Chapter 4: Professional Development in Support of English Learner Achievement: Science and ESOL Educator Collaborations

In the United States, there is no question that English Learners (ELs) are coming to a diverse range of high school contexts in ever-growing numbers. Each school with its own unique characteristics and contexts faces the challenge of assisting ELs in achieving academic parity with their native-speaker peers in keeping with federal mandates. As schools adapt local supports and practices accordingly, they are turning to professional development as a critical means of meeting the linguistic, cultural and academic needs of all of their students. This chapter narrates the experiences of three such U.S. high schools as they meet these challenges through teacher-centered and teacher-generated professional development. Interdisciplinary teams collaborated to build understanding of their schools’ ELs and developed instructional supports that fit their schools and classrooms. Three teams comprised of two ESOL specialists and two content area teachers (math and science) from three geographically and demographically distinct districts—one urban, one mid-size city and one suburban—worked together to build capacitance for their buildings’ ELs and their teachers. The goals, processes and outcomes of these collaborations are presented along with teachers’ reflections on participating in this unique form of professional development aimed to assist the ELs in their buildings, but which, as they emphasize, resulted in much more. Though both a math and science teacher were members of each team, we focus here on the three science teachers and the strategies and interventions collectively devised to address the particular challenges of the discipline in the three varied school contexts. We begin by situating professional development for teachers of ELs as it is currently conceptualized and practiced in the specialized literature.