Collaborative Practices for Secondary EL-Designated Multilingual Learners: National Survey Results
Presenters: Amanda Kibler (Oregon State University) and Martha Castellón Palacios (WestEd)
Danny Torres:
Welcome to our first session of the Where the Evidence Leads Webinar Series, brought to you by the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners. Our topic today: Collaborative Practices for Secondary EL-Designated Multilingual Learners. We’ll be sharing preliminary results from a national survey. Presenting today we have Amanda Kibler out of Oregon State University and Martha Castellón Palacios at WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us.
My name is Danny Torres. I’m Associate Director of Events and Digital Media for WestEd. I’ll be your host. Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. WestEd is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that aims to improve the lives of children and adults at all ages of learning and development. We do this by addressing challenges in education and human development, reducing opportunity gaps, and helping build communities where all can thrive. Now, I’d like to introduce Martha Garrett Sandstead. Martha is part of the research team for the center, working out of Oregon State University. She’ll be moderating the session today. Martha, take it away.
Martha Sandstead:
Good afternoon. Thank you all for being here. I am Martha Sandstead, and I’m so pleased to introduce today’s session. The National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners is funded by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, the nation’s leading source for rigorous independent education research, evaluation, and statistics. The center works to bridge research and practice bidirectionally and to identify the biggest barriers and opportunities in America to English Learner success in order to significantly advance the capacity of educators, policymakers, and research to serve students who are classified as English Learners.
The Center’s current studies seek to identify and describe the systemic barriers that prevent secondary English Learners from successfully accessing the general curriculum, and to develop and test innovative, educative curriculum materials and teacher development models that enable these students to reach their full potential. I am pleased to introduce today’s webinar, the first in a series of bimonthly webinars the center will host this year, titled, “Where the Evidence Leads: Preliminary Findings from IES-Funded English Learner Research.” Today’s researchers will show findings from a national survey on collaborative practices for secondary EL-designated Multilingual Learners and discuss how co-teaching and collaboration vary in implementation across the United States.
I’m so pleased to introduce Dr. Castellón Palacios, a senior researcher associate at WestEd, where she provides technical assistance to states and districts as they work to serve the needs of their Multilingual Learners. A former bilingual teacher and ESL educator, she has led several professional development efforts for teachers and administrators, and has served as a reviewer of English Learner programs and services throughout the country. Dr. Castellón Palacios holds a PhD from Stanford University.
Dr. Kibler is a professor in the College of Education at Oregon State University whose research focuses on the classroom experiences of secondary English Learners and their teachers. A former ESL teacher at the secondary level, she has served as principal investigator on several grants and has published extensively in the field of multilingualism and secondary English Learner education. Dr. Kibler holds a PhD from Stanford University. Take it away.
Amanda Kibler:
Thank you so much for that introduction, Martha, and welcome everyone. And, a particular welcome to those of you who have participated in our research so far and are coming back to check in to see what we’ve learned. So, collaborative teaching models in which ESL or ELD teachers and content teachers collaborate to provide integrated language and content instruction- these are increasingly prominent, but they remain understudied. This study explored the prevalence, structure, and implementation of these models in diverse educational contexts. Today, we’ll be talking about the national survey that we conducted in hearing from districts across the US to describe the prevalence and characteristics of collaborative practices, including but not limited to co-teaching, which are undertaken at the secondary level. We’ll go to the next slide. Alright, so first, a quick thanks to our team who participated in various data-collection and analysis activities. A special shout-out to OSU graduate students and postdocs: Jaclyn Bovee, Jamey Burho, Sarah Howard, Martha Sandstead, Sara Wiger, and Karrie Woodruff. Thank you all so much.
