"How can I bridge the gap between social and academic English?” was the question guiding the inquiry work of  Mills Teacher Scholar Alberto Nodal. An elementary teacher in San Lorenzo, Alberto has been investigating effective instruction for English Language learners with Mills Teacher Scholars for the last 4 years. He recently presented his work on idioms at the California Association for Bilingual Educators conference (CABE) to a standing room only crowd of teachers who nicknamed him, “The idioms guy.”  As a 3rd grade teacher at a school with a bilingual program, I remember the sense of frustration I felt at the beginning of the school year as my students resisted speaking and writing academic English. They had no problem using English freely on the playground, but in the classroom they often responded negatively. How could I bridge the social conversational language with which they felt comfortable with the higher language demands that they deemed almost scary?

Data: for many teachers, this word has come to mean standardized test score data frequently used to evaluate teachers and schools. Given at the end of the year, after instruction has occurred, they are not particularly useful to guide and inform ongoing instruction. By contrast, when we in the Mills Teacher Scholars project talk about data, we are talking about a much broader array of data: classroom assignments, interviews and conversations with students, teacher observations of students engaged in learning experiences, videotapes of small group learning, along with standardized test scores. It is our view that the use of these data can help teachers adjust their teaching on a day-to-day basis, and to address the obstacles that get in the way of learning. Our Mills Teacher Scholars groups--both site based and at Mills College give teachers the tools and support they need to collect and make sense of the kinds of classroom based data that can inform teaching practice. Dina Moskowitz has been teaching for seven years and has been in the Mills Teacher Scholars group  for three years. She began her most recent inquiry project investigating her middle school students’ reading comphrehension guided by a Teacher’s College Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop  philosophy. Using real time formative assessment data, her inquiry went in a very different direction than she had originally anticipated. From the beginning of the year it was clear to me that students generally fell into three camps—the “I love to read!” group, the “I’ll read because it is my homework, but I’d rather be doing something else” group, and the “I won’t read, you can’t make me!” group. For my research, I decided to focus on this last group.