Professional Growth
Customized, research-based training that equips Armenian DLI educators and leaders to teach with excellence, confidence, and cultural depth.
Training Built for Everyone a DLI Program Depends On
Excellent teaching and excellent leadership have to grow together, so ADLEA's Professional Growth program trains both.
For Teachers
Classroom-level training in the Armenian DLI instructional model, from biliteracy planning to translanguaging pedagogy.
Go to this strand → 2For School Leaders
Leadership-level training for principals, assistant principals, and district leaders who steward a DLI program's goals, models, and sustainability.
Go to this strand →Armenian DLI Demands Its Own Training
Armenian Dual Language Immersion programs face a persistent shortage of qualified educators and no centralized place to turn for consistent, specialized training. Teachers entering this model are often left to build their own instructional practice in isolation, with no shared pipeline preparing the next generation to fill the gap as programs grow. ADLEA's Professional Growth program closes that distance, offering training that is created specifically for the Armenian DLI context rather than adapted from generic dual language models, so that every educator, whether brand new to the classroom or decades into their career, has a clear and supported path toward mastery.
Built Around the Educators It Serves
Training Designed for the Armenian DLI Model
Built specifically around the Armenian dual immersion context, addressing the unique demands of biliteracy, translanguaging, and cultural integration that generic dual language training does not cover.
Support for Every Career Stage
Structured pathways for both new educators building their foundational practice and veteran teachers refining and expanding their instructional expertise.
A Credentialed Path to Recognition
Professional development that connects directly to ADLEA Certification, giving teachers a clear, credentialed way to have their growing expertise recognized by their school, district, and the wider field.
The Framework Behind the Training
ADLEA's professional development is built on a research-grounded framework that treats biliteracy not as two separate literacy programs running side by side, but as a unified, simultaneous, and carefully designed process. At its core is the understanding that strength in one language actively supports and accelerates growth in the other. Every training ADLEA offers translates this evidence base into concrete classroom practice, equipping educators with tools that are immediately applicable and designed to deepen over time.
Linguistic Interdependence
What a learner knows in one language transfers. Concepts, strategies, and awareness built in Armenian strengthen the partner language, and vice versa.
Simultaneous Biliteracy Development
Both languages are developed from the start, not sequentially. The Bridge, the intentional cross-linguistic instructional moment, is the cornerstone of this approach.
Translanguaging as Pedagogy
Learners' full linguistic repertoire is a cognitive resource, not a problem to manage. Pedagogical translanguaging is planned, purposeful, and distinct from unstructured code-switching.
Backward Design for Biliteracy
Units begin with bilingual performance tasks and work backward through language objectives, content integration, and cultural relevance.
Where Deep Armenian DLI Teaching Begins
The following represent a selection of the core topics ADLEA's professional development addresses — a curriculum that continues to grow with the field and the needs of Armenian DLI programs.
Planning for Biliteracy
Backward design from bilingual performance tasks through language objectives, using a Biliteracy Unit Framework to architect coherent bilingual units across content and grade levels.
Cross-Linguistic Transfer
Cross-linguistic transfer in DLI operates across five dimensions: conceptual knowledge, metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies, pragmatic language use, specific linguistic elements, and phonological awareness. ADLEA's training equips educators to recognize and leverage each type in their Armenian DLI instructional planning.
Translanguaging Pedagogy
Designing intentional, pedagogical translanguaging moments that honor learners' full linguistic repertoire, distinguishing between spontaneous language mixing and planned, purposeful cross-language moves.
The Bridge
Teaching the Bridge as the explicit instructional moment where learners move between languages, using structured cross-linguistic comparison to deepen metalinguistic awareness and academic language in both.
Oral Language Development
Building oracy as a literacy objective in its own right, from structured academic discussion in Armenian and the partner language to oral language routines that develop bilingual sentence complexity across grade levels.
Educator Wellbeing and Sustaining Practice
Equipping teachers with the inner resources and professional community structures to sustain joyful, culturally grounded instruction over the long arc of a career.
