California Scales Local Training to Help Young Bilingual Children

Most of the young children growing up in Fresno live in homes where languages other than English are spoken. And ten years ago, educators here were concerned that many of these children were falling behind in elementary school.

Today, the program they created to strengthen teacher practice is being used not only in early childhood classrooms in Fresno, but throughout the state. And it will soon be in family child care homes and in informal care settings as well.

“It started off as something that was a small pilot,” said Jessica Gutierrez who runs the Language Learning Project for Fresno Unified. “And now it's grown to the point where I don't think anyone could have foreseen.”

The training model focuses on the value of and support for a child’s home language, getting to know the child and family, and concrete strategies early childhood educators can use to support linguistic growth.

Fresno Unified School District worked in partnership with the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, Central Valley Children’s Services Network, Head Start, and local early childhood practitioners to develop the initial training, with leadership from experts Linda Espinosa, Carola Oliva-Olson, and Elizabeth Magruder. The project has since gone on to publish a toolkit and receive investment from the state of California to scale and expand.

More than 1,000 professionals who work with young children have been trained in the Fresno region including child care workers, teachers, and administrators. The program has been expanded to neighboring counties. And, during the pandemic, the project conducted train-the-trainer institutes over Zoom which were attended by early childhood practitioners from 24 additional counties in California who want to do this work in their own communities.

Some of the practices have been codified in California’s policy and administrative guidance, for example, guidance the California Department of Education issues to educators working with dual language learners in the California State Preschool Program.

And now with additional support from the California Department of Social Services, local leaders are working to expand and adapt the training to family child care and family, friend, and neighbor child care providers (FFNs).

Experts say FFNs are the leading source of care for infants and toddlers in the United States. In California, for instance, nearly 80 percent of children ages birth to 2 are cared for by informal caregivers. FFNs are also a common source of care for preschoolers. Yet, FFN caregivers can struggle to find access to training. They are unlikely, for example, to have training in early literacy or math which can impact children’s learning.

Gutierrez said the vision is to make sure FFNs understand the important role they play in children’s lives, see themselves as educators, and recognize the opportunities for oral language development in their daily work.

For example, Gutierrez said: “We want them to see how important it is that they're already singing during diapering time.” Their goal is to make sure care providers recognize those moments as learning experiences. “We want them to be intentional and repeat that vocabulary. It's all about repetition and reinforcement. Those are oral language opportunities.”

In Fresno Unified, Gutierrez said these practices are now embedded in the school district’s professional development system and are being used to train new teachers as the district expands its programs for young children—for transitional kindergarten teachers, for example.

Gutierrez said the training has been helpful coming out of the pandemic to get teachers back to focusing on best practices in instruction and supporting children—for example, the importance of language development and connecting with families.

What’s unique about this approach, Gutierrez said, is that while these strategies were developed for dual language learners, “they really are just incredible teaching strategies to support all children.”

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