So, one question that we are often asked is, well, what do you mean by collaborative practices of collaboration, and how does co-teaching fit into that? So, for the purposes of this survey study, we drew upon a popular framework for a collaborative instructional cycle from Honigsfeld and Dove, and it helped our survey respondents really think about these key activities in which co-teachers engage. So, co-planning, co-teaching, co-assessing, and co-reflecting. So, in this cycle, co-teaching, which we defined for the study as two certified teachers working together in the same classroom, it’s one of those four interrelated practices. And so, we’re often asked about, well, what are these collaborative practices for? And for our study, we were particularly looking at integrated language and content courses. So, the teachers work together to support content courses that integrate both the teaching of language and content. So, in our work, we found that at the secondary level, these courses do typically count for content credit rather than ESL or elective credit. And, also, they may be provided instead of or in addition to designated ELD, depending on state and district policies.
They may also be provided for some or all EL-designated students. And, this tends to depend on the recency of students’ arrival, their language proficiency, their academic progress, among other factors. And, we have also found that these courses are usually linguistically heterogeneous with both EL- and non-EL-designated students, but that does vary across settings. So, with those pieces in place of both the collaborative practices and the content courses, we’ll turn to our research questions. So, we used qualitative and quantitative findings from a national survey of K-12 district English Learner program directors to answer the following. One, how prevalent are collaborative practices in US school districts that serve secondary Multilingual Learners designated as ELs? And, how do collaborative practices and districts’ support for them vary? It’s important to note here that we are not attempting to assess the effectiveness of programs that use collaborative practices, so our aim here is to instead describe programs currently in place so that we can offer a portrait of what is happening nationally. We also aim to understand how district-level demographic differences might be shaping programs and how they engage in collaborative practices.
So, I’ll begin by synthesizing some of what we already know from research in this area. So, calls for more equitable learning opportunities for EL-designated students are urgent, but they’re especially complex in secondary schools. Collaborative practices have been developed in part in response to concerns about pull-out or separate ESL or ELD classes. One of the concerns found in research is that when EL-designated students are placed into separate ESL classes, they’re excluded from other courses, including both required content courses and electives. And, so, they may miss out on earning required credits for graduation. Second, as secondary schools continue to be held accountable to standardized testing and other graduation requirements, this quest continues for instructional practices that really can effectively facilitate EL-designated students’ learning across the curriculum in a new language. And, so, approaches that pull students from secondary content courses to, quote-unquote, “teach language in isolation” have come under increasing critique both theoretically and empirically as being ineffective in facilitating language development or academic success on their own. And, so, we also know that at the secondary level, collaborative practices are often more challenging to implement for a variety of reasons. Prominent among them are, there’s an increased number of different classrooms through which students are moving throughout the day.
Secondary content teachers’ knowledge, which in middle and high school especially, is often very specialized according to the content areas. And also, teachers’ work is also increasingly compartmentalized at the secondary level, which can limit collaboration. So, what do we know about collaborative practices at the secondary level? So, in relation to empirical work, studies have found that administrators play notable roles in providing resources valued by collaborating teachers. I know many of you are in administrative positions, and so you know this well. We mentioned a few of these ideas here. So, administrators, particularly at the school level, can play important roles in fostering collaboration and a sense of collective responsibility for EL students among all teachers, and in encouraging teacher ownership of students and instructional programs through shared decision-making. Administrators at the school and district levels can strategically allocate staffing and create master schedules that allow for common planning time. And, we also know that administrators play important roles in connecting teachers to professional learning opportunities, or PD, which they tend to value highly. And, so, research into teachers’ participation and their roles and collaborative practices at secondary grades- this research, as well as our own work, suggests that teachers often collaborate differently with every single partner with whom they work.
However, there are some general trends that are present and worth mentioning. First, we’ve found that collaboration does occur across multiple content areas, from English language arts, or ELA, to math, science, social studies, among others. The importance of co-planning is a consistent theme in the literature on collaborative practices. Teachers value this time, which is often scarce. And, it has a very strong impact on the other collaborative practices. So, in terms of co-teaching itself, there’s a consensus that the one-teach and one-assist model in which an ESL or ELD teacher helps individual students as the content teacher leads the instruction, it is the most prominent, even though it’s typically seen as less effective than other approaches. And, this is particularly likely as an outcome when co-planning time is limited. Studies also suggest that ESL teachers’ status in the classroom can be marginalized, especially when teachers’ roles are not well-defined, and when content learning takes precedence over language development.
