One of the fastest rising student populations in California schools and other states are English Language Learners. Yet, teacher preparation programs do not adequately prepare teachers to support the needs of language learning in the context of their own classrooms. This creates a chasm of equity and access for our most needy students. However, despite this dangerous trend of unpreparedness, there are promising practices that have begun to emerge for supporting classroom teachers. Instructional coaching is one of them. The objective for this case study on The English Learner Group (TELG) was: (1) to analyze the effect of job-embedded professional development, if any, on English Learner students’ academic achievement as measured by California State Assessments Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) results from the 2017-2018 Academic Year, and (2) to provide Dr. Sam Nofziger, the owner of TELG, with specific insights into the perceptions of his employees and the school districts TELG has served. There were four noteworthy findings which included an increase of ELL growth as measured by the SBAC and a decrease in the achievement gap between ELLs and English Only students as measured by the SBAC.
It is important to note that this case study was submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements in class EDL 561 with the Collaborative Online Doctorate in Educational Leadership (CODEL) program. CODEL is a joint Ed.D. program with California State University, Fresno and CSU Channel Islands. This project was initially conducted by doctoral students: Phyllis Grillo, Jazzie Murphy, Lauren Odell, and Lilia Ruvalcaba. Statistical analysis was performed by Ms. Ruvalcaba. The project was significantly edited and submitted for the purposes of CLEAR by Lauren Odell.