Effect of Transnational Standards on U.S. Teacher Education

This research was supported in part by grants from the Office of English Language Acquisition, United States Department of Education, Washington, DC. Award Numbers: T195N070385 & T195N070264. A PowerPoint synthesis of selected findings relating to this research has been accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), April 2015, Chicago, Illinois.

The Standards for Effective Pedagogy and Learning (CREDE, 2014) specify five transnational universals of teaching that are especially effective for the rapidly growing population of English language learners in North America. CLASSIC is an evidence-based, CREDE-aligned model of teacher education for classroom educators of English language learners. CLASSIC has utilized with more than 10,000 teachers in 100 school districts, located in eight states, in collaboration with eight different universities. This study examined the impact of the transnational standards of CLASSIC curricula on teachers' observed practices with English language learners as measured by the recently developed Inventory of Situationally and Culturally Responsive Teaching (ISCRT). Despite some variability, over 110 participating teachers in 37 U.S. schools demonstrated statistically significant improvements in their delivery of effective pedagogy, across a wide range (18 of 22) ISCRT indicators; teachers exhibited highest levels of growth in instructional conversations, joint productive activity, and challenging activities.