Dual Language Implementation Science - Program Implementation, Integrity, and Sustainability Support
Dual Language Leadership: Critical Leadership Actions for Success & Sustainability:
This course serves as a critical foundation for educators charged with beginning and/or implementing a dual language program and supporting its curriculum development, instructional planning and delivery, and assessment of learners in dual language programs. This course is a fundamental part of developing and customizing the design year action plan that ensures an effective program implementation and alignment with the seven GP3 strands. Participants will build their capacity around the latest theories, research, and best practices that are reflective of effective one-way and two-way dual language programs, transitional bilingual programs, and transitional programs of instruction.
This course also analyzes the implications of such programs on decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, practice, and assessment for the various language learner programs. As a result of this course, dual language school communities leave with a comprehensive and step by step implementation plan that includes timelines, shared responsibilities, and progress monitoring checks.
Systems and Sustainability Planning -Consultancy & TS:
It is critical that school communities with Dual Language programs seek support. Implementing an effective and sustainable Dual Language program requires the proper buy-in, expertise, building culture, pedagogy & practices, additive learning environment, resources, and more. Our technical support begins with a partnership for program implementation and equity for multilingual learners. Additional strategic supports included are:
- Design a 5-year professional learning plan for all layers of the school system that includes solutions for differentiated and blended capacity and knowledge-building.
- Augmentation of current tools and development of new tools, processes, protocols, policies that create a seamless and coherent relationship between district-level priorities, systems, and infrastructures with those needed for an effective and sustainable dual language program
- Strategically plan for, integrate, implement, and develop systems to ensure the sustainability of all components of the Dual Language Data Framework®
- Use the Dual Language Data Framework® to design, communicate, implement, and improve the MTSS process and resources needed (including evidence-based diagnostic assessments, interventions, bilingual and biliterate specialists, etc.) as well as the process for the identification of dual language students with individualized educational needs
Socio-cultural Competency, Equity, and Anti-bias in Dual Language Education:
This course serves as a critical foundation for teachers, school leaders, and district-level administrators to confront and dismantle the systemic inequities that exist in schools. These inequities pose barriers and long-term consequences for oppressed and less privileged student populations. This course is critical in understanding, analyzing, and evaluating individual and systemic bias, prejudice, oppression, and gaps in opportunity for students who historically do not come from positions of power. Participants will learn to use the power of diverse testimonies to provide insight around opportunity gaps, in order to select strategies that redistribute opportunity and power. Participants will analyze their school’s gap data in order to design and defend an action plan that prioritizes the time, attention, capacity-building efforts, and resources needed for educators to learn, apply, and sustain equity shifts in their educational context.
Designing Equity-based, Integrated, Biliteracy, and Thematic Model Units (and Yearlong Scope & Sequence):
This course is designed to ensure dual-language and bilingual teachers and leaders have the foundational knowledge, guidance, and program aligned process for developing yearlong integrated and thematic biliteracy curriculum maps, as well as units of integrated instruction that connect content, global citizenship, language acquisition, and cross-content practices across both program languages. Course participants will use the content practices and standards, second language acquisition theory, language development standards, and social justice standards to map and develop integrated units using a backwards design approach.
As essential components of the instructional design process, each map and model unit will include: essential questions, authentic assessments, explicit oracy, authentic instructional strategies for a holistic approach for improving learning in biliterate and bilingual ways, and strategies for using cross-linguistic connections to transfer and encode learning within both program languages. and learning activities that build content mastery, global citizenship; and language acquisition in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
Dual language and Emergent Bilingual Data Dashboards:
Dual language and emergent bilingual-specific dashboards provide a coherent tool that empowers districts to collect, analyze, communicate, and make decisions based on a more accurate understanding of equity & dual-language-aligned metrics. Centralized, interactive, and disaggregated data that are coordinated with district accountability metrics give leaders and educators more accurate, trustworthy, and meaningful information to capitalize on successes, identify strategies and processes needed to catalyze growth, and achieve goals.
Needs Assessment with Staffing & Community Feasibility:
Our collaborative needs assessments offer a means to identify the most effectively matched program model, practices, and/or assessment plan for the demographic served within a school community, as well as the opportunity to strategically adjust the timeline and design a 1 – 5 year long professional development and coaching plan based on the unique landscape and readiness of each educational community. Careful diagnosis of each district’s (1) program and system needs, (2) fit, (3) teacher, leader, and community, and (4) and potential timeline for implementation.
The needs determined by this fact-finding process, along with recommended timeline and needed supports based on that school community’s current context, are communicated formally with the site coordinator to the entire dual language leadership team. The collaborative needs assessments offer schools a clear path for moving forward more strategically with all future plans and decisions reflecting both the needs and complexity of each district to ensure implementation success. Our process is meant to be methodical and flexible depending on context-based factors.