What strategies are school districts using to build a bilingual teacher workforce in support of effective dual language education?
Our research paper identifies the significant challenges Washington school districts face when recruiting qualified teachers for dual language programs. In a series of interviews, district administrators shared the specific needs and challenges of staffing programs to serve their English language learner populations (ELL).
We found that districts use a number of tactics to meeting individual needs of the student, maintaining long-term program leadership at both the school and district level, recruiting qualified teachers and support staff, providing training and professional development for staff, and securing adequate funding to meet program and hiring needs. Whichever strategies they were employing – and each district was employing several – our participants all seemed to feel that their best chance of getting teachers for their dual language programs lay within.
We reviewed the existing policy literature on Dual Language funding and incentive programs in Washington State, and attempted to provide definitions of teacher and classroom support roles in Dual Language programs. The most successful program from the policy seemed to be PESB's Grow Your Own Initiative.
This paper also shares interview findings to identify themes of opportunities and challenges at the district level. These challenges represent state policy and funding distribution, and are, ultimately, unique to each district.
While bilingualism means the ability to fluently speak in two languages, biliteracy denotes an individual’s ability to fluently speak, read, listen, and write proficiently in two languages. Today, many educational programs are focusing on pursuing bi-literacy, including the recent creation of a Seal of Biliteracy award that students can earn upon high school graduation. To earn this distinction, students must participate in a five-year, rigorous, standards-based program and demonstrate mastery of listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in both languages on high-stakes assessments.
An important distinction between the EL certified workforce and the bilingual certified workforce is that EL teachers teach in English, not in their students’ primary language. Because dual language program education requires teachers to instruct in both languages, EL teachers are not inherently qualified to meet the needs of students in a dual language classroom.
There are measurable benefits for both bilingual and bi-literate students. Studies have shown bilingual individuals have stronger brains, better attention and task-switching capacities, adjust better to environmental changes, and experience less cognitive decline associated with aging. Additionally, bilingual individuals tend to be globally-minded citizens who develop multi-cultural understanding and are able to maintain strong familial and cultural ties via communication with native-language speaking family members.
Using structure-agent implementation theory as a foundation for our analysis, we were able to effectively compare key inputs to the policy framework that was constant across districts—namely, the status quo, rules, roles, values, and interests of district agents that ultimately feed back into policy a the state level.
