ELL Policy Podcast: Transcript

Tan: Today we have back again fan favorites Dr. Debbie Zacarian and Lydia Breiseth to the podcast. I'll let you both introduce yourself, but of course people know you both from, Dr. Zacarian, from your library of books and Lydia Breiseth, who has single-handedly with a very small team of like one or two or just by yourself, has really steered the institution of Colorín Colorado, who has shined the light for all of us for many, many years. When I started teaching as well, I was referred to your site and I was like, “Wow, what? This is free? Where is this?” And then I jumped in the rabbit hole that is Colorín Colorado.

Today, we're going to be doing a deep dive on your policy guide, called Serving Multilingual Learners: Law, Policies, and Regulations. Listeners, this is absolutely going to be practical. Let's take it away, starting with Debbie. Would you actually, both, would you please give us a context for the first edition before we get to the second one?

Debbie: Oh yeah, sure. Thanks for asking that question. And we are really honored to be with you too, Tan. This is really great. Thank you.

So just as background, in 2011, I wrote a book called Transforming Schools for English Learners. And honestly, I didn't set out to write a book. It was because schools kept calling with urgent, honest questions, like:

• What are the laws?
• What does compliance look like in my context?
• Why are we still missing the mark with the multilingual learners in our schools?

And at the time, I was working with districts across the country, helping them design language education policies that were both legally sound and grounded in best practice. But the real driving force behind the book was what I witnessed in the field and you know, some examples are students being taught in hallways, students being misidentified as having special education needs, or quietly disappearing from the system altogether. But it was the challenge of, "We don't know what we don't know."

So in prior podcasts with you, Tan, I've shared my own personal journey and how it began years ago, when I worked with Vietnamese refugee students and I too didn't know the rules and in a great sense I didn't know what I didn't know. And I remember phoning the regional office of the State Department of Education and being really fortunate to work with two great professionals who really guided me in creating programming.

And one of them is Sonia Nieto, who later became a professor at the University of Massachusetts. And I later became, served on the faculty at University of Massachusetts as well so I had this wonderful connection and I also had the great fortune of working with a wonderful principal who was fully committed to the work. So together we started asking, you know, questions at the time which were:

• How much time should we devote to teaching ESL?
• How do we place students in content classes when they don't speak English?
• How will we know if what we're doing is working?

And years later I found myself surrounded by educators asking the same questions that I once had. That that's why I wrote that book and then later started working with Lydia from Colorín Colorado on creating a policy guide that we called Serving English Learners: Laws, Policies, and Regulations. Both of these were shaped by real stories and real questions, with the goal of helping all of us design programs that integrate both laws and regulations, as well as the most current research, and for me it kind of, when I think about listeners of this podcast, it's never just about policy and compliance. It's really about building schools where every multilingual learner is really seen and supported and flourishes.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Tan, for this opportunity and Debbie, for that great overview. Where we come into the story is after Debbie has written this book and she and I were getting to know each other and working on a couple different projects, and I think what, there were sort of two animating ideas here. One is that this is really important information to get out in a practical, user-friendly format and we know that there are a lot of different policy guides and documents, but they can be a little bit dense to work through and they aren't necessarily at the top of an administrator's reading list, right?

So we wanted formats that were accessible and user-friendly, but the other piece of that is that the people who are using Colorín Colorado are often ELL specialists, ELL administrators, they are, in effect, the ELL expert in their building or in their district, and they are often the person who is most familiar with these kinds of regulations or the fact that they're even are regulations related to English language learners. A lot of people don't know that there's a whole body of policy and law and guidance and regulation related to ELL education.

And so we wanted to create a tool that not only someone who was new to this could come to, but someone who is more experienced could then share and say, "Oh, by the way, here's something that we can use as a jumping off point for this," or "By the way, did you know that this is what it looks like to be in compliance on this topic?" or perhaps even to say if they're having trouble getting traction on a particular issue, "There is actually a legal precedent for that." And so we wanted to give our audience a tool that they could take and apply right away in this format and then if they wanted more information, they could certainly go to the original guides. They could go to Debbie's book. There could be other resources, but that was where we came into it back in 2012 when we wrote the first edition.

