Furthermore, effective teachers were enthusi- astic, businesslike and task oriented, clear when presenting instructional content, and resourceful by using a variety of instructional materials and procedures.
James G. What teachers do before they engage students has also been identified as significant to effective teaching. For instance, Carol A. Dwyer reviews an extensive literature that relates to the importance of teacher planning activities as indicators of good teaching McDiarmid, ; Shulman, Interpretations of such studies, while adding to our understanding of good teaching, need to be examined in more depth relative to the context of teaching and learning in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms.
Ana M. For example, Robert D. Although similar to other research cited, the cultural context is identified here relative to effective bilingual teaching practices—an important distinction for second-language learners.
How do teachers begin to understand this cultural context? How do they plan instruction to take advantage of this context in order to see it as a strength and not a deficit? How do we teach preservice and beginning teachers to use these practices? These are questions that can be addressed by identifying a framework for effective teaching and analyzing it in a second- language learning context.
This will be done in the next section. Identifying Standards for Teaching Implications for Teachers of Second Language Learners Research has informed the practice of teaching by identifying teacher traits and successful classroom practices. As a starting point, a framework that includes most of the knowledge base from past research and subsequent standards on teaching is needed.
They include: knowledge of young adolescents, knowledge of subject matter, instructional resources, learning environment, meaningful learning, multiple paths to knowledge, social develop- ment, assessment, reflective practice, family partnerships, and collaboration with colleagues.
They are, Domain A. Teaching for Student Learning, and Domain D. Teacher Professionalism. There are a total of 19 criteria embedded in these domains e. Pathwise also speaks to the issue of teacher expectations Rupley et al.
Other Pathwise criteria have also been grounded in past research on effective teaching practices Dwyer, Although generally well received in the field, one concern school and district personnel have had with Pathwise is its relevance to preparation of beginning teachers involved with teaching second-language learners. This is an important issue in California, as described earlier in this article. Second-language learners present a unique challenge to educators, with some school districts doing better than others in providing educational services to this group of students.
As a result, second-language learners receive a wide range of instructional services from no support whatsoever submersion to various amounts of sheltered instruction in English, to native language instruction when in bilingual classrooms. The question becomes, how does the Pathwise framework facilitate or relate to the instructional context for second-language learners? Further, how does this framework become a useful preparation tool for future teachers entering classrooms with large numbers of second-language learners?
It is clear that a framework that informs practice relative to the cultural context of teaching and learning is especially relevant to this discussion of second-language learners. Yet standards specifically for teaching second-language learners do not exist. The Pathwise framework shows promise for imparting knowledge about effective teaching practices for second-language learners to beginning teachers, and is already used to various degrees in California—with second-language learners.
Thus, it seems appropriate to use it as a starting point for further investigation for teaching linguistically diverse students. With these issues in mind, we will explore the relationship between the Pathwise framework and instructional approaches used with second-language learners. In order to focus our discussion, we identify only those Pathwise criteria that, in our view, most directly relate to the teaching of second-language learners.
Further, as we review the relevance of each criterion to second-language learners, our purpose is not to provide a cookbook of sheltered activities, since other methods texts handle this quite well Oller, Our purpose is to examine the relevance of selected Pathwise criteria to second-language learners and to second-language instruction and suggest how support providers can assist beginning teachers in the classroom.
When used as a training vehicle for beginning and preservice teachers, the relevance of these relationships is significant. We organize our analyses of the Pathwise beginning teacher framework by noting each domain, followed by the selected criteria which are accompanied by a brief explanation of each criterion provided by Dwyer Dwyer identifies five criteria in this domain. Three were selected for discussion since they relate directly to teachers of second language learners. This teaching concept is crucial for teachers or beginning teachers who have a cultural and linguistic background different from those they teach.
This trend is expected to continue since data on teacher preparation candidates enrolled in California colleges and universities also reflect these numbers relative to White teachers, with Latino teachers comprising only 11 percent and Black teachers only 5 percent of the future teacher force CTC, As stated earlier, over one million students are identified as limited-English- proficient in California alone. If, as Villegas suggests, teaching and learning occur in a cultural context, it is important that teachers become familiar with the specific contexts in their classrooms.
Thus, how do teachers learn about the cultural backgrounds and experiences of different students? How a teacher learns about, interprets, and accepts cultural experiences for middle class white students and how they do this for culturally and linguistically diverse students is both different and challenging—especially in times of anti-immigrant sentiments.
As Lynne T. Diaz- Rico and Kathryn Z. With this in mind, teachers must make a concerted effort to learn about their students. Additional sources for this information could include friends, other teachers at their school, teacher assistants, peers, community, and family.
