¡welcome y bienvenidas!

Thanks very much for visiting my website. I am professor of education at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development and chair of the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society department. Before earning a doctorate and joining BC, I had multiple roles supporting the education of multilingual learners. I was a 3rd and 4th grade dual language teacher (Spanish and English), a bilingual resource teacher (K-12), an education specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and a research scientist for CAST.

As a Spanish-English bilingual and biliterate educational researcher, I am focused on three broad areas: 1) How language and literacy develop among bilingual learners; 2) What goes on in classrooms where multiple languages are spoken; and 3) Designing and evaluating instructional frameworks that support teachers to recognize and include the languages and lived experiences of their students. To those ends, I have a number of ongoing projects. Click on the headers of each for more detailed overviews.

Bilingual Teacher Education

With state department of education funding, BC is collaborating with with school districts in Massachusetts to offer the Bilingual Education Certificate a 1-year, online bilingual education course sequence for practicing teachers leading to endorsement for bilingual education for any license.

Exploring how grouping affects literacy 

In a collaboration with Michael Kieffer and Elise Capella at New York University, and with funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, we are exploring whether small group literacy instruction  is more effective when emergent bilingual 4th and 5th graders are grouped homogenously or heterogeneously with monolingual English speaking peers.

Scaling up the claves curriculum

Rebecca Silverman at Stanford University and I are continuing our decade-long partnership developing CLAVES, a program of research dedicated to designing language-based literacy instruction with and for multilingual learners and their teachers. Our most recent Institute of Education Sciences funded project (2020 - 2025) is an efficacy trial of the CLAVES curriculum in Bay Area, California school districts.

eliminating the gre from doctoral admissions

In the spring of 2020, the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society department voted to send a proposal to Lynch School administration the establish a 3-year study in we suspended the use of the GRE for doctoral admissions  (2021 - 2023). The proposal was accepted and we have begun to study the process as of the 2021 admissions cycle.