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By Jeff Ellenbird

Jeff Ellenbird is Professor of English Language Learning at Bunker Hill Community College and co-leader of the ELL Design Team during the AANAPISI funded ELL Program Reform.

Comprehensive reform of the ESL program was the core initiative of the AANAPISI grant at BHCC.  As part of this initiative, the grant stipulated funding support for the creation of faculty design teams that would overhaul the then linear and skills-based ESL program into an integrated, accelerated model. As a first step, the grant called for a faculty-led research review of best ELL models and practices.  Carrying out a research review to determine the most effective ESL program when the general model had already been determined struck some of the ESL faculty as an inherent contradiction.  Yet it was a strategic move on the part of the grant to ground the reform in research and engage faculty expertise and leadership. 

From the success of an earlier Title III grant, the Engaged Campus Initiative - which was modeled on research, design, pilot, evaluate, scale - the BHCC AANAPISI team believed that the same model would be effective for reforming the ESL program.  In the words of Lori Catallozzi, Dean of Humanities and Learning Communities and Activity Director for the grant initiative, “It is critical for the working group to gather and present research to the rest of the team. All of the research on faculty change points to the importance of taking a faculty-driven, inquiry-based, data-informed approach” (personal communication, October 24, 2016).  Previous to this grant, there had been piecemeal changes to the ESL curriculum and program over the years, but no significant reform of the ESL program had been institutionalized (which Alan Shute details in Section 3).  Therefore, the AANAPISI Grant called for a wholesale revision of the department mission, learning outcomes, master syllabi, and exit assessments to get the work done. As Catallozzi stated, “That is one of the reasons we pursued this grant -- because the grant structure not only gives us money to fund the work and a framework to guide the work but concrete objectives and deliverables that cannot be ignored” (personal communication, October 24, 2016).

Broad participation from the ESL faculty and buy-in from both ESL and content faculty in supporting this program revision was key, but the success of this reform also hinged on faculty reflecting on their own pedagogy and transforming their own practice in the classroom. Real program reform requires not only changes in structure and templates but also changes to faculty beliefs and practices. Carrying out a faculty-led research review of best practices on ELL learning therefore had many purposes in institutionalizing this program reform:

• Bring together broad participation from the ESL Department to achieve buy-in for the reform

• Ground the ESL reform in research and data

• Support ESL faculty in reflecting on their own teaching practices and moving towards more asset-based ones

• Provide a rationale for ESL program reform in order to achieve buy-in across the campus community

But after carrying it out, the research review and its findings found a new purpose as an effective anchor and scaffold for building the new program reform. In this section, I will discuss both this new purpose as well as the process – warts and all - in carrying out the research review.

Carrying out the ELL Research Review

Following the guidelines of the AANAPISI grant, faculty in the ESL Department were organized into work areas, and I was tasked with leading a team to carry out the research with four other ESL faculty members and a staff member from the Language Lab. Our principal charge was:

Carry out research on effective approaches to teaching ESL (accelerated, asset-based, integrated/holistic, content-based, learning community models and culturally relevant approaches) by reviewing the literature as well as other community college ESL programs.

Our team’s first meeting came with a packed agenda. A lot of the meeting focused on the timeline for our research and questions about the grant, with little time spent on planning how we would carry out the research. In hindsight, I see that our plan for reviewing the research and method of dividing up the work was haphazard. Though we divided up among ourselves different topics to research, such as remedial versus accelerated pathways, transformative and constructivist approaches to learning, content-based approaches, culturally relevant pedagogies, asset-based approaches, and learning community models, there was too much overlap between these categories to make the distinction meaningful. More valuable would have been for us to determine and assign a more precise and objective way for searching and identifying the research. For example, we should have collectively determined the exact search words to use and identified the appropriate databases to search within. Then, we could have assigned different search criterias and databases among us. Finally, we should have determined a common cut-off date to ensure that our research was current and determine what types of publications we would consider to ensure the research was authoritative. For that reason, having an experienced researcher or someone from the library on the team would have made the research review more efficient and of a higher quality. As it was, I believe most of us – myself included – did most of our searching on Google with chains of search words like “ESL” “culturally relevant pedagogies” and “colleges”. Though we did find and include some quality, authoritative and current research, some of the research we included in our final synthesis was not current, peer-reviewed or evidence based.

The other question to address was how to document our analysis of the literature. For taking notes on the research, we agreed on a simple format: A summary of the article (written as a paragraph or bullet points) and then an analysis of the article including usefulness and implications for our team's focus. We then shared these summaries and analyses on a Moodle page we had created for the team. Over the course of the next three months, we reviewed over 30 articles, chapters or books and compiled a 15-page document of notes.