In planning instruction, teachers can build on what children bring with them to the instructional setting, including their cultural framework for organizing, learn- ing, and presenting knowledge. Students bring an oral language history in their native language that—together with other literacy abilities—forms their schema i. Second-language learners bring a different schema that includes a different language and cultural background than that of middle-class White monolingual students.
Teachers will have to identify and reference the different schemas when planning instruction. However, where this is impossible, teachers must seek out other means e. Usually, some balance of a literature-based whole language approach and phonics are appropriate teaching methods in any language. However, the difference in this criterion for second- language learners is in the planning for two languages.
In many cases, school districts will not have the option of developing native language proficiency as a bridge to second-language acquisition—even though this option is the most desirable. In these cases there are not enough bilingual teachers to fill the classrooms of not only Spanish but of the various languages spoken in our schools today.
This information calls into question the quality of instructional services to LEP students. They are often segregated into classes where they receive very little interaction with their English-speaking peers while ironically receiving no native-language instruction either, thus they are left in situations devoid of English- speaking models. This has a detrimental affect on the quality of their instruction and their relationships with their peers.
Both the social and academic lives of second- language learners need to be developed in the classroom. These students cannot afford to fall further behind in content areas while learning the English language.
This method is an extremely important element that teaching standards need to address relative to second-language learners. According to Diaz-Rico and Weed , SDAIE instruction has four goals for students: 1 to learn English; 2 to learn content; 3 to practice higher level thinking skills; and 4 to advance literacy skills p.
Given these goals for SDAIE instruction, determining the balance of content and language instruction is still a challenge. Students are at various levels of English and native language proficiency, so determining the best mix and level of sheltering can still be complicated. Teachers need to plan how they will organize teaching methods with these two goals in mind. Beginning teachers will have to learn to plan activities for native and second-language instruction.
In the absence of a bilingual instructional strategy, teachers must develop activities that engage second-language learners with the content and language necessary to function at their grade level expectations.
Second-language teachers need to combine both academic content and language activities that are appropriate and challenging to students. Further, beginning teachers will need to embed second-language support in their activities by using cooperative groupings to include bilingual pairings with English-speaking peers, and by using teacher assistants, team teachers, and other resources available to connect content to learners.
Spanish materials are more available than those for the less-used languages. However, one way around this dilemma—at least initially—is the use of the language experience approach LEA. Sarah Hudelson notes that learners and teachers should be involved in sharing their own stories. Instructional materials and activities appropriate to second-language instruc- tion need to be specially prepared so as to ensure comprehensibility.
This special preparation does not mean that easier or less challenging concepts are covered in favor of grade-level standards, but that materials are challenging, relevant, and at grade-level. The special challenge to beginning teachers is in the preparation of materials e. To sum up this section, it is clear that teachers will have to plan methods, activities, and materials for two languages when teaching in a bilingual program.
However, in a structured immersion program, special care on selecting and preparing materials, activities and delivery of instruction must also take place. For example, materials that otherwise look appropriate for English speaking students would not be appropriate for second-language learners if the material is not sheltered.
This is a unique aspect of Pathwise that needs to be addressed for second-language learners: evaluating the appropriateness of English language activities using materials that are not modified and thus not comprehensible to students. Creating or Selecting Evaluation Strategies That Are Appropriate for the Students and That Are Aligned with the Goals of the Lesson This criterion asks beginning teachers to have well-designed evaluation strategies that are systematic and appropriate to students.
This evaluation criterion pervades the total instructional program for second- language learners. There are at least two major components of this criterion relative to second-language learners: 1 the way in which students display their knowledge of the content area and 2 the language in which they do so. Pathwise training materials point out the importance of culturally-sensitive evaluation strategies—especially for students of limited-English proficiency.
Ad- ditionally, beginning teachers should use evaluation strategies that allow children to display their knowledge of a topic or activity in ways that they have been accustomed to in their homes and communities.
The difference in the ways that second-language learners not only learn but display their knowledge, and the ways that schools require students to display that knowledge, poses enormous problems in the validity of such assessments.
In addition to displaying knowledge in culturally-sensitive formats, second- language learners also need to use the language they know best when being assessed, except of course, if second-language skills are the focus of the assessment.
The crucial questions for LEP assessment are: are we assessing content or lan- guage? And, are we assessing what we are teaching? In the former case, second- language learners are often given content area tests, yet because of the lack of second-language knowledge especially at the higher-ordered cognitive levels students are prevented from truly understanding the directions, procedures, or context needed to successfully answer or articulate responses to test items. As such, language proficiency, rather than content area knowledge or higher-ordered thinking skills, is being tested.