And at the time, just to offer a little bit of context, the English Language Proficiency standards were new, relatively, as a tool, and each state had to develop, many states joined the WIDA Consortium other states came up with their own, that all came out of No Child Left Behind, and so it it had been less than a decade that these were in place and so at the time Debbie and I spent a lot of time talking about, like, "What's the state policy? What's the federal policy? What's going to be determined at the state level? What's gonna be determined at the federal level?" And of course, the federal, you know, the federal big picture impacts what happens at the state, but there are a lot of things that states do and that states had to figure out.

And what I always remember, because we put together a list of all the resources that we could find by state and we still have that list, we call it our ELL State Resources list, so that you could go and you could click on Alabama and see what are the links. At the time, very few states had websites that had ELL information on them. Very few states had documents with guides. The big ones did: California, New York, Texas, Illinois, yes. But other ones did not. And you would have to find like a paragraph in this document on page 47. And we tried to be very expansive. How do you do identification? What are the assessments?

And over time, what we've now seen, I think virtually every state now has at least a Title III or an ELL page on their website. They have more documents, it's gotten more streamlined. We've taken down a lot of the content because it's gotten out of date, but that things have shifted so much just in terms of the development of the field and people getting to know whether it's through WIDA or the other resources, there's just much more infrastructure now than there was when we wrote the guide. And so the guide was in, you know, filling that gap a little bit. But fortunately over time, that has been improved overall for the field, I would say.

Tan: To summarize it all, like all of our work is guided by law and we have to be in compliance to law and your guide is really saying, "How, what does this look like? Let's clarify, let's make it comprehensible. The legalese is intense. Here's a guide to really help teachers, administrators, districts who really make sense of what this looks like in schools, and how can you make that happen?"

So it's going to be practical. As in all things, both your book and your website are all doing that. Could you, before we go into the second edition, let's talk about what, let's contextualize it with within stories. Can you both please share stories about how this guide, in what situation would this guide support students and teachers and schools?

Debbie: It's probably one of the most important things is that we properly identify multilingual learners and yes, Lydia's correct. States, have become much more clear on what that should look like. However, when it comes to putting it into practice, it isn't as simple as following, you know, this procedure that's written out. So while the law might say all learners must be identified within the first 30 days, some schools may think, well, "I have 30 days. So from, is that Monday through Friday? Should I add, you know 30 days from then? Do I keep kids out of school for those 30 days, not start school?" I've seen a broad range.

When parents fill out a home language survey, if they indicate, they speak English and their child speaks English, but if the teacher that the child is working with thinks the child is a multilingual learner, does that mean they are a multilingual learner? What does all this look like in practice? So we asked a bunch of questions like this. What should I do when and what does the law require? And we provide these wonderful graphics of, "New student enrolls. Here's what should happen. This would be step one," and then every state has a requirement of using a particular assessment.

Now, when I first began, there weren't as many assessments as there are now. WIDA didn't exist. The Language Assessment Scale existed. The BINL (Basic Inventory of Natural Language) existed. There were a few assessments that existed that supposedly had become a standard bearer, but there were many states that weren't using them, so the law requires that you use valid and reliable assessments. But it also says that we should be looking at students too in their classes and really using a broad range of information to determine is the student a language learner? At what stage are they?

So in the in the first edition and then later in the second, we provide very specific sequential steps of what to do and how to do it. And we provide wonderful examples of three specific students who are all the same age attending the same school and what their identification process looked like and why only one of them was it clear. For example, in one situation a student was an English learner and his parents indicated that the child spoke English all the time. In another one, the students name sounded American, never got assessed … at all. And that was an error and in the third one, the one that made the most sense, parents indicated the child spoke a language other than English. Child was assessed and found to be an English or what we now call multilingual learner. So we take people through this very grounded, here are sequential steps and why and what that looks like in a graphic. So we provide like a timeline of what that should look like.

