A grant from the U.S. Department of Education to the Indiana University School of Education will pay for a five-year project to better prepare teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs) before the teachers begin their careers, develop skills of current teachers, and revise methods of IU faculty. The national professional development grant of just under one and a half million dollars will fund a partnership between the School of Education at IUPUI and the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS).

Over the course of five years, IU faculty plan to revise university curricula, evaluate teacher effectiveness, and prepare more secondary content teachers for IPS schools. Three IPS schools will be working in the program. At the end of five years, project directors plan to have prepared 75 “master teachers,” instructors who can mentor new teachers entering ELL teaching.

“The funding will allow us to transform not only what we do here at the university in terms of modeling the kind of pedagogy that works for diverse learners,” project director Annela Teemant, associate professor of language education at IUPUI, said. “It allows us to go in the public school setting and work with teachers who are already in the field, to build on the good things that they’re already doing.”

The numbers of ELL students in IPS has grown dramatically over the last several years. The Indiana Department of Education reports IPS had 3,244 “limited English students” in the school year 2005-06. A decade earlier, IPS had 257.

This project is intended to focus on working with such students in areas aside from language acquisition. Faculty from other IU departments will be a part of the program, including science and mathematics. “We call them English language learners,” Teemant said, “but they’re not only learning English. They’re learning academic content simultaneously.” Teemant said the program will focus on how well such students can pick up on other concepts while trying to master a new language.

Associate professor of language education and project co-director Beth Berghoff said while the project focuses on three IPS schools—an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school—the development of master teachers will touch the entire system when the project is done. “It will start with three schools and get them up and running in a way that lets other schools see what the possibilities are,” Berghoff said. “And we can branch from those three to three more to three more. It’s a building process.”

The project outlines a four-phase implementation, beginning with the university and schools articulating a vision for the program. Professional development for university faculty and public school teachers will then focus on redesigning curriculum and methods. The third phase will take those redesigns into the classrooms. The program concludes with evaluations of teacher training, teacher performance, and student achievement.

Berghoff said that the redesign of teacher education curricula that will come from the work will improve all aspects of preparing educators. “We create a better urban teacher when we have this as our focus and everybody learns more about what these children need in specific, but what all children need.”

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Teemant says the 5-year program will focus on providing more and better experience for the new teachers of English language learners:
“We’ll be able to create across 5 years 75 exemplary placements for teacher candidates. We’ll work with elementary, middle and high schools, so when we put student teachers out into the field who have an English as a new language credential attached to their licensing they’ve actually been in a classroom where English language learners are. Because it is possible to get the degree and never have worked with an English language learner, but more than that they’ll have in their student teaching experience the exact model from an expert master teacher in the public school setting of how they can transform their classroom, what kind of activity centers work with children and how we can get all children using more language and developing higher order thinking skills.”

Berghoff says the change the program will bring about in the IU teacher education program will benefit not just those who teach English language learners:
“The interesting thing about what you need to know to teach ELL children well is what you need to know to be a good teacher. So the beauty of focusing on this as our way to improve our preparation for teachers is it helps us in every other aspect of our teacher education program. We create a better urban teacher when we have this as our focus and everybody learns more about what these children need in specific, but what all children need.”

The grant helps fulfill a longtime and growing need, says Berghoff:
“Ten years ago we started hearing from IPS ‘We need more teachers. We have to have some teachers who can meet the needs of these students.’ We’ve slowly tried to build programs so that we were graduating more teachers that had the ESL endorsements. 5 years ago we attempted to get this grant and we didn’t succeed so we had to sort of limp along for another 5 years. We’re thrilled now to finally have this kind of resourcing so that we can work in the schools. “We can work here at the University and we can build something that will sustain the kind of change----what we’ve learned is that change isn’t going away and we have to have mechanisms to stay on top of the kind of change we’re going to see. So this helps us build the kind of infrastructure for that to happen.”

For More Information, Contact:

Chuck Carney
Director of Communications and Media Relations
Office: (812) 856-8027
ccarney@indiana.educcarney@indiana.edu