The next question was how to synthesize this analysis. One of our team members came up with a simple template for recording his analysis of the works. Since the goal of our program reform was to transition from a remedial model to an accelerated model, the team members began organizing notes of each reading under two columns - accelerated and remedial - to highlight the contrast between these two models. Faced with the challenge of synthesizing and condensing 15 pages of dense notes into a concise statement on the research, we decided to use this same organizational framework for synthesizing the findings from all the articles. But then we added the additional contrast of asset-based and deficit-based to try to better reflect the research, so that the framework looked like the following:

In doing this, we pulled out common threads on effective ELL practices from our notes and framed them as corollaries as a way to better highlight the effective practices. For each of these common threads (or practices), we cited the articles that supported the practices. Though this system of categorization has some drawbacks, such as precision (a practice could be both accelerated and deficit-based) and oversimplification (some of the deficit-based/remedial practices could certainly be carried out in a way that is asset-based and accelerated), the simple contrasting format made the findings easy to make sense of.

The last step was to synthesize the long list of contrasting practices and categorize them under four key findings (see below) that our research had uncovered. Though there is certainly overlap between the key findings (particularly between the third and fourth findings), they are organized as such to prioritize the importance of ESL program reform at the institutional level (beyond just the ESL Department) and the other important spheres of student perceptions, teacher attitudes/approaches, and class practices/curriculum. The final report was a six-page document, with the first page highlighting the four key findings, the following four pages identifying the specific practices that support each key finding, and the final page listing the sources.

Research Findings on Best Practices for Teaching ESL
Four Key Findings: (See BHCC research review for complete document)

• Institutional Support: ELL students succeed when they are supported by all faculty and staff and there exists close collaboration between content faculty and ESL faculty.

• Student Perceptions: ELL students succeed when they see their ESL teachers and the ESL Department as advocates, supporters and a resource.

• Teacher Attitudes and Approaches to Learning: ELL students succeed when instruction is based on students communicating and negotiating meaning rather than students demonstrating their knowledge of the standard language.

• Curriculum: ELL students succeed when the curriculum is driven by challenging academic content through linked content classes and other classes that support students in 1) making personal connections between academic content and their lived experiences and 2) entering into the academic life of the college.

After four months of research with monthly team meetings to discuss and share our research findings, we had compiled a concise document to highlight these findings. The next step was to bring the document to the ESL Department and request the approval of our colleagues. It’s important to note that the practices deemed deficit-based/remedial in the research findings were in many ways the dominant institutional and department-wide practices at BHCC. The ESL Department’s role and relationship within the institution, the skill-based descriptions and course objectives of the Department-approved syllabi, and even many of the ESL course materials we were using in our classes reflected the deficit-based/remedial practices identified in the findings. For that reason, I was not sure how my colleagues would react to this document, especially since tension had been growing among us, with some of us expressing skepticism and resistance to reforming our program. But to my surprise, every ELL faculty member stated their approval of the final report on the findings and there was a general consensus that the document simply reflected good pedagogy. In this way, the document helped solidify a rationale and anchor for moving the program reform on. For some of us, the document also provided a framework for reflecting on how effectively we were carrying out best practices in our classes. These findings provided a starting place for doing that.

The research findings were approved by the ESL Department in April of 2017, just six months into what turned into a four-year long program reform. The findings then played a prominent role in creating a new mission statement for the ESL Department, supporting two college-wide professional development days that took place the following fall and spring, and guiding and anchoring the ELL program reform through the ensuing two years.

Defining a New Mission Statement

Just a month after their approval, we called a meeting of team leaders to start a discussion of a new mission statement for the department with a request for each of us to bring a statement to the table. In crafting my statement, I simply copied the four key findings from the research with some slight reorganizing. At the meeting, we agreed to use that statement as the template and I was assigned the work of incorporating other ideas from that meeting that were not already captured in that template. Over the next six months, we met twice more with the statement evolving but still reflecting the core elements of the research findings. The draft statement was then presented at an ESL Department meeting where it again was revised according to input. Finally, nearly two years after the Department approved the research findings, the department gave its approval to a new mission statement.

