These rubrics were created by Diane J. Tedick and Corinne S. Mathieu with support from a United States Department of Education grant (2016-2021) through the National Professional Development program (Office of English Language Acquisition). French translations by Geneviève Cocke were funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (430-2020-00574), PI Susan Ballinger (McGill University).
Scholars agree that dual language and immersion (DLI) teaching is different from mainstream content teaching or from language teaching on its own. It requires a particular knowledge base and pedagogical skill set (e.g., Guerrero & Lachance, 2018; Howard et al., 2018; Tedick & Lyster, 2020). Nevertheless, DLI teacher performance is often assessed with generic assessment tools that don’t address the unique pedagogical skills and knowledge that DLI teachers should demonstrate. Therefore, we developed both preservice and inservice, performance-based, DLI-specific rubrics for assessing teacher practices.
To create these rubrics, we:
- intentionally focused on skills and knowledge specific to DLI teaching and avoided categories that reflect general teacher knowledge and skills (such as general lesson planning, writing content objectives, classroom management, etc.), as such skills and knowledge are included in rubrics utilized in teacher preparation programs and in schools.
- initially worked with a checklist developed by Fortune (2014) and then changed and expanded categories to describe DLI teacher practices across various rubric levels.
- drew on many other sources to guide our thinking (for both the structure of the rubrics and their content). The sources listed under the resources tab were especially significant.
- sought feedback on the initial draft of the preservice rubric from Ana Hernández (California State University-San Marcos, the external adviser to the grant), and Roy Lyster (Professor Emeritus, McGill University), and made changes based on their feedback.
- conducted a survey study based on an earlier version of the preservice rubric and made revisions to reflect feedback offered by DLI and CLIL scholars (n=57), practitioners (teachers and administrators) (n=60), and student teaching supervisors (n=3).
- conducted a pilot study of the preservice rubric in Spring 2018 and made additional modifications based on feedback received from University student teaching supervisors at the University of Minnesota.
The inservice rubric is based on the preservice rubric but includes four developmental levels or stages rather than three. The self-assessment rubric represents a simplified, less detailed version of the inservice rubric to facilitate teacher self-assessment.
We also created a comprehensive workbook to support preservice and inservice teachers in developing the knowledge and skills represented in the rubrics.