And, so, what don’t we know about collaborative practices at the secondary level? Still to date, we do not have a comprehensive picture of how prominent collaborative practices are, how often they appear, and how district-level contextual factors may correlate with these practices. So, now, we’ll turn to our survey itself. So, we surveyed school districts across the country that had at least 500 students that taught students in grades 6-8 or 6-12, and in which at least 5 percent of the student body were designated as English Learners. And, in order to better understand the impact of those district-level contextual factors, we stratified our sample to include districts in both urban and rural settings; in districts with more and fewer than 12,000 students, which we called medium, large, and small, respectively; and then, districts with higher or lower percentages of EL-designated students, either above or below 10 percent. And, so, in each district, the Title III or the equivalent leader of English Learner or multilingual programs was invited to participate in our survey. And, we had 216 responses to the survey overall.
I’ll mention a few details about data collection and analysis. So, we drew upon features of co-teaching and collaborative practices described above to develop these potential questions for our survey. So, drafts of the questions were reviewed by researchers in the field, some of you who are here today, and educators as well, at school, district, and national levels. We undertook multiple rounds of cognitive interviews with Title III leaders to further refine the survey. And, so, the survey questions used in data collection address the five areas that you see at the top of the slide. So, we asked about the presence of collaborative practices, co-teaching roles and ESL teacher status, the content areas and levels in which collaborative practices occur, the frequency of those practices, and district support for them. In the survey itself, we also presented and defined the four different types of collaboration adapted for the instructional cycle mentioned earlier- co-planning, co-teaching, co-assessing, and co-reflecting.
Further, we explained that our questions focused on collaborative practices undertaken to support secondary EL-designated students, rather than other subpopulations, and that it did involve certified teachers, both ESL and content area, working together. So, we used the survey software Qualtrics, and we emailed all our potential respondents to invite them to participate in the online survey in May 2021. The response window was open for six weeks, and we sent some reminder emails. So, for analysis, the quantitative analysis of closed-ended questions was explored to identify patterns in collaborative practices and how they relate to those district characteristics I mentioned- so, size, urbanicity, and percentage of EL population.
This work was led by colleagues at the Oregon State University Survey Research Center using survey weights to account for the stratified sample and for non-responses. And, chi-squared tests were run on the survey data. The qualitative analysis of the open-ended responses was undertaken using a thematic content analysis, and it really tried to align to the key concepts in the survey so we could explore district leaders’ explanations of how and why collaborative practices were occurring as they did. [No Audio]
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Thank you Amanda. So, as we get into our findings, I’d just like to state for those of you who may have just joined the webinar that this study that we’re reporting on today is a descriptive study meant to describe the prevalence of collaborative practices between ESL teachers and content teachers in districts with various characteristics. We did not set out to test the effectiveness of co-teaching. That is a study for another day, one that I’m sure we’re all interested in. And now, onto our findings. We found that more than 70 percent of district leaders in our survey reported that collaborative practices serving English Learner-designated students were present in their district at that time. When district characteristics were considered, there was a significant difference by urbanicity. Urban districts were more likely to report these practices than rural districts. Among those districts who reported engaging in any collaborative practices, we asked further questions about the specific collaborative practices.
Co-planning and co-reflecting were the most commonly reported practices overall, with 78 percent of district leaders reporting that at least some teachers engage in each of these practices. This was followed, in decreasing order, by co-assessing and co-teaching. In looking at differences by district type, there were two significant relationships. First, co-planning was more commonly reported in districts with more than 10 percent English Learner-designated Multilingual Learners than in those with fewer than 10 percent. Second, co-teaching was more commonly reported in medium or large districts than in small districts with fewer students. All collaborative practices were reported more commonly in middle school than in high school. Both resources and instructional capacity played roles in the prevalence of collaborative instructional models.
