Every May, ICMEE reports to our funders (The Office of English Language Acquisition) regarding the progress of our project. This year's report was especially exciting with great success and impressive accomplishments to document. Some of the highlights of this report are shared below.
Across the AY 2018-2019 school year, we had an 82% completion rate for eWorkshop starters and completers. This is very high for online work, but is clearly due to the commitment of local schools and districts to provide teachers with locally meaningful incentives for completion. We work with some districts who use our eWorkshops for the required professional learning in their districts. In these eWorkshops our completion rates are even higher (over 90%). However, eWorkshops where there is no such local incentive can have much lower completion rates (as low at 0%, on average around 40%). For this reason, we feel it's important for school, district and state leaders who would like to use our work to also provide clear locally relevant incentives and supports to ensure eWorkshop completion at high rates.
Both participants and supervisors of participants rate the effectiveness of our eWorkshops very high. Across both groups over 80% rate our eWorkshops as effective.
We have pre-post surveys around Beliefs about Multilingualism in School that have documented statistically significant changes for our eWorkshop completers. The change is most pronounced with the group you would expect, those who do not have an ESL endorsement and are not working towards one. There is still significant change for those with ESL endorsements as well as those who are seeking ESL endorsement.
Nearly 70% of participants reported that the ICMEE eWorkshops had a moderate to significant impact on their classroom practice with only 22% reporting a slight impact and 9% reporting no impact. In terms of changes in classroom practice, many teachers discussed the use of specific techniques and strategies in their classroom instruction such as increasing the use of visual supports, sentence stems, thinking maps, differentiation templates, artifacts, and hands on activities. Others discussed incorporating more opportunities for practice across the language domains (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), posting language objectives, and embedding native language supports into their teaching. A few discussed
a deeper understanding of collaboration across educational staff such as school psychologists wanting to be more involved in referral process for emerging bilinguals to special education or ensuring that ELD teachers are included in the referral process.
All total 85% of participants reported that the ICMEE eWorkshop had an impact on student
learning with 53% reporting somewhat of an impact and 32% reporting a definite impact while only 14% reporting no impact at all.
Of those reporting an impact on student learning, participants tended to report the effect of the various instructional practices they learned or were revisited (since some already came in with background or endorsement in ESL) in the eWorkshop that they were implementing. They also discussed that
improvement in relationships with students seemed to be key.
We are beginning to run much more complex analyses on our data to look at predictors of various outcomes as well as what the levers are that appear to support the strongest learning outcomes. We have a large dataset now to do a great deal of interesting work with.
For more information on ICMEE and our success, please contact icmee@unl.edu.
More details at: https://cehs.unl.edu/icmee/