It was summer of 2015 in Framingham, Massachusetts. Our dual immersion program was about to enter our 25th year! Meanwhile, our transitional bilingual programs across the district were overflowing with newcomer students. Fortunately, we have had strong leadership guiding our programs for many years. Program design had always been based on research and followed principles of effective practices for bilinguals. However, it was time for us to revisit our approach and to better understand the challenges of developing bilinguals.

Our Bilingual Director, Gen Grieci, had learned about Cheryl Urow’s work through the Massachusetts Association for Bilingual Education (MABE). With Title III funding, Gen organized a two-day summer professional development workshop taught by Cheryl, “Introduction to Biliteracy and the Bridge Institute.” Teachers and coaches from both our transitional bilingual and our dual language programs attended the institute. Cheryl Urow began by asking for our burning questions that we wanted to address during the two days. Many teachers stated that while they felt comfortable with bridging vocabulary through cognates, they wanted to move beyond the word level of connecting languages. Throughout the two days, we were challenged to think about languages in new ways. We were also entertained by Cheryl’s lively presence and quick wit! At the end of the institute, we were so inspired; we wanted to continue to learn about biliteracy and how to apply Cheryl’s (and Karen’s) strategies in our classrooms.

This blog will follow our journey through a book study that sprang from the summer institute. We met on a monthly basis to reflect on each chapter, share ideas, and brainstorm applications in our classrooms. The book studies were held at two schools: Barbieri Elementary School, home of our Spanish/English Two-Way program, and Brophy Elementary School, which houses our transitional bilingual Spanish program and sheltered English classes. These book studies met separately at each school on different dates. As I helped facilitate the book studies at both schools, I realized there was a need to share our experiences. It has been valuable to inform Barbieri teachers about how Brophy teachers have implemented strategies from the text and vice-versa. My colleagues and I decided that other teachers from around the country would also want to compare experiences. We hope you will read about our book study and comment on our ideas in an ongoing dialogue.

Look for my posts at the end of each month. Future topics will address:

• Examples of Biliteracy and the Bridge, as shared by presenters at the Massachusetts Association for Bilingual Education conference.
• Chapter 1: Foundations in teaching for biliteracy.
• Chapter 2: Students, a multilingual perspective.
• Chapter 3: Teachers capitalizing on life experiences and diversity. Teacher collaboration and reflection. Photos of teachers collaborating.
• Chapter 4: Planning the strategic use of two languages. Biliteracy at the classroom level, two case studies with photos of bridging charts.
• Chapter 5: Linguistic creativity and academic conversations. Transcripts of student discourse.