Overall, qualitative findings explained many challenges to engaging in collaborative practices, including finding and funding staff, scheduling collaboration time, serving large and diverse student populations, and assessing the impact of collaborative practices. Many districts also mentioned various disruptions caused by the pandemic, as this study took place in 2021. District leaders did not, however, mention organizational capacity as challenges that prevented districts from engaging in collaborative practices. And, by organizational capacity, we mean teacher motivation and willingness to learn and share with other teachers. Districts that responded to our survey reported on the content areas in which each of the four collaborative practices took place at both middle and high school levels. The most notable trend was that English language arts was by far the most common content area for all the collaborative practices, across both middle and high school levels. Between 92 percent and 100 percent of district leaders reported that this was a content area in which collaborative practices occurred. Collaboration was reported in math, science, and social studies by between 52 percent and 85 percent of district leaders, depending on the practice and grade-level band.
Collaborative practices were rare in the visual performing arts and PE. None of these content areas differed by district characteristics at statistically significant levels. Although districts reported aspiring to provide integrated language and content instruction in all areas, when we examined our open-ended responses, we found that they mentioned only ELA, math, science, and social studies as subjects in which collaboration took place. Respondents also reported the general frequency with which collaborative practice took place among teachers in their districts. Across both grade-level bands, the four collaborative practices were most often reported to occur weekly. However, some noticeable differences by grade-level band exist. For example, districts reported daily co-teaching more frequently in middle school than in high school. And again, none of these frequencies differed by district characteristics at statistically significant levels. In our open-ended responses, the frequency of collaboration ranged from daily checks on student progress, like grades and missing work, to monthly co-reflection on student data. ESL teachers, who I’ll also be referring to as ESOL teachers, were reported to attend many additional meetings with varied frequency to address the needs of English Learner-designated students, much more so than content teachers.
Because co-teaching practices play a large role in the literature on collaborative practices overall, we asked respondents to describe these in greater detail. The responses were not mutually exclusive, in that districts might have said both were frequent, but 59 percent of districts reported that ESL co-teachers often or always assisted individual students, while the content teacher led instruction. And, only in 32 percent of districts did ESL co-teachers co-lead instruction. Also, almost two-thirds of districts indicated that the ESL teachers were often or always treated as having equal status as the content teacher in co-teaching classrooms. These co-teaching practices did not differ systematically by district characteristics. The open-ended responses to survey questions show interesting nuances. For example, districts described practices consistent with the one-teach, one-assist model of co-teaching. One respondent noted, “It is more common for one teacher to take the lead . . . and the other to perform a support function.” The same respondent acknowledged, however, that “the EL teacher should not just be ‘popping in’ to a classroom to assist while considering it co-teaching.”
The open-ended responses also show that the issue of status remains important in co-teaching situations. While some respondents said that ESL teachers are usually treated as equals to content teachers, others noted that the status differentials were still present. For example, one respondent explained, “There are too many classroom teachers that still consider English Learners not their responsibility, and do not consider the experience and skills of the ESOL teacher of value.” Some responses suggested that the content teacher ultimately holds the power to make pedagogical and curricular decisions, and so the relatively lower status granted to ESL teachers can impact the instructions students receive. For example, one respondent noted, “ESOL teachers develop curriculum supports and share them with classroom teachers, hoping that they will utilize them.” The survey asks district leaders about two district-provided supports often mentioned in the literature: release time for teachers to engage in co-planning and collaboration specifically, i.e., not general release time to be used for any purpose, and PD to support collaboration. District-provided dedicated release time is relatively rare.
It was reported by 40 percent of districts. Professional learning was more common, with 69 percent of districts reporting this provision. These supports were reported less frequently in small, rural, and low EL-percent districts. None varied at statistically significant levels. Here are a few qualitative responses from district leaders. District leaders acknowledge the value of and need for release time, yet expressed many challenges to finding this time. Statements such as, “Time to coordinate, collaborate, and communicate is really difficult to find, organize, or prioritize,” reflect this challenge. One respondent noted that in the absence of release time, most of the collaboration was informal. Although the majority of districts reported offering professional learning, or PD, qualitative responses suggest that its frequency and implementation vary by district. One district leader described PD as “Spotty at best.” Others described multiyear plans to deliver PD to their teachers. For example, one respondent shared, “Last year, we also began a series of PD with the science department as our first-year target. This will continue with the other content teachers, and it is reflected in our four-year ELD plan, as well as in our new Local Control Accountability Plan.” In terms of implementation, some districts that provide training do not necessarily hold teachers accountable for implementing what they have learned, while others have supported PD sessions through subsequent instructional coaching and teacher evaluation. So, what do all these findings mean?