Related to the issue of assessing language or content is the ultimate congruence of assessment and instruction. For example, second-language learners receiving primarily oral language instruction e. Unfortunately, in the rush to transition second-language learners to an English-only curriculum, many schools use standardized English language tests which assess higher-ordered thinking skills i.
In this case, students are not being tested on what they are being taught. Beginning teachers will need to pay special attention to testing what they teach. The classroom environment is important because it sets the tone for subsequent learning.
When students come from a different culture and language background, how does the classroom accept them as equals in the learning process and integrate them into the classroom community, and how does the classroom lower the affective filter Krashen, to promote second- language learning?
Classroom support providers can see or sense the fairness, rapport, and interaction between students and teacher and among students while in the classroom. The following three criteria were selected from this domain for further discussion on second language learning and teaching, Creating a climate that promotes fairness B1 ; Establishing and maintaining rapport with students B2 ; and Communicating challenging learning expectations to each student B3.
Again, this is a unique feature in second-language-learning classrooms since there are two languages present where the status of each language needs to be treated fairly. How the language is used integrated into instruction and other purposes , encouraged by teacher and students , or, how it is discouraged or neglected by teachers and students , all relate to the fair treatment and status of language. For example, even though teachers may not speak the language of the students, second-language learners still need access to learning.
Basic to this access is communication. However, by not being able to communicate with second-language learners, some teachers give these students different assignments, or group them together for menial busy work. Thus, oftentimes the language is discouraged, not integrated into instruction and curriculum, and thus relegated to second-class status. Indeed, language status is visible to students and teachers alike.
She suggests that students see the use of the English language by the teacher in various important contexts e. The authors go on to state that Spanish-speaking students do not necessarily need Spanish as a foreign language, but their social status as Spanish speakers is paradoxically lower than that of mainstream U. In fact, Spanish-speaking children will enter schools where their native language will be ignored and discouraged only to find themselves taking high school Spanish or college Spanish to fulfill a foreign language requirement.
This dilemma for second-language learners is not only ironic, it is unfair. As reported earlier, language and culture are inextricably linked. In fact, Shirley B. Heath argues that language learning is cultural learning. David E. Freeman and Yvonne S. Freeman ask what one gets when one learns a language. This criterion is significant because of its emphasis on showing respect for cultural and linguistic diversity and the important role of respect for students.
This respect not only builds rapport, but addresses the affective areas of second-language learning. Student anxiety, however, affects output as well. Students who are not comfortable in class and feel intimidated by the teacher will also have problems with output i. Diaz-Rico and Weed discuss the sociocultural context of second language learning by asking: Do students feel that their language and culture are accepted and validated by the school?
Another way for second-language teachers to show rapport is by talking to students in their native language. In bilingual programs with healthy dosages of native- and second-language instruction, this is not an issue.
Thus, building rapport with students means building trust where teachers allow students to speak in their native language in the classroom in various situations. When students are instructed in their native language, the content and purpose of instruction must be academically challenging. For example, generally, second-language learners receive primarily oral language learning and little, if any, content instruc- tion. In fact, in many cases, these students do not receive academic content instruction until they have reached a specific oral language proficiency level in English.
It is no wonder that these children do poorly on tests of content and higher- order thinking skills when most of their waking hours in the classroom are spent learning about the English language, rather than learning language through grade appropriate content. Recently, teachers have begun to integrate content into their language lessons in the hopes of providing students the opportunity to keep up with grade-level content demands.
This is an important expectation concept for second-language instruction. Even though students do not speak English, they can still learn higher- order thinking skills through a modified sheltered instructional approach. Well-meaning teachers may feel that they are doing a service to second-language learners by not providing them with demanding academic content or higher-order thinking skills so as to not place a heavy cognitive load on them—at least until they learn English.
This scenario, however, would be an obvious example of low expectations for second- language learners. Watering down of academic content needs to be directly addressed, vis a vis this criterion, relative to second-language learners. Further, the idea of consciously designing instruction that integrates content and language as learning goals and expectations for second-language learners needs to be directly addressed and assessed in beginning teachers.
Domain C: Teaching for Student Learning Teaching is an interactive process where teachers and students work together to engage and learn content; and additionally for second-language learners—to learn the language. Yet merely communicating with students is not enough to satisfy this criterion or any other criterion for effective teaching. Teachers need to use language and other means i. For students who do not speak English, this criterion is certainly a challenge during instruction conducted entirely in English.
Bilingual programs satisfy the first condition of communication—but not necessarily the second—comprehensibility. Where bilingual programs do not exist, structured immersion programs at- tempt to communicate with students to make content comprehensible.
