THE IMPACT OF A MULTILINGUAL LEARNER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON TEACHER SELF-EFFICACY AND STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF TEACHER SUPPORT

The population of multilingual learners is struggling to adapt to mainstream classes because the educational system has failed to support them on the same level as native English speakers. The gap in achievement and lack of teacher preparation demonstrates a clear need to support teachers who educate them. This study, a nonequivalent (pretest and posttest) control-group design combined with a cross-sectional survey design, addressed the effectiveness of a professional development series focused on best practices for teaching secondary math to multilingual learners. The professional development intervention consisted of one 45-minute initial session followed by twelve 15-minute mini lessons throughout the fall semester. The effectiveness of the professional development series was assessed from the results of a pre and post teacher questionnaire and a separate questionnaire for students. The teacher questionnaire contains Likert-type scale questions regarding teacher self-efficacy in teaching multilingual learners. The student questionnaire focused on perceptions of teacher support and course grades. The results showed that multilingual learner specific teacher self-efficacy improved for all teachers (n=28) who attended the initial professional development and increased even more for teachers (n=11) who attended both the initial professional development and the mini lessons. Results of the student questionnaire (n=98) showed that perceptions of teacher support were correlated to student course grade, but did not vary with a student’s language learning status. These findings have implications for using professional development mini lessons, basing professional development on culturally sustaining pedagogy, increasing teacher self-efficacy, and supporting multilingual learners in mainstream classrooms.