The fact that more than 70 percent of responding districts reported using collaborative practices demonstrates the presence of teacher collaboration in US schools as a way of supporting the academic and linguistic development of EL-designated Multilingual Learners in secondary schools. Although patterns of significance are not consistent for the prevalence of different components of collaborative practices, there is a general trend suggesting that these instructional models are more common in rural, high EL-percent, and larger districts. To the extent that resources and capacity may be concentrated in these types of districts, collaborative instructional models may be more viable. Among the four types of collaborative practices we explored, co-planning and co-reflecting were found to be the most common, followed by co-assessing and co-teaching. In terms of the greater frequency of co-planning and co-reflecting, the relative efficiency of co-planning might explain its greater frequency.
This is particularly true when compared to co-teaching, which is much more resource intensive. In terms of co-reflection and co-assessing, additional research would be necessary to clarify reasons for their relative prevalence. We also know that many teachers engage in collaborative assessment, reflection, and planning simultaneously, and in different ways. With co-teaching in particular, and consistent with previous research, our data show that ESL co-teachers are reported to assist individual students more frequently than they co-lead instruction. Some qualitative data suggest this could be due to teachers’ lack of dedicated planning time, so that assisting individual students during class becomes the default for ESL co-teachers. However, having ESL teachers co-lead instruction still occurs in approximately one-third of districts, and so remains an important aspect of collaborative instructional practices. Although data suggests that teachers tend to assist students regardless of their language proficiency designation, status differences between ESL and content teachers still appear to be prominent in nearly half of classrooms, reflecting varied findings in the literature related to ESL teacher status. So, what bigger-picture issues does this study raise? Empirically, this study suggests that relationships among the district, school, and classroom systems in which collaboration occurs are complex and varied.
Research into the characteristics and efficacy of co-teaching or other forms of collaboration must embrace this complexity rather than focus solely on the classroom settings in which collaborating teachers are often studied. Further, while our study demonstrated the statistical significance of district characteristics in only some aspects of collaborative instructional models, the overall pattern in which collaborative practices were more common in larger, higher EL-percent, and urban districts suggests a need to better understand what is occurring in smaller, lower EL-percent, and rural districts. It may be necessary to revise our working definitions and models of what collaboration might entail in those latter settings, given the fact that these districts may have fewer or different resources. Additionally, this study sets an important baseline for understanding the prevalence and features of collaborative practice that can be updated over time. Methodologically, our experience with surveys suggests both the usefulness of gaining district perspectives on overall patterns, as well as the necessity of complementing this work with qualitative case studies that situate teachers’ practices in their ecological contexts. Our project has already begun working on this last issue, and we are currently analyzing data from three case studies we conducted of district-wide implementation of collaborative practices across secondary schools.
So far, we are exploring varied goals for collaboration and student learning, patterns showing how district, school, and classroom teacher characteristics influence the quality of collaborative practices, connections between the quality of collaborative practices and the quality of classroom instruction, and reconsideration of how ESL teacher status is recreated by curricula, physical spaces, and teacher scheduling. We look forward to sharing the results of this work at future webinars. Thank you so much to all of you who are interested in this work, and particularly to any of you who have participated in our data collection. We appreciate the time and expertise you have generously shared with us. If you’d like to learn more about our study, we have a one-page free summary of the study available using the QR code that we have on this slide. You can also read an article on this study which was recently published in TESOL Quarterly, and we’ve listed the URL for that there. And, hopefully someone can put that in the chat, as well. And finally, feel free to contact Amanda Kibler or myself at our respective email addresses. We encourage you to subscribe to “Where the Evidence Leads,” the free e-newsletter from the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary Learners, to learn about future webinars.
