum. The paper argues that in order to trace developmental paths for teachers and realize them across multiple contexts in coherent ways, it is important to understand what needs to be developed as well as the multiple, successful hows, and their intermediate versions that implementations may shape into as they are situated in the particulars of professional development and enacted in classes contingently.

Author

• Aida Walqui, WestEd