May 2, 1996 Contact: Jennifer McNulty (408) 459-2495; mcnulty@ua.ucsc.edu

UC SANTA CRUZ RECEIVES FEDERAL GRANT TO HELP IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Three-year teacher-training project will help bridge the cultural gap between teachers and increasingly diverse students

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Dramatic demographic changes have transformed the makeup of students in California classrooms, where more than one-fifth of K-12 students have limited English skills. Although Spanish remains the most prevalent language other than English, it is becoming more common for instructors to be faced with the challenge of teaching students who speak Vietnamese, Hmong, Cantonese, Khmer, Tagalog, Korean, or Armenian.

In 1990, there was an estimated shortage of more than 14,000 qualified bilingual teachers, according to the California Department of Education. Yet the majority of new teachers continue to be monolingual English-speaking non-Hispanic whites, creating a "cultural mismatch" between California's students and the teachers who serve them, says Trish Stoddart, associate professor of education at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"The challenge for us in this state is to prepare teachers who can meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students, including students in both bilingual and multilingual classrooms," says Stoddart. "How do teachers who only speak English make the academic content of mathematics, science, English, and other subjects accessible to second-language learners?"

Stoddart is the lead researcher on a three-year $1.25 million federal grant UCSC has received to help teachers develop instructional strategies and theoretical perspectives to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. The grant will fund the California Center for Teacher Development (CCTD), and participants will work to improve teacher preparation-- in part by evaluating what actually works best in K-12 classrooms. Participants will also provide support for new teachers during their first two years in the classroom. Stoddart's UCSC collaborators are Ellen Moir, director of teacher education and the Santa Cruz New Teacher Project/Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program, and Stephanie Dalton, associate director of the National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning. The project is funded by the Eisenhower Professional Development Federal Activities Program.

Joining UCSC in this endeavor are California State University, Monterey Bay, the California Department of Education, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, and the Santa Cruz and Monterey County Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Projects. The collaborators hope to create a model program of teacher development that links minority recruitment, teacher training, and ongoing support of beginning and experienced teachers.

"Since 1992, teachers in California have been required to receive special training for students who are learning to speak English, but little is known about how effective those changes have been," says Stoddart. The first step for CCTD is to assess what teacher education programs are currently doing to prepare educators for culturally diverse classrooms--an endeavor that Stoddart will oversee.

The CCTD will also launch a field-based program of "professional development schools" similar in some ways to medical training programs, says Stoddart. "Most medical schools have very strong research programs, and they also have teaching hospitals where medical students learn cutting-edge skills from practicing physicians and researchers," says Stoddart. "Similarly, we want to integrate educational theory with models of exemplary practice, so we'll be working with these professional development schools where excellent teachers are developing practices that we can use in teacher training. We'll do most of our research at the school sites in real classrooms."

Ultimately, the CCTD will capture the most effective classroom strategies on CD-ROM or video for distribution to teacher credentialing programs. "Students from different cultures have different patterns of language and discourse and social interaction. We want to be able to give beginning teachers some examples of what good teaching looks like," says Stoddart. Samples of student work and curriculum materials could be shared in the same manner, she notes.

Participating in CCTD will be a round table of faculty members from the teacher education programs at each of the UC campuses as well as the California State University campuses in Chico, Monterey Bay, Northridge, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Francisco, San Jose, and Stanislaus. The center's materials will be developed with input from those faculty and will be field-tested in their courses as well as in classrooms where student teachers are getting their first hands-on experience, says Stoddart.

"We're taking knowledge generated by basic research on learning and translating it into practical models and teacher education materials," says Stoddart.

Editor's Note: Trish Stoddart can be reached at (408) 459-3850 or via e-mail at stoddart@cats.ucsc.edu; Ellen Moir can be reached at (408) 459-4025; Stephanie Dalton can be reached at (408) 459- 3501.

This release is also available on the World Wide Web at UCSC's "Services for Journalists" site (http://www.ucsc.edu/news/journalist.html) or via modem from UC NewsWire (209-244-6971).

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