In response to the Common Core’s  emphasis on conversations that promote learning, many of our teacher scholars chose to focus their inquiries on academic discussion during the 2013-14 academic year. Through support from Mills Teacher Scholars staff, participants looked at...

We are thrilled to announce that the Spencer Foundation has awarded Mills Teacher Scholars’ Faculty Director Anna Richert and Senior Researcher Julie Nicholson a $50,000 research grant for their project entitled, “Making Thinking Visible: Documenting Teacher Leaders’ Facilitation...

Nessa Mahmoudi is a second grade dual-immersion teacher at Melrose Leadership Academy in Oakland, CA and is a teacher leader at her site. Through her Mills Teacher Scholar inquiry work she works to critically examine the varied assumptions we make about teaching and learning in our unique school contexts.    My first year as a Mills Teacher Scholar, a colleague and mentor of mine told me that inquiry work is about reexamining your assumptions. She was referring to the assumptions that we hold that inform the decisions that we make in our classrooms. Sometimes these assumptions are about our students: what they can and cannot do, who they are, what they’re thinking. Other times these assumptions are about ourselves, our colleagues, our principal or our school. One thing that I have learned about my assumptions is that they often over-simplify an inherently complex situation. When I started working at my school, I had very little experience or exposure to two-way immersion programs. I was excited to receive a rather succinct description of what two-way immersion is. The Center for Applied Linguistics, an important database and resource for bilingual teachers, writes that two-way immersion is a program with “a balanced numbers of native English speakers and native speakers of the partner language that are integrated for instruction so that both groups of students serve in the role of language model and language learner at different times.” “Great,” I thought at the time. “The kids will be able to learn from each other and everyone will have an opportunity to teach and to learn from one another.” The idea aligned well with my vision of a progressive, student-centered classroom. As I got to know the diverse group of families and students in my classroom I soon realized that the simplified definition of two- way immersion did not represent the true linguistic complexity of my classroom. When I tried to pair students by language proficiency and when I thought about the language status of my students that were exposed to African American vernacular, I felt confused.  I quickly began to question two of the most commonly held assumptions about two-way immersion programs: In the two-way immersion classroom there is a dichotomy of language resources. Two-way immersion inherently creates opportunities for all students to be “language experts.”