We also encourage you to save the date for our June 17 and 18 conference in Portland, Oregon, titled, “Reconceptualizing the Development of Educator Expertise for a Multilingual, Intercultural Future.” We have some very interesting conference sessions planned for that conference. And, I want to thank you again for attending, and at this point, I’m going to turn it over to Martha Sandstead, who is going to lead our Q-and-A.
Martha Sandstead:
Great, thank you Martha. That was very interesting, and it’s always good to hear you talking about the research. There are a few questions that have come in, so I’m going to start with one of them. This one comes from Kristen Black, and she’s wondering, what are the most common roles of the district leader respondents, and specifically, wondering how much time they might spend in the classrooms, and how their perspective might vary from what the teachers are experiencing, or what’s happening in those classrooms?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
That’s a really good question. I would say that we aimed our survey at directors of English Learner or multilingual programs in school districts. However, it was at times difficult to find who that person was, especially in large school districts. So, some of the people that responded to the survey wore multiple hats, right? So, they might’ve been the director of curriculum and instruction. They might’ve been the director of federal programs. Or, in the cases of some small school districts, they might’ve been the superintendent. But yes, I do agree that who completed the survey and what their role is within the district would likely be reflected in their survey responses, depending on how close or faraway they are from the instruction that happens in the classroom. Amanda, did you want to add anything?
Amanda Kibler:
No, I think you covered it, and I think that’s why we’ve recognized that the perspectives that many different levels are very important, and those experiences. So, our qualitative study will help us understand how district perceptions fit in with perceptions at school and classroom levels.
Martha Sandstead:
Great, thank you for that answer. The next question is from Hongying Shen, and is wondering, how you have defined equal status and how do co-teaching teachers achieve equal status?
Amanda Kibler:
Thanks for that, and I wanted to actually-I have just opened the article because I wanted to explain how we phrased that question in particular. And, there are certain limitations of how we can frame things for surveys to be said quickly and succinctly. So, we asked if the ESL teacher is treated by students and other adults in the classroom as having equal status as the content teacher. And so, you know, that was our way of asking that question. How we’re defining it is, you know, we were defining it in that way only. But, the question of how do teachers achieve equal status is a fascinating question, and it is one that we’re looking at in quite a bit of depth. And, I think what we’re finding is there are both- there are structural issues that may be impacting that, as well as instructional and individual factors, as well as organizational ones. So, it’s a very complex kind of question. And, so, I think our survey helped us get a little inkling of where people felt they were, or where they felt their teachers were in their districts. Martha, would you add anything to that?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
No thank you.
Martha Sandstead:
Great. The next question comes from Reza Norisien, and the question is, were any of your findings heterogeneous across the grade levels? If so, where? And was there any known reason explaining that heterogeneity?
Amanda Kibler:
Yeah, there were two main areas. Well, one is that all practices were more common in middle schools than high schools. So, regardless of the practice, the demographics of the district, it was always more common in middle schools. And then, among the individual practices, there was a particularly large difference between co-teaching prevalence between middle and high school. There was really quite a large difference of it being much more prominent in middle schools than high schools. And so, in our qualitative responses, we did not have anyone explaining that difference to us in their responses.
But, we did hear early on in our piloting of this survey that we should ask about middle and high schools differently because there was that sense that they are organized differently, and that collaboration just may be happening differently. And, I think our qualitative work has shown, as we’ve gone in and seen, you know, grade-level teams operating slightly differently at middle and high school levels. I think there could be a range of reasons for that difference. So, Martha, anything else?
Martha Sandstead:
Okay, another question came from Maria Romero. Have you looked at student outcomes as measured by assessment data to see if different types of instructional models had any effect on their learning outcomes?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Right, no, we did not. This is not a study that looked at the effectiveness of co-teaching or other models on student outcomes. So no, we did not collect student outcome data.
Martha Sandstead:
Another one just came in, so I’ll quickly get that one to you. It’s by John Nordmeyer. And, since you mentioned that some of the data collection overlapped with the pandemic, have you been able to differentiate between virtual versus face-to-face collaborative practices, or do you plan to do this going forward?
