Developing the Next Generation of Educators
CLASE provides Latino-oriented expertise, short and long-term professional development and regularly for schools, media, community groups, non-profit organizations, governmental agencies, courts, and more. However, a key to CLASE’s model to reducing the achievement gap is the professional development of teachers. Most of the educators in the “new South” are ill-prepared to deal with the particular needs of the growing number of English language learning (ELL) children and other at- risk students, particularly immigrants and children of immigrants, in their classrooms. Over the course of the last 9 years, CLASE has developed many teacher professional development initiatives, e.g. workshops, school partnerships, and teacher summer institutes (including a unique study abroad opportunity for teachers integrating language goals into science instruction). In 2010, CLASE was awarded a 2.9 million dollar grant through the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to implement and study the impacts of the Instructional Conversation (IC) pedagogy on the academic success of English language learners.
The IC focuses not only on academic achievement, but also second language acquisition by increasing the rate and intensity of interactions with peers and expert teachers. The level of professional development and support that is being offered in this project is unprecedented. After attending a one-week summer institute focusing on the cognitive theories behind IC and the practical issues involved in implementing this pedagogy in the classroom, teachers in the treatment group are supported with coaches and trainers for a full academic year. Teachers in Georgia who have been introduced to this pedagogy and experienced this support report that they believe it has enabled them to cover more material in more depth. CLASE has been working in close collaboration with several school districts across the state to develop this project which is in line with the common core standards and will be sustainable for systems and schools even when the project is complete since participation in the project is an investment in each system’s most valuable asset toward reducing the achievement gap: their teachers.