Supporting All Teachers in Becoming “Language Teachers”: Evaluating the CLASS Project
Emergent Bilingual (EB) students are one of the fastest-growing groups in Texas schools. With about 1.2 million EB students in the state, school districts are looking for effective ways to help these students and support their teachers.
To address this, the Texas Center for Educator Excellence (TxCEE) received a federal grant to create and implement the Collaborative Language Acquisition Strategies (CLASS) program. AIR has partnered with TxCEE to study the implementation of the CLASS project and its impacts on teachers and students.
CLASS helps elementary teachers learn effective ways to enhance their general instruction while also supporting EB students. The project has three main goals:
- Provide teachers opportunities to learn, implement, and reflect on evidence-based teaching strategies to enhance their instruction;
- Increase teacher retention; and
- Improve all students’ English language arts skills, and EB students’ language development.
AIR's Evaluation of the CLASS Program
AIR is conducting a multi-year evaluation of CLASS that includes an implementation (formative) study and an impact study to support continuous improvement and assess program outcomes. The formative evaluation examines how CLASS is implemented across schools and districts, identifies facilitators and barriers to implementation, examines teachers’ use of CLASS-related practices, and explores teachers’ experiences with the project. The impact study is designed to estimate the effects of CLASS student outcomes after three years of implementation.
To answer these questions, AIR is drawing on multiple data sources, including teacher and parent surveys; interviews and focus groups with teachers, mentors, and leaders; program participation records; and student administrative data. Findings from the evaluation are intended to inform ongoing refinement of CLASS and contribute to the broader evidence base on professional learning models that support educators serving Emergent Bilingual students.
Next steps
The evaluation team is continuing formative data collection and analysis during the current implementation period and preparing for impact analyses as student outcome data become available. We look forward to sharing these findings as they become available.
