Abstract Professional development for teachers is a complex and multifaceted endeavor and is becoming more so as popularity grows for standards-based education.
Teachers generally report feeling pressure to cover the curriculum at nearly any cost.
For English language learners, the cost is greater than usual as teachers often inadvertently pay less attention to the language needs of these students in content courses. The project described in this report was designed with the belief that teacher professional growth can best be fostered through sustained collaborative inquiry between teachers and researchers. It has set out to incorporate what we know about quality professional development with the special features needed to meet the needs of English language learners. The purpose of the research project was to develop an explicit model of sheltered instruction that teachers could use to improve the academic success of their LEP students. The project has defined a model of sheltered instruction that is based on the research of best practices, as well as on the experiences of participating teachers and researchers who collaborated in developing the observation tool being utilized in the study.