By DR. GEORGE MEGENNEY
Principal, Collegeville Elementary
A common theme across all of Escalon’s schools and its educational staff during this school year has been improvement through professional development of various types. Perhaps most notably, and in alignment with goals established by our Board of Trustees, has been a focus on the improvement of our students’ proficiency in math. This has taken the form of multiple ongoing training sessions at all grade levels with the objective being straightforward: improvement in instructional techniques and strategies will lead to more successful outcomes for our students.
A similar strategy is being employed at Collegeville within its Dual Language Immersion program, now in its sixth year of implementation. During the past five school years, Collegeville gradually transformed itself from a traditional English-only program into a bilingual one. Students attending Collegeville are immersed in academic Spanish and incrementally experience instruction in English until they reach the fifth grade, at which point half of their day is in Spanish and the other in English. The purpose of the program is to produce bilingual, biliterate, culturally aware students who are comfortable and confident communicating in either language.
In order to provide our students with the best possible instruction, professional development targeted toward addressing the needs of students learning in a bilingual environment is of critical importance. With this in mind, Collegeville Elementary, in partnership with the San Joaquin County Office of Education (SJCOE), worked together to craft a series of ongoing meetings and trainings to take place throughout the 2023-23 school year. Collegeville staff played an integral role in the selection and development of topics to be covered throughout the school year.
Although the collaboration between Collegeville teachers and SJCOE is currently ongoing, it has already yielded important changes to the school’s instructional culture. A good example is the initiation of ‘dictado’ as a tool. Dictado, (literally translated, the word means ‘dictation’) is a method of language instruction very common in México and other Latin American countries in which students are asked to write complete sentences after listening to their teacher read those sentences.
The process creates opportunities for students to practice spelling and spend time focusing on punctuation and grammar. (For those interested, I highly recommend viewing a short video that explains and demonstrates dictado far more effectively than the above description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV278nEX_UM) Dictado, because of its commonplace use in much of the Spanish-speaking world, is also an instructional tool with which many of Collegeville’s Spanish-speaking parents are familiar. This has the added benefit of providing them with a familiar tool that they can use at home to practice and reinforce academic vocabulary, proper punctuation, and grammar with their children.
Collegeville’s instructional staff is also working on the alignment of state educational standards in both languages across the grade levels. Since dictado will be used from kindergarten to fifth grade, it is important for teachers to clearly understand the nuances between what is expected and required at one grade level in comparison to others.
Professional development and training opportunities for instructional staff often means that teachers are temporarily away from their classrooms. As such, this requires that a substitute teacher briefly take over. However, the long-term benefits of providing our teachers with research-based instructional strategies that they can use to great positive effect in their classrooms outweighs their short-term absence. In sum, investment in our teachers in the form of training, whether the focus is math or bilingual education, will result in better outcomes for all of our students and school instructional culture that is familiar and uniform for all students.
Principally Speaking is a monthly article, contributed by principals from Escalon Unified School District sites, throughout the school year. It is designed to update the community on school events and activities.