And we also say that 30 days is the maximum, but it's so much better to have someone at the ready to assess a student right from the very beginning so that that child receives the services they're entitled to as quickly as possible. So that's one example of many that we provide in a very user-friendly, practical, actionable way.

Lydia: And I can follow up on that with a little bit of a twist. We heard a really moving story from Dr. Ayanna Cooper, and I should mention that we will be compiling all these resources in one place so that people can go back and see the videos and the guide and everything else that we're talking about.

And she has done a lot of work related to Black immigrants and Black immigrants in school. And so she has a story about two students, I believe they're Haitian, in a classroom and the administrator comes in and he says, "You're in the wrong class." And they say, "No, we're not. This is our ESL class," and he says, "No, you're in the wrong class," he pulls them out into the hallway and they are Haitian ESL students, but he has thought that they are African American students and so at this very basic question of who are your students, you know, they had have been identified as the ELL, so the teacher knew, and they knew, but the administrator didn't know and couldn't make that leap to say, "Well, maybe this is the right class that they're in."  So I think that's sort of one piece of having a cohesive system in a school in which everybody can trust the data and trust the process to know that you have the information you need.

The other story and and Debbie has mentioned special education. We have a few other examples of this, but we work with a wonderful school in Baltimore called Wolfe Street Academy, which is a community school. We did a big video project with them and one really interesting thing that happened is that they noticed an uptick of special education referrals with their students who spoke Spanish.

So, this was kind of unusual and the good thing about this story is that they were paying attention. So, they noticed and they thought, "We're going to look into this a little bit more." And it turned out they had a population of Mixtecan speaking students who came from Mexico. Spanish was their second language, and so when they were assessed in Spanish, they weren't doing as well in the assessment because it was a second language. So they dug into this. They learned more about the language and all of a sudden these little language patterns they've been noticing started to make more sense. They started creating a culture of welcoming this language, and it all came from this data on this special assessment, you know, cohort that they were looking at.

And the principal said, "We thought we were doing everything right. We were giving them the assessment in Spanish. We were giving them the support and then we realized we had an entire population that we hadn't, we didn't know because we didn't have that communication yet."

So I think that, you know, sort of both of those stories speak to the fact that you really understanding who your students are is so huge because you want your policies and your approach and your instruction to fit who your population is. And you need that information and in one case, it was, there was not quite as much effort made by the administrator to figure that out. On the other hand, they had made a lot of effort. They just didn't have the full picture, through no fault of their own. So, I think those kind of speak to why it matters to sort of take these ideas off the page, out of the binder, and really get them kind of in schools and classrooms and how they're impacting children.

Tan: Because the law says that we have to identify multilingual learners, but the process is very broad, like Debbie said. And so in your guide, you're really walking students, teachers, districts, administrators through the process step by step. And we're really starting with saying, know your students. When you know your students well, you can serve them well, both instructionally, but also now abide by the law.

So now this brings us to the second edition. Tell us about what is new, how it's organized. What can teachers take away from it?

Debbie: When we shifted to writing a new edition, it was for many reasons and first, multilingual learners, they are the fastest-growing and most diverse student population in the U.S., so that's a big idea. 
Just think about what Lydia just mentioned. Here at Wolfe Street School, we thought students spoke Spanish because they were from Mexico and Lydia brings in, "Well, wait, they speak another language." That's very helpful to think of.

So when we think of who are our multilingual learners and what are their experiences, very, very important to consider, and we provide a very detailed explanation of who the nation's multilingual learners are both from a language perspective, from a prior literacy perspective, from the perspective of just the epic numbers that are experiencing adversity. So we provide this rich explanation of the diverse population of multilingual learners. 

And then second, we describe who we are as educators, and most educators in our nation are monolingual English speakers who haven't had much in the way of training or experience working with this growing population. And what we found is many, many are asking for support, understandably, because they, we recognize how much training we need. 

So what we've done is also look at what are the changes that have occurred between the first edition and the second both in who our multilingual learners are, who we are as educators, and also what the laws and regulations say. Many, many districts across the country weren't following the laws and regulations, and we organized this new guide, the second edition, around 10 most common reasons that districts weren't in compliance, by providing a road map for educators of here's how you might address these 10. 

