Learning the Language

The New York Times has taken on the topic of teacher-preparation programs in a post for its ongoing Room for Debate blog.

In the post, "Frustrated Early Childhood Teacher" characterizes some teacher coursework offered by education schools as "laughable." For instance, this teacher writes, she (or he?) once attended a training session hoping to learn about how to increase literacy among English-language learners and went away disappointed that the session had ended with an activity of making caterpillars out of egg cartons. She considered the session a waste of time.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Prospective teachers are more likely to get training on students with disabilities than on English-language learners as part of their teacher-preparation programs, a Government Accountability Office study released today says. That's the case even though the ELL population is one of the fastest-growing student populations in U.S. schools.

A majority of traditional teacher-prep programs have at least one course that focuses solely on how to educate students with disabilities while no more than 20 percent of teacher-prep programs require at least one course that focuses entirely on how to teach English-language learners, according to the study. ELLs are more often "a partial focus of required courses" than are students with disabilities, the study says.

In addition, a larger proportion of teacher-preparation programs require field experiences for prospective teachers with students with disabilities than with ELLs.

Interestingly, administrators of teacher-prep programs told the GAO that one of the main reasons they don't have stiffer requirements for teachers to be trained to work with ELLs is that their state standards don't require it of them.

The GAO notes that state standards sometimes include limitations on the maximum number of program or credit hours, so I can see how it could be a challenge for teacher-prep programs to add a requirement that everyone take a course devoted to teaching ELLs.

But I wonder if blaming the lack of standards is really just an excuse on the part of the teacher-prep programs for not keeping up with how school demographics are changing in the United States.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm not surprised by the following bit of news from the What Works Clearinghouse of the U.S. Department of Education, which has been dubbed the "Nothing Works" Clearinghouse.

The clearinghouse has taken a look at studies of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, or SIOP, a framework for teaching English-language learners content and English at the same time, to determine the effectiveness of the approach. It found that none of the eight studies meets the "evidence standards" of the clearinghouse and thus no conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of SIOP.

I just wrote on this blog about how it appears SIOP, a set of strategies that mainstream teachers can use to reach ELLs in their classrooms, is sweeping the country.

The 2008 annual report of the Center for Applied Linguistics says that the center provided professional-development services in SIOP to a dozen different school districts and other individual schools or education entities in 2008. Among them were public school systems in Austin, Texas; Beaufort County, S.C.; Chapel Hill-Carrboro City schools in North Carolina; East Baton Rouge, La.; and Loudoun County, Va.

Of the 33 reviews of learning interventions for ELLs that the clearinghouse has conducted, 14 bear the label "no studies meeting evidence standards" or "no studies meeting eligibility screens."

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over the last year, more than 130 teachers received national-board certification in a category called teaching "English as a New Language," according to a press release from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. That brings the number of teachers in this country with that credential to more than 900.

You can learn more about what the certification entails here and here.

A study published by the National Research Council last June concluded that teachers with certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards are more effective than teachers without the credential, but it also said that there isn't enough evidence to conclude that the actual process of getting the credential leads to better-quality teaching. Other studies about board-certified teachers have had mixed results.

Some states provide financial incentives for teachers to earn the credential. They may pay for the $2,500 testing fee or give bonuses to those who are successful in attaining the certification, or do both.

States with the highest number of teachers who achieved the English-as-a-new-language certification in 2008 were North Carolina, 27; California, 16; Washington, 14; Florida, 13; and Illinois and Maryland, 10 each.

Readers, if you've been through the process of getting the credential for teachers of English as a new language, tell us what it's like and whether you think it's made you a better teacher of English-language learners.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)