J. Sterling Morton High School District 201 in Cicero, Illinois, is a large urban high school that serves a predominantly Latino student population. About 65 percent of our students are current or former English learners, and our population of current ELs has doubled in the last five years.
We have had a longstanding bilingual program with content-area courses in Spanish, but historically, whenever anything was offered in Spanish, be it a book or resource, a class or an event, it was perceived in our school as a crutch for someone who hadn't yet mastered English, and something to be discarded or passed over once English was acquired. A subtractive model, which takes away a student's home language and emphasizes English only, had historically been the answer to closing the opportunity gap for our high school English learners. Yet this approach was not meeting our students' needs, and their achievement was declining.
In order to reverse this decline, in 2014 our district looked to the seminal work of Thomas and Collier on working with language-minority students, which demonstrated that the dual-language model was the most effective program for increasing English learners’ achievement in the long run. However, when we attended conferences on dual-language programs, the research and strategies were always geared toward elementary schools, and most models started at preschool or kindergarten and worked their way up. We didn't want our students to miss out entirely because they weren't in an initial cohort at the elementary level.
In order to begin to move to a more additive model, we knew we needed to address our school and community's attitudes about bilingualism. We needed to change the perception of activities and resources in Spanish (or any language other than English) from that of a crutch to a challenge, from intervention to enrichment, from something that brings about shame to something that produces pride, orgullo.
We realized that to close the opportunity gap for our English learners, we not only needed new strategies and curriculum models, but we also needed to change the way we thought about bilingualism within our school community. We needed to change the way that we saw Spanish and other home languages in order to change the way that our students saw themselves. Identity formation is one of the key components of adolescence, and linguistic identity is critical to that process. For our English learners to reach higher levels of achievement, they had to see themselves as high achievers in the first place—and in their first language. To achieve this, we focused on shifting to an asset-based mindset, with the long-term goal of turning our transitional bilingual education (TBE) program into a dual-language program.
Pride and Identity
We embarked on this work of closing the achievement gap and changing the status of bilingualism in our community in partnership with Northeastern Illinois University, which supported student enrichment opportunities, and the Illinois Resource Center, which provided us with professional development and programmatic planning.
Our school leadership team knew that in order to change perceptions and increase pride, we had to work closely with the students and their parents. The message had to come from them, not just us. We began by conducting two attitudinal surveys at our freshman campus: one for students and one for staff. It was moving and affirming to see that 90 percent of our freshman class reported that they speak Spanish at home, that 85 percent of them reported that being bilingual is "a big part of my identity, of who I am," and that 88 percent of them wanted to improve or maintain their Spanish. We shared these findings with our Bilingual Parent Advisory Committee; created a working subgroup called el Comité de Bilingüismo; and conducted student and parent interviews about their attitudes, experiences, and goals around bilingualism. Armed with this data and strengthened by the assistance from our engaged parents, we moved forward knowing that our efforts were in response to and aligned with our students' voices and the desires of our community members.
Building Capacity
To improve experiences for our students, we had to make sure our staff was getting the professional development they needed. The Illinois Resource Center, an agency that helps educators working with English learners, supported our action planning. They helped us focus our vision, expand our stakeholder advocacy, and steadily work toward our goal. We offered our entire faculty professional development opportunities on language development, best practices for teaching ELs, and biliteracy.
For the last two years, we have offered full-day Saturday PD sessions on biliteracy development for faculty, staff, and administration to help us transition collectively from an early-exit TBE program to a dual-language model that we call the School for Biliteracy. We now offer nine different biliteracy content courses, entirely in Spanish, open to both English learners and mainstream students, in addition to our modern language and Spanish language arts offerings.
In 2015, Angela was hired as the district's first biliteracy coach to provide teachers with job-embedded instructional coaching around biliteracy, cultural responsiveness, and language development. In 2016, Lauren joined the district to serve as our second biliteracy coach. In fall 2018, our district adopted student discourse as an instructional focus and added a third biliteracy coach position. Professional development for all teachers focused on increasing student discussion in the classroom, and the biliteracy coaches leveraged that emphasis by encouraging multilingual conversations and translanguaging strategies.
We also took advantage of Illinois' Seal of Biliteracy, which the state adopted in 2015. This is a gold seal placed on a students' high school diploma to recognize their high level of proficiency in two or more languages, for which students can receive college credit. We've used this honor as a catalyst to frame bilingualism and emergent bilingualism as student assets in our classrooms. To make sure our students have every opportunity to take the required language exam for the Seal, we committed to offering the exam free of charge and on various dates and times, including school days and Saturdays. In 2016, 21 percent of Morton seniors earned the Seal of Biliteracy. By 2019, that number increased to more than 35 percent, and has included recipients who speak Arabic, American Sign Language, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Tagalog, as well as Spanish.
Creating Guerreros Bilingües
It was important to us to increase student access to and enthusiasm about Spanish-language reading materials. Our English teachers were already using the digital differentiated instruction tool Achieve3000 to boost reading skills, and we gave all students the opportunity to use the program's dual-language option in Spanish. Incentives were offered to students who showed significant gains or met benchmarks in both languages. We also began to expand our Spanish-language offerings in the library, taking students to a Spanish-language bookstore to select titles that their peers would be interested in reading. We took steps to normalize and incentivize reading in Spanish, and the students responded enthusiastically.
From there, we began a Spanish language book club, which the students named Guerreros Bilingües, or Bilingual Warriors. They were aware that choosing to read in Spanish was part of a larger battle, and that what they were opting to do was something bold, daring, and brave. Our librarians were on board and, together with our biliteracy coaches and our partners at Northeastern Illinois University, created "Lotería del Libro," a reading incentive program. For approximately 1,200 incoming 8th graders at one campus, we began to offer a Spanish summer reading novel option, and anywhere from 300 to 400 students each year opted to take a book in Spanish in addition to their required English selection. They began to see Spanish as a challenge, as something above and beyond instead of something behind or below.
In collaboration with resident artists at Northeastern Illinois University, we also created a daytime enrichment activity that took place during supervisory periods. El Taller, or The Workshop, was a Spanish immersion and arts integration experience. Participants studied cultural and historical topics, created artwork, learned and performed Latin American songs in Spanish, went on field trips to cultural institutions, and were trained as docents to serve as cultural ambassadors during schoolwide events. From there we created different iterations of El Taller to meet the needs of other buildings in the district.
Northeastern Illinois University also supported after-school biliteracy enrichment in the form of teacher-led clubs like Traductores, a student translation corps, and STEMentores, which prepared and translated STEM kits for students to take home and do with their families. Over the summer, students were invited to participate in Academia Bilingüe, a Spanish-immersion and arts integration elective class that is made up of both English learners and students in mainstream or honors classes who want to improve or maintain their Spanish language skills.
Change Is Happening
As a result of these efforts, we are seeing changes in the perception of bilingualism by all stakeholders in our district and increased opportunities for our emergent bilingual students. We should note that our district has a robust and longstanding Spanish language arts program that leads to very successful outcomes in AP Spanish Language and Culture and AP Spanish Literature. Each year, about 270 students take these exams and about 97 percent earn a passing score. Coupled with our efforts in biliteracy, dual-language education, and success with the Seal of Biliteracy, our school community has embraced the bilingual identity that our students and community value. Just as the students have reported that being bilingual is a big part of their identity, Morton has embraced bilingualism as part of our collective identity. This is an example of our #OrgulloMorton.