We included that, our response to the 10, also included the findings of two major federally funded research reviews of what works and the National Academies report in 2017 on what works and the work of researchers like Collier and Thomas, who've shown long-term benefits of bilingual education.

So what all of the research tells us, and the Every Student Succeeds Act tells us, is that following the law is really important, but it's not enough. We have to really design programs that recognize and build on the strengths of our students or what they already bring with them, their linguistic strengths, their cultural strengths, and their lived experiences. And that's what really leads to lasting, meaningful change. 

And we embed a number of resources in this so that we not only give folks a very practical, demonstratable, actionable way of thinking about this, but we also share some really wonderful resources that educators can use to put these 10 much needed steps into play.

Tan: Which brings us to the features of the resources that you've already talked about, the organization. So Lydia, I'll invite you to talk about the featured guides in the source. And can you share some of them?

Lydia: Absolutely. And I also want to really highlight Debbie's expertise in this area because she has worked with so many schools and districts. And so I often will say to her, "Debbie, is this a good example? Is this a good resource? Does this fit?" And she'll say, "Oh, yeah, I love that clip. I use that all the time." Or she’ll say, "I don't think in this situation that's quite the right thing that we need right now." And so I really lean on her for that kind of guidance. But we looked through a lot of different practical resources from Colorín Colorado that we could include and I'll mention just a few.

One is an interview with Dr. Jennifer Love and I remember I spoke with, I spoke about her on the last podcast I did with you, Tan, and Debbie, we both every chance we have to talk about her work we do because she is really exemplar. And she is the director of language access in Prince George's County in Maryland. And she really has taken it to a whole new level in terms of providing district-wide support for language access for multilingual families. And she has worked very closely with the district and gotten support from the district for those efforts. She has very high standards.

And she is really thinking about, "How do you put the systems in place? How do you make them sustainable? What kind of training do people need? What kind of communication?" It doesn't just stop once somebody is hired, once you've gotten the position. There's a lot of work that goes into thinking about that and identifying that need. And in fact, we have a video interview with her, which we linked to in the guide, but we also have an article that she wrote with our colleague Laura Gardner, who works with Immigrant Connections.

And they talk about working best practices for working with interpreters, and they make a chart about what are the role that a bilingual teacher plays or a bilingual staff member and what is the role that an interpreter plays. So they have this shared skill in that they are bilingual, but their role and their training is really different.

And so that training is really valuable and it may come with, you know, learning about special education terminology. Learning about things that are very complex and also getting to know families. And how do you know what are families preferred forms of communication. So she really drills down on that, I think, in a way that's super helpful and brings that to life of what it looks like a district. So that's one.

And then two other things I just want to mention briefly come from educators we know who came as English learners when they were children and, like you, Tan and they have been so generous and gracious in sharing their stories and sharing their perspective and sort of being able to look back now and say, "Here's what it was like, here's what I felt." And I think that's so important, especially as Debbie mentioned a lot of teachers of English learners haven't had that experience, especially as children. And so that's always really valuable to share, I think.

So one is a teacher named Sean Pang. And he is an award-winning teacher who came from Hong Kong at the age of 6. And he tells that story, he remembers, "There were so many trees." He hadn't seen this many trees in Hong Kong and he had been such an talkative, outgoing child, and he became very shy and quiet. He didn't feel smart. And he kind of goes through that first day, he didn't know how to ask where the bathroom was. And you know, that just that shift that he was old enough to understand and realize. And so he talked about the things that made a difference: teachers who made a difference. A friend, grabbing his hand at recess saying, "Let's play," and pulling him and the extracurricular activities. And so we feature his video in the section that we have about school activities and ensuring that students have opportunities not only to participate, to sign up, to work with families, to know, how can these really support? So, you know, on the one piece is kind of the policy, what is in place that makes that possible?

But then to what end? To the end that the student feels included and part of the community, and then goes on and grows up like you, Tan, to be an incredibly valuable member of their community and someone who really has made a difference for a lot of people. And that is something that, you know, stems through that trajectory of having supportive teachers along the way, right?

