Leading Turnaround Instructional Improvement for Dual Language Learners: Designing an Immersive Professional Learning Program to Invigorate Secondary Teachers’ Multilingual, Interdisciplinary Planning and Teaching Practices through Focusing on Emergent Bilingual Students’ Biliteracy Writing Skills Development
Abstract
Addressing the academic performance deficiencies associated with the growing percentages of immigrant/emergent bilingual learners and other culturally and linguistically diverse sub-groups comprising the student populations of many K-12 school districts in the United States continues to be an acute challenge facing school change agent leaders. This article profiles how one high school principal and his instructional improvement colleagues working in a high-diversity metropolitan school district in the southwestern US utilized design-based improvement research methodologies (i.e., multileveled data analysis processes coupled with targeted intervention program development techniques) widely supported in the education improvement science literature to drive turnaround instructional improvement for emergent bilingual learners on their campus. The multi-week intervention program developed and implemented by the principal and his intervention team included carefully structured immersive learning experiences to assist grade-level teams of teachers in gaining multilingualism literature–informed knowledge and skills on how to effectively integrate writing development–intensive dual language learning projects into their instructional planning efforts and classroom teaching practices to significantly expand and deepen biliteracy-centered interdisciplinary learning for the campus’s large populations of emergent bilingual and other culturally and linguistically diverse students. The article includes a discussion of how campus-based instructional leaders can leverage school-wide root causal data analysis techniques in tandem with design-based interventionist methods that incorporate the intentional use of writing development–intensive dual language project learning strategies as powerful turnaround instructional improvement tools for expanding and enhancing the biliteracy, interdisciplinary academic development of multilingual learners in high-diversity school districts.