Training for the Leaders Who Steward Armenian DLI Programs
A DLI Program Rises or Falls With Its Leadership
A thriving Armenian Dual Language Immersion program is inseparable from the leadership around it. The goals a program is working toward, the instructional model that carries it, the staffing and scheduling decisions that determine whether it can function day to day, and the sustained institutional will a program needs to survive its most fragile early years all rest on the judgment of the principal, the assistant principal, or the district leader charged with protecting it. When that leader arrives without a genuine grounding in what Armenian DLI is building toward and why, even excellent teaching can be undermined by decisions made one level above the classroom. ADLEA's School Leadership Training closes that gap, giving the administrators and district leaders who steward these programs the same depth of understanding in DLI goals, instructional models, and research that ADLEA already builds in teachers, so that leadership becomes a source of stability for a program rather than a variable it has to survive.
Built Around the Leaders It Serves
Fluency in DLI Goals and Models
Leaders build genuine command of what Armenian Dual Language Immersion is designed to achieve and the instructional models that carry it, so every program decision is made from real understanding rather than assumption.
Research-Informed Decision-Making
Leaders learn the research base behind biliteracy and dual immersion so scheduling, staffing, and program design choices are grounded in evidence, and so leaders can confidently defend the model to families and school boards.
Operational and Sustainability Leadership
Leaders gain the operational judgment and long-range planning skills needed to protect a DLI program through leadership transitions, budget pressure, and enrollment growth.
The Framework Behind the Leadership Training
ADLEA's School Leadership Training is built on the premise that a leader does not need to have taught in a DLI classroom to lead one well, but does need a genuine, researched understanding of what the model is, why it works, and what it takes to sustain. The training moves across five dimensions of leadership, from the program's founding vision through the daily operational choices that either protect or erode it, so that leaders come away not with talking points, but with the working knowledge to make sound decisions on their own.
Program Goals and Vision
A precise understanding of what Armenian DLI is working toward, biliteracy, bicultural competence, and academic parity across both languages, so every decision protects that vision.
Instructional Models
How the DLI instructional model functions in a classroom, from language allocation to the Bridge, with enough depth to recognize strong practice and notice when a program has drifted off course.
Research Foundations
Direct engagement with the research base behind biliteracy and dual immersion, equipping leaders to make evidence-grounded decisions and speak with authority to staff, families, and boards.
Operational Leadership
The practical operating knowledge specific to running a DLI program well: staffing pipelines, master scheduling, and budget decisions that treat both languages as equally essential.
Sustainability and Long-Term Success
Succession planning and institutional habits that let a program's success outlive any single leader's tenure, so continuity never depends on one person staying in the role.
Where Strong DLI Leadership Begins
The following represent a selection of the core topics ADLEA's School Leadership Training addresses — a curriculum that continues to grow with the field and the needs of Armenian DLI programs.
Understanding the DLI Model and Its Goals
What Armenian Dual Language Immersion is actually building toward, and how that shapes every other leadership decision around it.
Research Foundations for Leaders
The evidence base behind biliteracy and dual immersion, translated into language leaders can use confidently with staff, families, and school boards.
Staffing and Scheduling for DLI Programs
The operational realities specific to a dual immersion model: language allocation, staffing pipelines, and master scheduling that protects instructional time in both languages.
Evaluating and Supporting DLI Instruction
How to observe, coach, and give meaningful feedback to DLI teachers, even for leaders who did not come up through a dual immersion classroom themselves.
Budget, Operations, and Resource Planning
Allocating funding, materials, and resources across two languages as equally essential, rather than treating one as core and the other as supplemental.
Sustainability and Succession Planning
Protecting a program's future through leadership turnover, growth, and institutional change, so continuity doesn't depend on any one person staying in the role.
Learning Experiences Built for Real Educator Lives
Workshops and Institutes
In-person and virtual sessions designed as standalone modules that educators can attend independently or as a connected sequence.
Coaching and Communities of Practice
Ongoing cohort-based professional learning, peer observation cycles, and coaching that extend learning beyond a single session and into the sustained rhythm of the school year.
Expert-Led Series and Keynotes
Multi-session deep dives with field researchers, master teachers, and thought leaders, connecting Armenian DLI educators to the global bilingual education community.
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