The Context

There are multiple challenges in rural schools regarding ELs in the state of Texas. Ours is a state in which 7.3% of rural students are ELs (Johnson, Showalter, Klein, & Lester, 2014). Many Texas teachers do not have the opportunities for training that many of their urban colleagues do (Mollenkopf, 2009), and there are multiple schools that struggle to fill math and ESL teacher vacancies (The Rural School and Community Trust, 2004). As a result, professional development (PD) programs for inservice rural teachers must strive to serve as many of these teachers’ needs as possible. With this aim in mind, a state university and 15 rural or small (in some cases, rural and small) districts in north Texas partnered to propose Science and Mathematics for All: Rural Teacher Training through Technology for English Learners (SMARTTTEL), a 5-year PD project sponsored by the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA). Since 2012, this project has aimed to help fill the gap between the need for qualified teachers and the increasing number of ELs in rural schools, and ultimately, to improve the science and mathematics achievement of this student population.

The Project

Assisted by learning technologies, SMARTTTEL is operationalizing its goals of doubling the effect of PD in rural schools and filling the gaps of qualified content teachers of ELs by (1) training three cohorts of 4th- through 12th-grade math and science teachers (54 teachers in all) via four online research-based graduate courses and a face-to-face summer institute and (2) facilitating the transformation of these teachers into ESL mentors of willing peers at their respective schools. Through the first component, participating teachers learn about and research second language acquisition theories, are exposed to and implement culturally responsible pedagogy; design and teach lessons that address content and language objectives via ESL strategies and methods, and study and practice effective mentoring techniques. This mentoring component provides the foundation for participants to become teacher mentors and thus extend the impact of their PD in the schools and districts they serve. Each SMARTTTEL participant is responsible for finding a colleague at the participant’s school who is interested in learning about ESL education and how to better prepare to work with the ELs in the classroom.

The Mentoring Experience

The mentoring activities are designed to be progressively included in every graduate course that SMARTTTEL participants take. The standalone mentoring course is the culminating course where the SMARTTTEL participants work intensively with their mentees under a university faculty member’s supervision. As mentors, teachers provide support to their mentees in EL education; they work together in incorporating Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (Texas Education Agency, 2015), Texas English Language Proficiency Standards (Texas Education Agency, 2007), and Texas College and Career Readiness Standards (Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, 2009) into their math and science instruction using ESL methods. At this point in the program, the first of three cohorts of teachers is completing that last course. Highlights from the mentoring experience of the first 16 SMARTTTEL teachers are included in this article.

Getting to Know Their Mentee

During the first course, Second Language Acquisition, each of the 16 teachers identified a peer in their schools who had ELLs in his or her classroom and who was willing to invest time in the mentoring relationship. They used Pica’s Questionnaire (Pica, 1994) to get to know their mentees better. Reporting on her findings, one teacher reflected about her peer:

Mrs. D believes cultural integration is extremely necessary to the student learning a second language. “A person cannot fully comprehend the culture around them if they do not understand the language or the nuances that accompany it,” Mrs. D said. [She] admits she is not exactly certain as how to best assist students that have reached a plateau in their L2 learning. It is my hope that as I learn more through these courses I can become a resource and assist in this area.

Another teacher mentor wrote:

I chose Mrs. L as my mentee for this assignment. Mrs. L works with ELL students in K through 4th grade on my campus…Mrs. L believes that the stronger or weaker a student is in their first language determines how easy or difficult learning a new language can be. She has observed that the students who are high readers in Spanish seem to have less difficulty learning to read in English. I feel almost like I should be her mentee and she my mentor! I'm sure though we will both gain some useful information through our work together this coming year.

Identifying challenges and proposing solutions

In the Education in Culturally Diverse Environments course, teacher mentors worked with their mentees to reflect on and contrast the challenges teachers and ELs face in rural schools, as reported in different research articles, with their own challenges. They also proposed possible ways of addressing them. For example, one teacher mentor had a discussion with her 4th-grade teacher mentee and reported that they had been able to conclude that the lower graduation rates for immigrants in rural schools versus metropolitan areas discussed in the literature did not apply to their district “because most of our ELL population are not recent immigrants and they are almost all from Mexico. Thus, there is a common language and background for our ELLs.” However, they saw other challenges and solutions, among them the following:

Mrs. K felt the biggest challenge for teachers in our district is when we receive those few students who are newcomers. Our program focuses on providing ESL services within the regular content areas. For newcomers, this is often not enough help in the area of gaining the English language. Thus, having a designated pullout ESL teacher for those few students would be helpful. We are working on having our new translator become highly qualified so that she can then help these students in this way.

Producing mentoring materials

As part of their growth as mentors, in the ESL Methods course, teachers in SMARTTTEL’s first cohort prepared multimedia products to enhance their colearning interaction with their mentees. These products reflected current principles, practices, and methods for the implementation of sheltered instruction in their science and mathematics classrooms. Participants visited with their mentees for feedback on the lesson plans that they were developing and sought their input to select the one to be videotaped. This videotape would be used for future mentoring and training.

