Abstract
One of the most pressing challenges confronting
change-agent leaders in rural school districts in the United States is how to
provide well designed instructional programs to meet the biliteracy academic
development needs of emergent bilingual learners. This article examines how one language arts
teacher / dual language coordinator and her instructional improvement team
colleagues working in a high needs rural middle school leveraged design
research thinking and intervention development strategies to: 1) engage in
intensive data teaming to investigate the root causes of the persistent
learning performance gaps of emergent bilingual students on their rural campus;
and 2) develop and implement a design-based professional development
intervention program for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade core content teachers
to refocus teachers’
individual and collective pedagogical perspectives regarding the perceived
learning capabilities of emergent bilingual students and reinvigorate their
team-centered interdisciplinary planning and classroom teaching practices.
Change-agent leadership insights derived from an analysis of collective
intervention design and implementation efforts completed by the instructional
improvement team are presented and discussed within two areas: 1) leading instructional improvement initiatives in high
needs rural school districts; and 2) leveraging immersive professional
development to build core content teachers’ dual language instructional teaming
capacities.
Finally, a set of design principles derived from the case study
is presented that may be of practical use to rural school leaders interested in
exploring the potential of design-based intervention methods to address the
dual language programming needs of biliteracy learners.
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