ASU Report: A New Framework for Elementary Education

Dreamers Academy is a public charter dual language elementary school serving Kindergarten to fourth grade students. Almost half (41%) of the students enrolled speak primarily Spanish at home, and 52% receive free or reduced lunch.

Although Dreamers has only been in operation for three years, in 2023, their fourth grade students outperformed their peers districtand state-wide in math. Dreamers has a 50/50 language allocation model, where children receive half of their instruction in Spanish and the other half in English. Teachers co-teach, with children having instruction in one language and with one teacher on one day and the other language and teacher on the following day. This language allocation model was developed to ensure that children receive all instruction, including specials like Music and Art, in both languages.

The administrator helped design the school building to facilitate dual language education, such that classrooms that are co-taught for each grade have a door between them to facilitate collaboration. To ensure that the co-teachers are providing instruction in tandem, they are given time to co-plan and ensure alignment between their lessons.

Children are taught in accordance with state-level standards and in alignment with a bilingual approach to education. The curricula used are Benchmark Advanced/Benchmark Adelante for Language Arts and Math Reveal for grades K–5. The administrators and teachers are in the process of adapting the Science and Social Studies curricula to fit within a dual language setting.

Additionally, instruction embeds opportunities to make explicit connections across languages. For example, the Spanish instruction teacher has an anchor chart with cognates — words that sound the same in English and Spanish — to help children bridge the concepts they know across their two languages.

Translanguaging is also used within the context of the traditional 50/50 language allocation model; for instance, a teacher who is providing instruction in English will clarify the content in Spanish to help the child understand before continuing the English instruction.

Newcomer children who are not yet fluent in English are kept in the Spanish-only classroom for a month to help them get acquainted with the school’s culture and procedures before switching between Spanish and English classrooms.