scaling up claves: cultivating linguistic awareness for voice and equity in schools
Since 2009, my colleagues Rebecca Silverman, Jeffrey Harring, and I have been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences on a series of projects called CLAVES. Once upon a time, CLAVES stood for Comprehension, Linguistic Awareness, and Vocabulary in Spanish and English, because our first IES grant (2009 - 2013) explored the relationship between language components (syntax, semantics, and morphology), vocabulary, and reading comprehension among Spanish-English bilingual children and their monolingual peers in grades 2 - 5. After a number of publications and presentations from that first grant, we kept the name for our second round of funding to develop CLAVES as a language-based reading curriculum (2014 - 2018). We used the first 2 years of the project to work directly with teachers and bilingual students in fourth and fifth grade to develop the curriculum using design-based methods in a practice embedded educational research model (see Snow, 2015). In the third year, we ran a quasi-experimental field trial of CLAVES that show meaningful effects on language, reading comprehension, and argumentative writing (Proctor et al., 2020; Silverman et al., in press).
Most recently, we received a new 5-year IES grant (2020 - 2025) to test the efficacy of CLAVES in a larger context, specifically the San Francisco Unified School District. As we work to center student voice and language awareness through text selection, critical conversations, and teacher / student language awareness, we felt compelled to keep the CLAVES acronym, but change its representation to Cultivating Linguistic Awareness for Voice and Equity in Schools. This work not only asks the confirmatory questions about whether CLAVES is an effective instructional approach at scale. We are also focusing in on multilingual teacher education, asking questions about teachers' attitudes toward language, race, and culture, and how sustained professional learning contexts, with CLAVES as the foundation, may lead to changes in those beliefs and attitudes with implications for instructional practice. See www.clavescurriculum.net for more information.
Most recently, we received a new 5-year IES grant (2020 - 2025) to test the efficacy of CLAVES in a larger context, specifically the San Francisco Unified School District. As we work to center student voice and language awareness through text selection, critical conversations, and teacher / student language awareness, we felt compelled to keep the CLAVES acronym, but change its representation to Cultivating Linguistic Awareness for Voice and Equity in Schools. This work not only asks the confirmatory questions about whether CLAVES is an effective instructional approach at scale. We are also focusing in on multilingual teacher education, asking questions about teachers' attitudes toward language, race, and culture, and how sustained professional learning contexts, with CLAVES as the foundation, may lead to changes in those beliefs and attitudes with implications for instructional practice. See www.clavescurriculum.net for more information.