Amanda Kibler:
So, I can speak to that briefly. That is, you know, something that is- our survey is a snapshot in time. And so, you know, we recognize that this was at a point in the pandemic when some schools were still running virtually, some were face-to-face. There was quite a bit of variation. And, so, we saw that in our qualitative responses that people were really responding to a variety of different kinds of collaboration and settings for collaboration that were all happening at the same time.
But, we do think it would be interesting to run this survey again to see what is different a couple of years on. How are things shifting? Is there a legacy? Because, you know, there was both collaboration becoming more difficult, and some ways, it became simpler. So, there are a variety of potential outcomes that I think time will tell what has been carried forward and what has not because of the legacy of the pandemic.
Martha Sandstead:
Okay, there’s another question that’s come in that’s about the effectiveness being dependent on co-planning. So, I wonder if you can say anything about what you learned about the role of co-planning in this kind of collaboration?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Sure. Just that co-planning is desired, but it’s not universally provided across all school districts, unfortunately. And, we did see-we did have a finding that in scenarios where that dedicated co-planning time isn’t provided, you know, it turns into much more of a one-teach, one-assist kind of situation with the ESL teacher acting somewhat like an instructional aide. And, somebody else referred to that kind of collaboration as less formal. Yeah, so, there were differences there.
Martha Sandstead:
Okay, and another question that, maybe, to think back to how you began the study, going into it, did you begin with the idea that co-teaching with ESL teachers pushing into a classroom is the best model? Did you begin with that idea, or how did you approach this question from the start?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Yeah, we did not approach the study with that perspective. We went in pretty agnostic about it. And we had to be, you know, in order to be objective about the data that we were collecting. So no, we didn’t go in with any preconceived notions of whether it was, you know, better or worse.
Amanda Kibler:
I think a lot of our interest in this area came from the fact that it was becoming more and more prominent. We were hearing about a lot of districts engaging in different forms of collaboration and co-teaching, and lots of definitions of what those meant. And, it was quite interesting in the prominence. And so, we are really interested in understanding what was happening. And I think, you know, a best model, that’s a very difficult phrase to- best for whom, and under what conditions? And, those are some of the complexities we’re really starting to dig into with our qualitative work, and it’s been fascinating.
Martha Sandstead:
So, based on the results of this study and knowing that there’s lots of administrators and teachers in your audience, what are some sort of takeaways that you would have them gather from this presentation, and how they might go back and use this research to apply it in their own settings?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Hmm, mhm.
Amanda Kibler:
Would you like me to start on that one, Martha?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Yeah, that’d be great.
Amanda Kibler:
Okay. Alright. Yeah, so, I think that, you know, we thought about how does this apply? And, I think that there are-all of you in districts and different school settings, maybe in different stages of an interest in collaborative practices, or the practice of them. And, you know, we really did see that, you know, this helps us understand what this looks like at the different levels. And, you know, a lot of these pieces for practice- I think if you’re designing a program, what we have uncovered are several of the really common characteristics and features that you may want to think about in designing a program.
What are these things to consider? How do you plan for them? What are supports that teachers might need? We also wanted to recognize that, you know, this is also data that would be, you know, these are areas in which you might want to collect data. You know, what are these kinds of practices happening? How are teachers feeling about them? And so, I think a lot of the pieces that we pulled out in our survey are relevant to data you could collect from teachers and administrators. One thing we would also recommend is that in our work, we have found that districts also can learn so much from each other, and wanted to also encourage collaboration among networks of districts. A shout-out to many of the Oregon districts who are already doing this in collaboration, to really sort of grapple with some of these issues together, and to understand how to shape practices around your context and your faculty, and most importantly, your students. Martha, is there anything you wanted to add?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
I mean, I would just add that it’s important to not base all of the supports that you provide teachers at one level of the system, right? So, there’s the classroom level, and you can provide classroom teachers with lots of supports. But, there’s also supports that can be provided at the school level and at the district level, which we didn’t directly get into in the survey, which we’re going to get more into in our current study, our qualitative study, on the practices that are going on on the ground. So, just to keep that in mind, that it’s not dependent on two individual people solely. It’s individual-it’s dependent on the context as a whole.
