Model Adaptation

Internationals Network’s existing educational model has a 25 year track record of effectively serving a linguistically diverse student population. However, as immigrant students are living in increasingly more segregated communities, the need to serve a more homogeneous population is clear. This project seeks to document, explore, and reflect upon the experience of adapting the Internationals Approach for educating recently-arrived immigrant high school youth from a program serving diverse linguistic immigrant communities to a program serving a largely homogeneous linguistic immigrant community. To that end, two pilot International High Schools have been created in New York City to serve a largely Spanish-speaking immigrant student population. Latinos are the fastest growing and most segregated of all linguistic communities in the United States. It is hoped that the current focus on adapting the Internationals educational approach for Latino immigrant populations will serve as a model for comparable efforts targeted towards other linguistically homogeneous communities.

The work to develop this model adaptation was undertaken with guidance from a broad based and highly experienced Advisory Board of practitioners, researchers, teacher educators, policy makers, administrators and funders. (SHOULD WE LIST ANY NAMES?) In addition to the guidance of the Advisory Board, expert practitioners from across four different International High Schools worked for a full year to examine in detail the Advisory Board recommendations and determine their impact on actual school planning in areas such as curriculum, human resources, professional development, pedagogy, and community-school partnerships..

As the pilot schools (which opened in 2008 and 2009) develop and work towards their first graduating classes, we are documenting the advances and highlighting the challenges through a multi-faceted process that includes teacher and principal focus groups, interviews with community partners, classroom and school observations, and writing by school practitioners. Mid-way and again at the end of the pilot, we will summarize our findings, and ultimately refine and document a modified model for national dissemination. Completion of the analysis of the pilot and its documentation will closely follow the first graduation from our pilot schools, allowing us to determine the efficacy of our model, prior to moving into dissemination.