Sunday, May 19, 2013


My family and I are just coming back from my daughters’ Multicultural Festival at their preschool.  Both of them are attending Puerta Abierta (Open Door) and both of them danced in the festival. It was a blast! We were first hand witnesses and participants of a celebration of life by a community of happy, engaged committed individuals supporting an educational approach. Puerta Abierta is a successful, popular, notorious Bilingual- Spanish immersion preschool in Illinois. I choose Puerta Abierta preschool for my observations for this course because of their prominent and well known Bilingual Spanish Immersion program. In this type of program you try to create a balanced class consisting of half of students that speak the dominant language, in this case English, and half of students that speak a minority language, in this case Spanish. Then, you immerse the English-dominant students into the second language’s instruction and gradually transition them into the dominant language. The outcomes of using this approach have been phenomenal, there are scores of research based studies pointing to the tremendous benefits of this approach on all students. Furthermore, I selected Puerta Abierta because my wife enrolled our two youngest daughters in their program, she speaks wonders of it, and I wanted to see it with my own eyes. According to the scholar research on programs’ effectiveness, this approach has proven to be the most effective in educating second language learners, especially the Hispanics in the U.S., which is the focus of my doctoral studies. I wanted to see it first hand, in practice, and it entirely exceeded my expectations.

It is essential to note that the ways on which children exhibit development in specific domains such as physical, cognitive and social emotional are similar to the ones observed in other equally effective programs: toddlers are actively exploring with language and the environment; they exhibit separation anxiety; their dramatic play is incipient...etc.  Even the classroom environment and the physical arrangement is very similar. What really stands out is the use of language in the classroom. This was one of the questions during the interviews to the teachers: What language do you use for instruction and why? This was the answer: “Ninety percent of the time we use Spanish and ten percent English. The purpose of the massive use of Spanish is to teach a second language, in context, to the English speaking students and to enrich and expand the language of the Spanish speaking students. We use English ten percent of the time to ensure understanding and to clarify some linguistic misunderstandings.” In the toddlers’ classroom, half of the English speaking students communicate with the teachers in Spanish and the rest in English but the teachers responded in Spanish most of the time. All the teachers speak both languages fluently. In the preschool classroom most of the students communicate with the teachers in Spanish which expresses high levels of bilingualism by the second year in the program.

The Puerta Abierta program by itself is remarkable, long waiting lists, hundreds of bilingual students and 17 successful years can attest for it. I successfully used a similar approach in my Bilingual Transitional Kindergarten classroom for years. The difference was the ratio of language use. Due to the transitional nature of the program, I used 65% Spanish and 35% English and by the end of the school year most students were reading in both languages. This year the system mandated the implementation of an English immersion program for all English Language learners, according to them, to meet the linguistic demands of the new assessments, and the results have been disappointing qualitative and quantitative.

Generally speaking, observing this program was absolutely useful in enhancing my understanding related to child development in the early years for each age group, but it was particularly useful in enhancing my understanding of the benefits of this approach in the education of all children. After all, maybe the benefits of a bilingual education is the reason affluent people pay large sums so their children can learn another language.

I would like to bring to your attention some of the most significant insights gained as a result of my experience with Puerta Abierta.

1)       The ways on which children in a Bilingual Program exhibit development in specific domains such as physical, cognitive and social emotional are similar to the ones observed in equally effective monolingual programs.

2)      In Bilingual immersion programs all students feel proud of their use of language. English dominant children are proud of showing that they speak another language and Hispanic student feel proud and empowered because their language is the mean of instruction and is valued in the school.

3)      This program works. I know that plenty of the children graduated from this preschool continue their studies in bilingual schools and become fluent bilingual children. My 4 year old daughter is fluently bilingual from her first year in Puerta Abierta. My wife and I purposefully only spoke to her in Spanish the first three years of her life, we knew that she was going to learn English in school. After one year in Puerta Abierta she became fluent in English just by interacting with the English dominant children at Puerta.
As a consequence of these observation I am planning to advocate for the re-integration and implementation of a Bilingual program in our school. I hope I was able to share new insights about Bilingual education to you through this assignment. Thanks for reading it! Comments/questions are welcome!