Developing Talkers
Developing Talkers: Building Effective Teachers of Academic Language Skills”: This work, done in collaboration with the Children’s Learning Institute, will evaluate the impact of Developing Talkers (DT), an intervention designed to improve teacher facilitation of academic language skills, and the academic language skills of kindergarten and first grade students. We are specifically examining two distinct versions of DT: One that provides teachers with a script to follow (scripted), and one scaffolds teachers to prepare lesson components on their own (teacher-inspired). The Logan Lab’s role in this project is the research design. This is a Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART), which will place teachers in 8 different conditions. We designed the project to identify whether adaptive professional development strategies help teachers implement the curriculum and whether each helps children develop stronger academic language. The Logan Lab will also be involved in analyzing the data to identify the most effective combination of intervention supports.