Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Education provides a much-needed blueprint for how school leaders can leverage the power of collaborative learning to create more culturally and linguistically responsive schools.

The book describes an innovative network of twenty preK-8 schools located across the United States striving to address the barriers to inclusive education. Based on an ongoing initiative begun in 2012 by a team at Boston College, the book shows how these schools transformed to better serve their diverse, multilingual communities by adopting a two-way immersion model with the help of local faculty and other experts in bilingual education serving as mentors.

Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Education describes the founding of the network, the theory of action that drove its design, and the compelling evidence linking the networked approach to subsequent growth in student achievement and enrollment at the schools. Chapters written by the network's mentors examine in detail six practices that were key to driving the schools' transformation, including critical conversations, fidelity assurances to the two-way immersion model, coordinated professional development, teacher reflection cycles, family engagement, and distributive leadership.

The editors draw key lessons from this network for other leaders and argue for increased attention to culturally and linguistically responsive schooling that builds on students' sociocultural competence, cultivates an appreciation and proficiency in multiple languages, and promotes high levels of academic achievement.
About the Author: Martin Scanlan is an associate professor in educational leadership at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. Before becoming a faculty member in higher education, Scanlan spent a decade working in teaching and administration in urban elementary and middle schools in Washington, DC, Berkeley, California, and Madison, Wisconsin. He continues to work closely with building and district-level administrators to bridge research and practice. Scanlan's research explores how to strengthen the communities of practice in schools to promote inclusion of students across multiple dimensions of diversity. His scholarship has focused primarily on reform in special education service delivery, bilingual education, and school-community collaboration. His work can help leaders conceptualize how to structure service delivery, promote professional learning, and attain resources. He is committed to design-based research in which practitioners play a lead role in articulating the problems of practice that they seek to address, and creating collaborative research projects tackling these problems.

Cristina Hunter is the associate director of research initiatives for the Roche Center for Catholic Education. She earned her doctorate in applied developmental and educational psychology from the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College in 2014. Her research has focused on the experiences of Latinx migrants in the United States with a specific emphasis on dual language development. Hunter completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on a collaborative study between Boston College and Tufts University examining character development in youth. She earned her master's degree from New York University and her bachelor of arts from Boston College.

Elizabeth R. Howard is an associate professor of bilingual education in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches graduate courses on linguistic and cultural diversity and conducts research focusing on dual language education, biliteracy development, and the preparation of teachers to work with multilingual learners. She is currently a coinvestigator of a federally funded research project exploring writing instruction and outcomes among English Learners, and has served as principal investigator of several large-scale studies of biliteracy development and dual language education. Her books include Realizing the Vision of Two-Way Immersion: Fostering Effective Programs and Classrooms and Preparing Classroom Teachers to Succeed with Second Language Learners. Previously, she worked as a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Linguistics and as a bilingual teacher in California and Costa Rica.