Grounding Professional Development in Research

At that same time, just two months after the approval of the research findings, the ESL Department, in partnership with the AANAPISI leadership, proposed and was approved to plan and host the Fall and Spring Professional Days (PD) for 2017-2018. These half-day PD events are scheduled each semester and all full-time faculty, staff and administrators are required to attend. Titled “Supporting English Language Learners at Every Step”, the Fall PD Day was focused on supporting ELL students across divisions and work areas, reflecting the above BHCC key research findings on institutional support.  Our goal for this PD event was to provide our colleagues a better understanding of ELL students and engage them around the effective pedagogies and practices that support them.  Basically, we wanted participants to walk that same road - for a short stretch of it - that the ESL faculty team had taken in carrying out this research and for them to immerse themselves in these research findings. Another goal was to raise awareness about the ESL program reform as well as garner more collaboration between the ESL Department and other departments.

In planning the event, we recruited faculty and staff from outside the ESL Dept who we knew supported this reform to help lead the event in order to solidify allyships for the program reform as well as showcase the importance of a campus-wide support system for ELL students.  We were also very conscious in organizing the event around the same research model we were using for our program reform: Begin by engaging our colleagues with the research, and then let them walk the same path we had walked.  To that end, we requested our colleagues read beforehand one of the seminal research works that had impacted our team the most, “Stuck in the remedial rut” by Shawna Shapiro (2011), who is also a contributing writer to this edition (see Naggie, this issue).  We also created a truth/myth handout with a list of statements drawn from our research findings, including both asset and deficit-based statements to engage our colleagues around this research. Below is a condensed version of that document.

Myth or Truth?

Is it a myth or a truth? Or is it more complicated than that? Discuss the following statements with the people at your table.

• Stricter prerequisites for entering content classes enable ELL students to receive needed English instruction instead of failing in those content classes.

• ESL materials should be simplified in order to best teach reading skills.

• Effective ESL learning activities prioritize use of small group project-based activities with students interacting primarily among themselves.

• Helping ELL students develop their English skills is most effective when they are supported by all departments within the college.

• Professional development sessions, like this PD Day, are the most effective way to support collaboration between the ESL Department and content faculty and staff.

The PD event began with participants seated at tables, given this handout and asked to share their opinion on whether the statements were truths and myths. The purpose of this activity was not for our colleagues to correctly identify which were truths and myths – if that is even possible – but rather to begin reflecting on their own practices and attitudes around teaching their ELL students. After the truth/myth activity, we provided participants a handout with selected passages from “Stuck in the remedial rut” with an event leader placed at each table to facilitate a discussion of the article. This discussion was followed by a 15-minute review of the ESL Department research findings, with each participant asked to identify asset-based practices that they already utilize in their classes, asset-based practices they would like to try out and practices that they would need support in trying out. After this brief engagement with the research, the rest of the event was structured around 30-minute workshop presentations on a range of ELL focused topics.

By far the most engaging and contentious of the activities were the discussions of the article and the research findings.  Based on both feedback surveys and report-backs by the facilitators, the tenor of these discussions had a lot to do with the makeup of the table.  In the feedback surveys, some colleagues responded positively to discussing the research while others considered it a waste of time.  Likewise, some facilitators reported fruitful discussions of the research while other facilitators reported discussions dominated by anecdotal stories meant to refute the research findings. 

One of the research findings is “professional development is more effective when it supports continuous collaboration instead of the more common one and done 1-day model of PD.”  For that reason, we planned a follow-up PD Day for the spring semester to engage faculty, staff and administrators in reflecting on their practices with ELLs and make connections between theory and their practice.   The research findings therefore served as a foundation for challenging the dominant deficit-based perception of ELL students at the college and helping to find and cultivate allies with other departments.  The PD Days also contributed to building a critical mass of faculty and staff at BHCC in support of our program reform as well as moving towards a culture change at the college with professional development framed around scholarship and evidence rather than anecdotal stories.

After Spring PD Day in 2018, the ESL Department again became the locus of the program reform.Over the next two years, as Alan Shute recounts in more detail in the next section, we grappled with defining new program and course outcomes, creating a new streamlined and accelerated pathway out of the program and eventually bringing a new identity to our department by renaming ourselves the ELL Department.All of these changes were supported by the research findings, but more importantly the findings were used as leverage to make those changes happen.Reflecting the campus culture at the time, department meetings and decisions would often get derailed by anecdotal evidence or emotions.The research findings helped disrupt that tendency by providing a solid framework to return to when discussing important decisions and a common language for discussing what is best for the students.We continue to refer to the research findings when writing proposals or making presentations to our colleagues within and outside the college.Rooted in scholarship, these findings have helped change the culture of department meetings by anchoring our discussions and decision making in evidence and they continue to scaffold our ongoing work and collaboration in building on the ELL program reform.