Content-Specific English Learner Core Practices and Preparing Mainstream Classroom Teachers

• In Event: Educating Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners: New Approaches to Practice in Teacher Education

Abstract

Purpose
Preparing mainstream classroom teachers to provide equitable and rigorous instruction for their English learner (EL) students continues to be a challenge in teacher education (Lucas & Grinberg, 2008). This paper examines content-specific “core practices” for teaching EL students, as part of a comprehensive approach to preparing novice teachers to work with EL students.
Perspectives
Scholars have identified EL-specific knowledge and skills teachers need, such as second language acquisition, cultural competency, and scaffolding of academic language and content learning (Lucas, Villegas, & Freedson-Gonzalez, 2008). In many teacher education programs these knowledge and skills are taught outside of content area methods classes. Novice teachers often struggle with what and how to integrate these generalized EL practices into content area instruction. The development and enactment of “core practices” in pre-service teacher education may potentially inform how mainstream classroom teachers learn to teach EL students (Dubetz & Coffey, 2015). Core practices are specific sets of teaching practice essential to support student learning that novice teachers can learn and implement. These practices aim to provide rigorous, meaningful, and high-quality instruction (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013), and develop teachers’ adaptive expertise (Zeichner, 2012). As core practices embody the discourse and ideas unique to each discipline (Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, & Stroupe, 2012), content-specific EL core practices may specify how to support EL students to engage in this work.
Methods and Data Sources
Data for this paper comes from two different studies. The first study focused on integrating EL and math instruction in a pre-service teacher preparation program. The second study, a job-embedded professional development project, examined practices that best serve EL students in science classrooms and professional development models that best support teacher learning. In both studies, teachers met to inquire into, develop, and try out ambitious science or math practices through multiple day-long “studio days,” following a modified “lesson study” model (Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006). Data include videos of studio day work, classroom teaching and debriefing sessions, and written artifacts such as instructional tools, lesson plans, and exit tickets.
Conclusions
Results from each study illustrate how generalized EL practices were transformed and adapted more specifically to math and science discourses and practices, to help EL students engage more rigorously in their curricular learning. For example, “visual supports” for EL students were translated into scientific modeling, a way to engage more fully in the work of science.
This paper argues for more closely integrated EL and content area instruction through developing: (1) content-specific core practices for beginning EL educators, especially academic language development; (2) EL instructional routines through which to engage in more cognitively and linguistically demanding work; (3) core practices that attend to students’ cultural and linguistic strengths (Harper & de Jong, 2009) and their social, political and cultural contexts (Zeichner, 2012).
Scholarly Significance
This paper addresses a gap in the research on preparing mainstream classroom teachers to teach EL students, focused on developing content-specific EL instructional practices, as part of a more well-rounded and comprehensive approach in teacher education.

Authors

• Kerry Soo Von Esch, Seattle University

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Washington - Seattle