Creating a Model for Mainstream Elementary Teachers with High Numbers of English Language Learners (ELLs)

Working in a collaborative team, faculty and staff from the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition along with teachers and admnistrators from the Minneapolis Public Schools developed a program model that initiated a learning community among mainstream teachers who regularly deal with the challenges of meeting the needs of ELL students in their mainstream classrooms. The purpose of the program was to create a site-based, teacher-directed model for improving instruction to ELL students that could be broadly replicable in its approach. Launched with Title I support, the project began in spring 1998 at two elementary schools in Minneapolis, which were selected as demonstration sites for the entire district. One of the schools has a high percentage of Spanish-speaking children and the other chosen school has a high percentage of Somali and Hmong children, which are also dominant minority language groups in the Twin City region.

For each school, a project facilitator was hired to regularly convene mainstream teachers in grade-level groups to share concerns and to get information from each other. In addition, the project facilitators helped to provide the teachers with outside resources in order to support their efforts to improve instruction to ELL students in their classrooms.

Throughout the development of the program, CARLA staff worked closely with the project steering committee which included the project facilitators, the school principals, several teachers from each school, Diane Tedick and Constance Walker, faculty from the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development, the Director of English Language Learners Services in the Minneapolis Public School District and the CARLA coordinator. This leadership group, along with the solicited input of teachers, helped CARLA to create credit-bearing courses through the University of Minnesota that were specifically targeted at these mainstream teachers and their ELL student population. As part of this project collaboration, CARLA offered a two-credit summer institute focused on the special literacy issues that mainstream teachers need to address with the ELL students and supported their work on adapting reading lessons in a standard reading series to meet the needs of these students. Throughout the project, several short courses were offered that focused on: first and second language acquisition; research related to literacy and language acquisition; cultural differences; and support for students who are brand new to English and the American school system.

The model also featured a rich arts program for the children that functioned as a mechanism to enable teachers to meet with each other during the school day, rather than before or after a very full teaching schedule. More importantly, however, the arts program fostered an appreciation for other cultures through dance, song, and theatre and proved to be very popular among the children and their teachers.

This program developed a unique collaborative model of professional development for mainstream teachers and provided teachers with needed tools to improve their instructional practice within classrooms with high populations of English language learners. In 1999, Minneapolis Public Schools received a Title VII grant for five years which will expand and deepen the model and will employ teachers in classroom-based research on the impact of this model on changes in instructional practice and performance of ELL students.