ABSTRACT
This chapter closes the book by highlighting five key lessons for those interested in promoting collective faculty learning to improve teacher preparation for emergent bilinguals. We then address some questions or concerns that we anticipate others might have as they consider creating their own version of a collaborative faculty learning community. Our top five recommendations are as follows:
Start simply and simply start. Eight years ago, one professor at the University of Connecticut (UConn) clearly, kindly, and insistently pointed out to some colleagues that not enough was being done to prepare teachers to succeed with emergent bilinguals. When her urging turned into peer coaching with two colleagues, Dr. Mileidis Gort had no idea that several years later, she would wind up facilitating a book club with six other faculty, much less that even after she left our university, the work would continue to evolve into a learning community fomenting change among 18 faculty members. She just knew that something wasn’t right, and she started with the participants and methods that seemed most appropriate given the needs and resources she had at hand. In summary, this book is a testament to the potential and power of starting small but seeking to purposefully collaborate. The insights, dilemmas, practices, and progress we’ve uncovered would be impossible to imagine if there weren’t a larger group working together, but that large group would have been impossible to imagine—or create from scratch—without smaller steps that planted seeds.
When initiating, maintaining, or growing collective faculty development, respond to the unique needs, motivations, resources, and incentives relevant to the individuals and larger organization around you. We intend for this book to help you think about strategies for recruiting diverse individuals with different agendas, respond to the specific mission and incentives that exist within your institution, and develop a responsive set of plans, expectations, and learning activities that are appropriate for your particular context (see Chapter 3 for more details). Thus, we can’t offer a cookie-cutter model that could be blindly replicated across multiple sites; we see too much advantage in being responsive to individuals and institutional context while identifying your own shared ends. As such, we encourage you to consider how to integrate your efforts as a faculty learning community as seamlessly as possible with your ongoing day-to-day responsibilities. This could include folding the learning community work into various research agendas, committee responsibilities, and/or program structures depending on the mission and priorities of your institution.
Promote sufficiently deep learning about emergent bilinguals so that faculty are empowered to reframe the core content of courses on their own and in synch with others. Ultimately, as suggested in Chapters 4 through 8, preservice teachers should have the chance to learn about emergent bilinguals not just as a separate or added topic, but in relation to multiple aspects of teaching; this is more likely to happen when professors know enough to weave new material into the important preexisting assignments and content of their courses. Although top-down directives from deans or teacher education directors can get things done, we believe you can foster long-term buy-in and investment by inviting faculty participation in shaping the content and methods of learning. This doesn’t mean that the blind lead the blind; such input must co-exist with the guidance or advice of scholars who can point to what must be learned and accomplished to adequately prepare teachers to succeed with emergent bilinguals.
To promote depth of learning about emergent bilinguals, develop activities and routines likely to sustain learning and promote accountability across a long time period. Vygotsky (1962, 1978), activity theorists (e.g., Engeström, Miettinen, & Punamäki, 1999), and those who write about communities of practice (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991) have helped us see how we are often able to think and do things with others that would be impossible if we were acting on our own. It may well be that we acquire and internalize new ways of thinking or acting in the world most easily when we have the chance to develop habits of mind and practice in the company of peers and/or more skilled others. Thus, we encourage you to hasten your own learning by thoughtfully organizing joint routines with colleagues. Whether you commit to monthly readings and discussions, sharing practice, visiting schools and reflecting on these visits, or engaging in co-teaching in a partner school with emergent bilinguals, your commitment to some regular collaborative activity will build greater coherence and accountability into your work. As your group builds some understanding of how to take advantage of their joint activity, you are more likely to feel increased momentum, commitment, and accountability to both peers and a shared mission.
Leverage data. Assessment data can be a powerful factor in demonstrating a need to prospective participants and to the administrators who can offer financial or administrative support. As suggested in Chapters 9 through 12 of this book, data can also inform participants of progress and gaps in their efforts to prepare teachers for emergent bilinguals. Although data can promote some of the learning we envision among a faculty learning community, with sufficient framing and planning, it also can lead to publishable research, making this work more sustainable in contexts that value publication and impacting the field.