Traditional teaching methods are not enough for second-language learners. Care must be taken that materials and concepts are presented in a special way to encourage comprehension.
In fact, the total classroom needs to be sheltered—to include materials, methods, environment, and routines. Table 2 illustrates this concept that will be elaborated in the following sections. Materials used in sheltered programs need to be carefully selected and modified. In addition to the relevancy criteria, materials need to be prepared beforehand to determine how they will be presented and sheltered.
Patton O. Tabors and Catherine E. In this case, how can materials e. They also recommend that text components be grouped by concepts. For its education majors, classroom-based field experiences progress from working one on one with students to working with small groups and entire classes.
Alverno teacher candidates design lesson plans, teach the lessons, and reflect on the effectiveness of their instruction. Teacher candidates keep logs that require them to reflect on their practices and to make links between theoretical knowledge and practical application, observe processes and environments of learning, translate their content knowledge into short presentations, and begin to translate their philosophy of education into decisions about the instructional process.
Before student teaching, teacher candidates compile a portfolio consisting of samples of written work, lesson plans, videotapes of their interactions with children, and instructional materials. They develop a resume and write an analy-. Portfolios are reviewed by teams of teachers and principals who pose questions on teaching practices to candidates.
Readiness for student teaching is judged on the basis of the portfolio as well as performance during the questioning session. Students at Alverno College are required to meet the licensing requirements of the state of Wisconsin, which currently include a basic skills test and endorsement from the institution conferring the teaching degrees. Candidates who pass the portfolio review will be granted provisional licenses to teach for three to five years while pursuing professional development goals related to the standards.
To conclude this chapter, the committee focuses on what can be learned from a comparison of the design principles underlying the assessments reviewed here. In each of the cases involving prospective or beginning teachers, there is consistent attention to the following features that the committee considers important components of a sound licensure systems:.
There is a coherent statement about the qualities of teaching valued by the institution or agency. There is sustained attention to the professional development and support of prospective or beginning teachers integrated with the qualities and practices covered by the assessments.
Support systems draw on the capabilities of experienced teachers, thereby supporting professional development for experienced teachers as well as beginning teachers. For the programs that have begun or are beginning operational use, there is an ongoing program of research into the validity of these assessments and opportunity for outside professionals to review the practices. Looking across these case studies of assessment practice, the committee also found instructive differences.
While all of the selected systems involve performance-based assessments of teaching, the programs use different measurement methodologies e. The agency or institution responsible for implementing performance-based assessments also differs for the various cases, including two states, a professional organization, and a teacher preparation program. The particular decisions supported by the assessments differ, as do the means for combining results with other information to make decisions about teacher competence.
Furthermore, the systems in which the performance assessments operate are more or less tightly coupled; in one case the performance-based assessment is a fully integral ongoing part of the learning sequence, whereas in another case the connections between assessment and support are less direct. Looking more specifically at the performance assessment methodologies, additional differences can be noted.
These include differences in the way in which the statements of teacher competence guiding the assessments are developed and characterized e. There are also differences in the way standards are set e. The balance of contextualized versus standardized forms of evidence about teaching competence also varies across these programs. The two cases that have been in operation the longest call for special note.
For our purposes, it serves as an existence proof that centrally administered, large-scale, high-stakes assessments of teaching performance can meet professional standards of technical quality for standardized assessments.
As such it provides an important model for states, districts, teacher preparation programs, or other organizations developing performance-based assessments.
As noted, Connecticut already has drawn on the work of the NBPTS in developing its portfolio assessment with some unique design features of its own. First, it can be used to support reciprocity across states in granting licenses based on evidence of performance, albeit at the advanced practice level. It suggests possibilities for reciprocity in initial licensing. Second, and perhaps most important, it offers opportunities for assessment and recognition of accomplished teachers, thus providing incentives for professional development and advancement across the span of a career.
The teacher education and student assessment program at Alverno College provides an existence proof of a different sort; it demonstrates that evidence-based decisions about readiness to teach can be based on assessment practices contextualized at the local level as part of a program integrating learning and assessment in a developmental sequence.
Whether this sort of contextualized assessment system culminating in high-stakes decisions can be successfully implemented in a broader range of teacher education institutions is a question that deserves further study. Research is needed to understand the impact of these different assessment choices on decisions about teaching quality. While the committee believes all design choices should be situated in an assessment with a strong program of validity research, it is not believed that these differences necessarily can or should be resolved into a single set of recommendations.
The diversity is productive: it provides an important source of alternatives for triangulation and critical review and revision.
