The Central Texas ELL Collaborative Rubric on Highly Functioning Campuses for English Language Learners was created to support continuous performance improvement for ELL students.
One in six students in Texas is an English language learners (ELL). This is the fastest growing population in Central Texas with ELL student enrollment doubling over the last decade. Unfortunately, the achievement gap in average student performance scores on state assessments have barely improved over that decade. By high school the performance gap has widened. Only 8% of ELL students graduating college ready, compared with 58% of all Central Texas students. The rapid growth of students who have traditionally struggled most in our schools could be seen as a deficit for our region. Instead, we see a unique opportunity: if we can change the system and services to build on the strength of multiple languages, and build a truly bilingual, multicultural, academically prepared student population, we can have a workforce that creates a true competitive advantage for our region in a 21st century global economy.
The ELL Rubric is not to be used as a compliance tool. It has been designed to integrate the CIP, committee structures, and campus goals so that they yield a complementary focus on ELL academic achievement. The Central Texas ELL Collaborative developed the Rubric on Highly Functioning Campuses for ELLs as a tool to enable conversation among district leaders, principals, and school faculty around what a high functioning campus for ELLs should look and feel like in order to promote academic growth.
The ELL Rubric is a tool for communicating and deliberating expectations, identifying opportunities for growth, and informing professional development criteria for your campus in service to the
fastest-growing student population in Central Texas.
The ELL Rubric is a research-based tool originally developed in fall of 2009 and piloted in spring 2010 by members of the Central Texas ELL Collaborative (listed below). It has been updated to include promising practices supporting academic growth identified in the spring of 2013 through research conducted in the Bright Spots Study for English Language Learners. Perhaps the most important finding of this research is that principal instructional leadership is key to building structures and practices that support ELL students. Therefore, this is the driving feature of the updated ELL Rubric.
The ELL Rubric is comprised of four categories, which are: Instructional Leadership, Teacher Effectiveness, Community Engagement, and School Climate. For each category, there are concrete examples and descriptions of the evidence needed to show that a school:
• is excellent in their service to ELLs;
• is good in their service to ELLs; or
• needs additional support, knowledge and resources to serve ELLs.
Future iterations will include a Sheltered Instruction Framework, a walk-through checklist aligned with the ELL Rubric, and specific strategies and best practices suggested by the members of the Collaborative.
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