Martha Sandstead:
All right, one more question here. Could you share a bit about how similar or different the co-teaching model you observed being implemented across schools?
Amanda Kibler:
I can speak to that a little bit in our qualitative follow-up. So, we are doing these case studies of three different school districts, and I think that we have noticed really fascinating variation, as much- sometimes even within a teacher, as it is across schools or even districts, sometimes. So, we see a lot of variation in how the individual co-teaching partnerships are working and functioning. And, there is quite a bit of variation both in what practices they’re doing and then how they’re doing them. So, I think that, you know, we noticed- I think one of the key elements we’ve noticed is variation, and that there is a lot of sensitivity that teachers are using in terms of who they are working with, both the teacher and the students. What is the content area? What is the grade level?
Those are all very important aspects, as well as, what time do they have to work together? How many co-teaching partnerships do they have? We currently have quite a long list of different ecological factors that seem to be shaping these patterns of co-teaching implementation. And so, it was not, even though there may have been a model that was really adhered to quite closely, there was also quite a bit of very natural dynamic, and what we would assume is really normal variation, as teachers are collaborating with each other and working with students.
Martha Sandstead:
Okay, there’s another question about how if there is an ESL teacher going into a classroom, if there’s an area where they do more planning? And, the example they provide is, do they plan for ELA more than science? So, I think that you did look a little bit at subject areas, so maybe if you could address how- where they’re doing that collaboration?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Well, yes, we saw most of the collaboration happening in co-planning. And, what was the second part of the question, Martha?
Martha Sandstead:
So, which subject areas was there more planning happening?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Hmm, yeah, I think we found that it was more prevalent in ELA.
Amanda Kibler:
Yeah, and one of the complexities of that is we didn’t actually ask questions that would crosswalk those two things, of both the-yeah, so I think that we asked where co-planning was happening. And I think-actually Martha, you can take us back to that slide about the subject areas. There we go, there we go. So, if we see this, for example, you know, we saw that this pattern of, if we take ELA and science, we saw pretty high right across the board on ELA. The practices were pretty consistent, maybe a little more reflecting. Science, there was a dip in-there was less co-teaching. So, science is that middle one. And, that green bar is the co-teaching. So, there’s a little less co-teaching, but more co-planning, co-assessing, and co-reflecting. So, you know, it certainly could be that as teachers may have less time to do the actual co-teaching, they’re doing more of the co-planning. So, I think that’s maybe the pattern that we were able to see in our data.
Martha Sandstead:
I’m going to give it another minute. There are no questions outstanding at the moment, so I’m going to just wait and see if anyone else pops in there. You know, it sometimes takes a minute to type out your thought. While we’re waiting and giving that little bit of think-and-type time, another question just to- is there any more you can say about the next phase of the research and the qualitative studies? I mean, I know you’ve referenced that quite a bit, but is there any more you can say about when we can all be expecting to learn from that research, or, sort of, any preliminary findings you have to share?
Martha Castellón Palacios:
Yes, so, I’ll just speak a little bit about what data we collected. So, in three different school districts where collaborative practices are happening, we conducted interviews with ESOL teachers or ESL teachers to ask them about their collaborative practices. We also conducted interviews with school principals where collaborative practices are happening, as well as with higher-level district administrators. And, we’re also excited about some classroom observations that we conducted across these three school districts to really describe and get a clear sense of what the collaboration looked like. We spent all day in classrooms that were co-taught. And, we’re finding that they varied tremendously in terms of who the EL teachers collaborated with, how many preps they had, and so on and so forth. And, we’re in the thick of data analysis of those data now. And, it takes a while to publish our findings. So, I’m guessing that would be at least a year out, possibly two. Amanda, what would you say?
Amanda Kibler:
Yes, I think the next academic year we’ll have some exciting findings to share in different venues. So, that’s something we’re definitely looking forward to.
Martha Sandstead:
I think we all are looking forward to those findings.
Martha Castellón Palacios:
We appreciate all of you joining us.
Amanda Kibler:
Thank you everyone.