One another is from our friend Areli Schermerhorn and she is a peer evaluator in Syracuse, NY. When I was last on your podcast, we talked about the big evaluation project we were doing, which is up and online. And so we see her go through a whole peer evaluation cycle with a teacher she's working with, which is a phenomenal project.

But we did an interview with her as part of that project and I asked her, I knew that she had been an English learner, but I knew nothing about her experience. So I just said, "Areli, can you tell us what it was like to be an English learner when you were young?"

And she said, "I didn't talk for a year." She had come to central New York from sort of the Syracuse area from Puerto Rico, she said, "I didn't speak for a year," and and that in itself, I think, you know, we hear about the silent period. But to hear from an adult who remembers going through the silent period, that's really powerful and she said, "I was put in a special education class. And I'll never forget the day the teacher brought me a book in Spanish, and I was delighted because I knew I could read in Spanish. No one else knew that, no one else had tried to figure that out, and it changed everything because they realized that I already knew how to read.”

And so when you think about Debbie's earlier discussion about identifying a child, what a difference that would have made if someone had put that book in front of Areli on her first day of class, what might have been done differently and it was, you know, at a different time and and not all of those practices were were as well known as they are now. But all that time that she lost, not being supported because people didn't know the skill set that she had, and that wasn't part of their identification and and all the other things. And then she gets into the special education class. Right. So that is, I think, just sort of a a sampling of what we have.

And then one other story I'll mention briefly comes also from Wolfe Street Academy, the community school with a parent who is a Spanish-speaking family, and she said, you know, "My daughter, I thought she had attention issues. I would talk to her and she wouldn't listen. And I was so frustrated and I thought she was disobeying me." Well, she gets to kindergarten and they give her a hearing test and it turns out she's in the early stages of hearing loss and her family didn't know; they hadn't had a hearing screening and the school works with them, not only to get her the hearing equipment she needs, eventually to get her cochlear implant, because that's just the kind of school it is, they work with their families to get what they need.

So here is the case. You know, we talked about over-identification and special education and under-identification, here's the opposite side where she really did have a special need that needed to be addressed. The family didn't know; the school played an important role because they have those systems in place. They figured it out, and then they went one step beyond that. So we've created, I've created a video gallery with a lot of our videos about special education, in particular, because I think these stories are very powerful and they show, "What does this look like? What are the implications for a student or a family?" And especially as I said, when you can, when you can get personal stories from people, when you can get people looking back, I think that can make a really big difference. And I would just say, you know, Debbie talks about this a lot, but we have great resources related to special education and ELLs going through, we have some great video clips with her, these questions around identification that are really challenging to unpack, and so that's part of the guide. And we linked to a lot of these things that people can find.

Tan: Just as I was listening, I was thinking, "Oh my goodness," another project you could possibly take on is expanding that the videos about teachers who are multilingual themselves and then going into the field and sharing their experience. But wow, what if they I wonder if you could expand that into a book or series or something, but I know you have many, many projects in there. I'm sure you going to tell us about them later, so this is planting the seed. Debbie, let's talk about how educators can use the guide with all of these features that Lydia just talked about.

Debbie: Yeah. Another great "Tan question." I would say one of the things I really appreciate about the guide, this new addition of it is how flexible it is, and it's designed for a variety of different users. First, if you know individuals or you know you, me, anyone who want to use it as a reference or for research, it's available and it's very easy to use. For groups of educators working in specific schools or district settings, you can use it as well. And it's a great foundation for professional development sessions or with professional learning community discussions.

I think the big goal between what I'm describing as this very easy-to-use document is in building programs that really works for whomever the multilingual learners are in our own context, and that follow federal and state laws. So we have a lot of embedded links. Let me give you an example of how to use it. So I mentioned there are 10 sections in the guide and one of them is all about monitoring students who've exited language education programs. So monitoring students who exhibit proficiency in English and you know, that's something that often gets overlooked.

