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Quality Teaching for English Learners (QTEL) was created in 1999 by WestEd's Teacher Professional Development program under the direction of Aída Walqui. QTEL improves the capacity of teachers to support the linguistic, conceptual, and academic development of adolescent English learners, both immigrant and U.S.-born. Funded through the Western Regional Educational Laboratory Teacher Quality Initiative, as well as other funding sources, QTEL is grounded in a body of research that challenges the traditional thinking that teaching and learning for English language learners must be simplified. Instead it provides an academic framework that offers intellectual challenges and supports that strengthen teacher knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge in classes, and in turn raise student achievement.
Our extensive research and practical secondary classroom experience have helped us develop tools and processes that can be used in flexible ways by a wide variety of participants, depending on their prior knowledge, time availability, most urgent needs, and other contexts of their work with English language learners.
QTEL's tools and processes adapt the six key domains of teacher expertise that Lee Shulman (1995) mapped out in his work with Ann Brown and Joe Campione in their Fostering Communities of Learners project: knowledge, vision, motivation, reflection, context, and practice. Aída Walqui adapted Shulman's model, developing a learning model for educators that mirrors the learning opportunities that teachers need to offer their students (Walqui, 2000).
Our tools and processes for teacher professional growth include the following:
Sustained Professional Development/Apprenticeship that promotes a coordinated system for supporting the development of teacher expertise along the professional continuum. more »
Modules designed for the development of teacher expertise from preservice education through induction, on-going professional growth, accomplished teaching, and teacher leadership. more »
Building the Base five-day institute for professional developers and teachers designed to develop participants' understanding of how new, research-based practices enable rigorous linguistic and academic learning for English learners. more »
Comprehensive Professional Development Programs are multiyear that begin with the Building the Base Institute and further develop educators' expertise through a focus on disciplinary literacy and change at the school site. more »
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