Changing paradigms

The 16 members in the first cohort are currently taking the last course of the program, ESL Mentoring for Mathematics and Science Teachers, in which they are learning how to practice successful peer mentoring. They are also providing structured support to mentees as their culminating activity in the course. In reflecting about effective mentoring methods and their new acquired role as mentor, one teacher found a different paradigm:

I had never really thought about mentoring/coaching as a co-collaborative effort. In my educational experience coaching is and has been, the mentor teacher telling the other teacher what they are doing wrong and how to fix the problem. I believe with this collaborative method of mentoring, the teacher would definitely be more open to advice and more eager to work with a coach or mentor.

Another teacher mentor was able to transpose colearning, openness, and equality as characteristics of effective mentoring to the relationship with her mentee in this way:

I am always trying new strategies and activities. Sometimes they are wonderful and sometimes they are complete failures. I need the support from my peers to know that it is okay to try and fail. I also need their encouragement to keep trying new practices. As a mentor, I need to offer the same support and encouragement to my mentee.

The Content Teacher as a Language Teacher

At this point in the program, participating teachers have recognized their role in the language development of their ELs and the effect that this has on their disposition to integrate language objectives into their lessons. Throughout the last course, mentors are facilitating this process for their mentees and in some cases more evidently than in others, leading them to think “outside the box” and eliminate a common assumption among content and even language teachers:

We had already discussed how some of our ESL students were struggling in some aspects of regular classroom work. After reading practice 3 [part of their reading assignments], we felt like we had some insight into why and how this had occurred. We had never even considered that our ELLs might be misidentified in their proficiency levels of English language development because of the early childhood programs they were taking part in.

Furthermore, most teacher mentors have been able to rationalize with their mentees the need to incorporate activities that help ELs develop their language skills, especially once they have realized that in many instances their students’ struggles to reach content standards have some of their roots in a limited academic vocabulary. With the teacher mentor’s knowledge of total participation techniques (Himmele & Himmele, 2011), sheltered instruction observation protocol, and other ESL strategies learned throughout SMARTTTEL’s graduate courses, mentees have come up with ways to address this issue. Some mentors have reported:

We will be using foldables, writing prompts and sentence starters, graphic organizers, word walls, and interactive notebooks as tools to help our students more deeply comprehend the content-specific terms and definitions. We will have them writing, reading, speaking, and listening in every class period.

Clarifying for the student is important and creating an environment in which the ELL students feel comfortable to ask for extra explanation is a must.

Total participation techniques would be very beneficial to ensure student participation and understanding. Using thumbs up, pair-share, and other strategies will help ELL students make connections and conclusions working with a partner. Sentence stems will provide them with academic vocabulary to expand on the new concept when sharing with their partner.

New PD Needs

By working collectively and collaboratively, it was easier for both mentor and mentee to identify their professional development needs. After evaluating the PD that their respective schools offered, a mentor and her mentee concluded that they “generally have ESL training; however, it is not necessarily what will help the teachers . . . one area that ranked really low was the one where all teachers who have ELLs have substantial training in sheltered instruction methods.” Another mentor reported the needs her mentee had considered based on the needs of the ELs in his science class: “Ben identified his pedagogical needs to include strategies for structured conversations to include academic language and group activities to include speaking.”

We have also found that the use of technology to deliver online professional development helps to better meet the needs of rural educators as it provides opportunities for participation in multiple communities of practice. Through targeted and focused interaction with other educators in virtual spaces, teacher mentors may begin to acquire both access to resources and a sense of control over their own professional learning in a manner similar to that of their more urban/suburban counterparts. From such experiences, participants acquire the tools necessary for appropriately evaluating web resources for accuracy and support of student learning.

References

Himmele, P., & Himmele, W. (2011). Total participation techniques: Making every student an active learner. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Johnson, J., Showalter, D., Klein, R., & Lester, C. (2014). Why rural matters 2012-13: The condition of rural education in the 50 states. A Report of the Rural School and Community Trust Policy Program. Retrieved from http://www.ruraledu.org/user_uploads/file/2013-14-Why-Rural-Matters.pdf

Mollenkopf, D. L. (2009). Creating highly qualified teachers: Maximizing university resources to provide professional development in rural areas. The Rural Educator, 30(3), 34–39.

Pica, T. (1994). Questions from the language classroom: Research perspectives. TESOL Quarterly, 28,48–79. doi: 10.2307/3587198

Texas Education Agency. (2007). Chapter 74. Curriculum requirements Subchapter A. Required curriculum: §74.4. English language proficiency standards. Texas Administrative Code. Retrieved from http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter074/ch074a.html

Texas Education Agency. (2015). Texas essential knowledge and skills. Retrieved from http://tea.texas.gov/index2.aspx?id=6148

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. (2009). Texas college and career readiness standards. Available at http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/download.cfm?downloadfile=EAE69736-B39D-F3FF-EA777519F1F0348B &typename=dmFile&fieldname=filename

Liliana Grosso, MA, is the project coordinator for SMARTTTEL. Her research interests have focused on preservice and inservice teacher training and parent involvement.

Holly Hansen-Thomas, PhD, is an associate professor of ESL and Bilingual Education and the project director for SMARTTTEL. Her research interests include ESL training for mainstream secondary level teachers; ELs’ development of academic language in the content areas, with an emphasis in mathematics and science; and how the language awareness paradigm can be used in these contexts.