This is so because to the extent that alternative perspectives are perceived as legitimate, it is less likely that any one of these perspectives will dominate our assumptions, our methodologies, or our thinking about the validation of test use. Some issues of concern to the committee have not been sufficiently addressed by these assessment programs.
These concerns, the committee notes, are equally relevant to its review of conventional testing programs. First, very little is known about how any of these different assessments of teacher quality relate to one another or to other indicators.
To be fair, the professional testing standards do not explicitly require such evidence before an assessment is put into operational use. To their credit, the NBPTS and the state of Connecticut have undertaken such studies on a small scale with specific assessments. Cross-fertilization among these programs and between these programs and more conventional assessment practices would be fruitful. Second, with the possible exception of Alverno, very little is known about the quality of the overall decision about competence or accomplishment.
Licensure decisions rest on the combination of information across disparate sources of evidence. In most of the examples the different assessments within a given. Each decision has the potential to reduce the pool of prospective teachers. This represents an implicit and underexamined theory about professional development that needs further investigation.
Studies have examined these differences in relation to gender, years of teaching, location of teaching assignment, putative quality of the baccalaureate degree-granting institution, support during preparation for the assessment, assessment exercise type, writing load of the assessment task, assessor training, and assessor ethnicity. None of these factors have been found to fully explain the performance differences observed between African American and white teachers on these assessments Bond, a, Bond ; A.
Fourth, none of these assessment programs examine the teaching performances of the same individuals across different contexts of teaching. For instance, student teaching requirements and the assessment data they yield could be structured to assure multiple contexts that include diverse learners. Also, support and professional development may be needed when teachers whether beginning or experienced move into new schools and communities.
In closing, the committee believes that articulating the validity issues that these cases suggest is an important challenge for the field. In Chapter 4 the committee presents an evaluation framework for standardized forms of testing. Some of its criteria apply directly to the assessments described here. The criteria for the purposes of assessment, the competencies to be assessed, and others are meaningful and important to judgments about performance-based assessments of teacher competence.
However, for other evaluation criteria, their meaning and utility are less immediately clear for these assessment forms. The developmental nature of the systems in which these assessments reside, the varied ways in which candidates demonstrate their knowledge and skills within assessment forms, the balance between the information value of these assessments and the professional development benefits that accrue to examinees and other participants, and other differences raise issues about the validity evidence needed to support them.
The committee asserts that the evaluation criteria and evidence for these assessments should be rigorous, just as rigorous as those for conventional teacher licensure tests. The committee suspects, however, that the forms of evidence that will be telling and the criteria that should guide judgments about the soundness and technical quality of the assessments described here may differ somewhat from those outlined in Chapter 4.
The committee challenges test developers, practitioners, and researchers to consider its evaluation framework as well as other more conventional evaluation frameworks and to decide which criteria best apply to judgments about newer forms of assessments, which criteria have important and helpful corollaries, and where new criteria may be needed that address the particular validity issues raised by performance-based assessments.
For example, consistency and generalizability are important criteria in traditional evaluation frameworks; although they might be instantiated differently, they are potentially important concepts in evaluating alternative assessments as well.
The utility of other evaluation criteria that speak to the unique validity issues raised by these assessments also should be considered. Furthermore, careful study of the validity criteria used by these performance-based assessment programs might suggest additional criteria that are relevant to more conventional forms of assessment. It urges the field to do so. Several new and developing teacher assessment systems use a variety of testing and assessment methods, including assessments of teaching performance.
In these systems, assessments are integrated with professional development and with the ongoing support of prospective or beginning teachers. Given its analysis of systems that employ performance-based assessments, the committee concludes:.
New and developing assessment systems warrant investigation for addressing the limits of current initial teacher licensure tests and for improving teacher licensure. The benefits, costs, and limitations of these systems should be investigated. Americans have adopted a reform agenda for their schools that calls for excellence in teaching and learning. School officials across the nation are hard at work targeting instruction at high levels for all students.
Gaps remain, however, between the nation's educational aspirations and student achievement. To address these gaps, policy makers have recently focused on the qualifications of teachers and the preparation of teacher candidates. This book examines the appropriateness and technical quality of teacher licensure tests currently in use, evaluates the merits of using licensure test results to hold states and institutions of higher education accountable for the quality of teacher preparation and licensure, and suggests alternatives for developing and assessing beginning teacher competence.
Teaching is a complex activity. Definitions of quality teaching have changed and will continue to change over time as society's values change. This book provides policy makers, teacher testers, and teacher educators with advice on how to use current tests to assess teacher candidates and evaluate teacher preparation, ensuring that America's youth are being taught by the most qualified candidates.
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