A randomized controlled trial study: An analysis of virtual professional development and virtual mentoring and coaching for mainstream teachers serving emergent bilingual students

Abstract

Preparing mainstream in-service teachers of emergent bilinguals (EBs) to provide engaging instruction is key to the academic and linguistic outcomes of EBs. Pre- and post-classroom observation recordings were used to compare four instructional components: ESL strategy, activity structure, communication mode, and academic language across treatment (VPD + VMC) and control (VPD only) conditions through a paired-samples t-test. The findings indicated that teachers in the treatment and control conditions changed their pedagogical practices from pre-to post-classroom observations across ESL strategy, activity structure, communication mode, and language content. Additionally, we analyzed teachers' pre- and post-intervention classroom observations utilizing descriptive statistics to investigate how teachers’ individual pedagogical practices across the two conditions changed over time. Lastly, post-classroom observation recordings were used to compare the difference between treatment and control teachers' ESL strategy, activity structure, communication mode, and language content implementation through an independent-samples t-test. These findings indicated no significant differences between treatment and control teachers' implementation of post-ESL strategies, activity structure, and language content but in one area of communication mode (i.e., verbal, reading, and writing). The conclusion of the study is that 60 h of asynchronous VPD sustained over a six-week period is key for teachers of EBs to make positive changes in pedagogical practices without the need for the added short-term VMC support (3 h over three sessions).