Chapter 6: The Effects of a Novel Teacher Professional Development Model on Student Achievement in Spanish/English Dual Language Programs

The past decades witnessed an increasing popularity of dual language programs (DLP). However, issues such as the effective evaluation of DLPs and teacher professional development (TPD) for DLPs started to emerge (Xia et al., 2022). Part of this conversation involves the known debate on how TPD translates into better student outcomes in terms of assessment scores, and specifically, how difficult it is to measure the effects of TPD on student performance (e.g., Wallace, 2009; Yoon et al., 2007). This study takes all of the above into consideration, and contributes to the limited literature of the effectiveness of TPDs in relation to student performance. Specifically, this study examines how the Lesson Study With Video Clubs (LSVC) TPD model is effective in terms of students’ literacy and mathematics performance (Xia et al., 2022).

For decades educators and educational researchers have been facing the challenge of how teacher professional development (TPD) translates into improved academic achievement (e.g., Garet et al., 2008; Kutaka et al., 2017). Despite the difficulty of identifying causal relationships and/or associations between TPDs and student outcomes in terms of standardized test scores, obtaining large-scale student outcome data associated with teachers who participate in TPDs has also been a great obstacle. Effective TPDs share some common features (e.g., Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995), but limited formats of TPDs have been successful so far due to various reasons such as relevance to content, sustainability, and accessibility, just to name a few. This study examines student data from two school districts, comparing student outcomes based on whether or not their teachers participated in a novel TPD, Lesson Study With Video Club (LSVC) in dual language programs (DLP). We aim to investigate if the LSVC TPD model, which focused on integrating literacy and mathematics instructional practices, was effective or not in terms of student outcomes in both English language proficiency and mathematics standardized testing results.