Personalized Professional Learning for Elementary Bilingual Educators: A Policy Advocacy Document

This policy advocacy document advocates a policy to strengthen an existing elementary bilingual program through personalized professional development. Twin goals of the proposed policy are to (1) increase student achievement and (2) increase bilingual teacher retention. District 32’s bilingual program recently shifted from a Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) model to a Developmental Bilingual Education (DBE) model, which emphasized biliteracy. As a small suburban school district with a rapidly rising Hispanic and low-income student population, this shift raised awareness among district administrators of the need for a new professional development model geared toward its mostly inexperienced bilingual teachers. To be immediately effective, this new professional development model would need to be more classroom-based, frequent, and focused on sustained personalized professional learning. Key to providing this kind of in-depth, individualized professional learning is hiring a full-time bilingual consulting teacher. Browder’s (1995) policy advocacy needs analysis framework is used to analyze the educational, economic, social, political, and moral/ethical dimensions of the proposed policy, and to identify related best practices in professional learning for bilingual educators. Guskey’s (2002) five-level professional development framework and Escamilla’s (2014) biliteracy observation protocol are utilized in the policy’s implementation plan and assessment plan