But under federal law, we're required to monitor former multilingual learners or what others call former English learners to make sure they are continuing to succeed in school. And the law emphasizes not just tracking their progress, but also stepping in with support when students start to struggle, so in that section we talk about some common missteps that we can make, like not following up regularly with individual students who've transitioned out of programming, not having clear tools to track their progress, or assuming that students are just fine because they appear to be fluent in English and then, like we do throughout the whole guide, is we lay out specific, actionable steps to take.

For example, looking at their report cards and their progress reports, looking at their test scores, looking at other data on a regular, consistent basis for years, making sure that they're learning both English and grade-level content successfully ask. Actually asking students how they believe they're doing and listening to their experiences, and most importantly, giving them support right away when they need it. And since tools vary a lot from district to district and even from school to school and classroom to classroom, we really suggest using, consistent, well-defined tools and what we do is we provide opportunities with embedded links for educators to see some tools that we suggest that you use so that every one of us can have a clear picture of how each student is doing over time.

So overall, it's not just about knowing the law, it's really about putting systems plural in place to make sure that no student falls through the cracks, as they exhibit proficiency in English.

Tan: I'm looking at the document right now over the website and it's beautiful. And so I could see the partnership between the the broad and deep experience that you have with the resources, your teacher-friendly, focused resource that that is known for Colorín Colorado. I can see why you have partnered together for that.

Debbie: A wonderful example, if you don't mind, I just want to add that in if that's OK. Lydia brings in Jennifer Love from Prince George's County in Maryland, and Jennifer brings in so many important examples of if we hire a translator, for example, to do word-to-word translations. And in one district, I went into this high school where I think they had three translators who had been translators at the U.N. and I could hear them talking and when I tell you, they were in a montone, it was as flat as could be. They were doing word-to-word translations without much emotion, and the high school students look like clams. Each of the students had fallen with their heads on the desk, and Jennifer really talks about and brings to life, it's not just translating, it's translating with meaning and emotion, and you know what teachers do.

So what she brings to life and you know, the various interviews that she's done with Colorín Colorado is how important it is to employ translators, yes, but also provide them with training. And that's what was missing with these wonderful translators. Well, once they got training on how to be a good translator that works well with students in their classrooms, they became superstars. It wasn't that they couldn't do it. It was that they had been trained to provide word-to-word translations, straight, without much emotion to give, you know U.N. representatives, listen it so they could listen accurately and in their context. But that doesn't work in a school. So shifting their thinking through these trainings was so helpful and the students became much more successful and they no longer had their heads on their desks, they really paid very careful and close attention, and we're engaged like we want all students to be.

Tan: It's all about engaging students, and I can see how U.N. interpreters have to not sound biased. They have to keep it like interpreting the person. You have to not add your emphasis, open with education, and you actually have to engage students with your voice. So very telling story. Let's end our last few minutes with Lydia, let's talk about what Colorín Colorado has to offer in terms of resources to English and bilingual and multilingual learners. Can you share the additional resources that is known as the Everest or the high gold standard or teacher-friendly resources on the web for free from at Colorín Colorado?

Lydia: Thank you. Thank you so much. And we've done a lot of work since I was last on your podcast and had the pleasure to speak with you. So I just want to give you some updates on that.

We, as I had mentioned earlier, we talked about the project about teacher evaluation with Areli and that I really recommend it especially in discussions about being an informed observer or evaluator for teachers of English language learners.

Areli, that is her full-time position. She is an English as a New Language Teacher/Bilingual Teacher, peer evaluator. And so she brings a wealth of expertise. And what we really wanted to pull out of that is that you can see what she's noticing as she's doing an observation. So she's noticing the language objective. She's noticing the use of academic language in the classroom and so we pull that out in terms of her notes and her discussion and her interview as well as getting the feedback from the teacher along the way. And you see how this is actually a very supportive relationship, a professional relationship. And she has become and he says, "She's a member of my support team like a coach would be."

So I think that's really unusual, but I also remember that you and I spoke a lot about language objectives because I had mentioned them in reference to that project. We have a bonus video clip where we watch Areli walk the teacher, Mr. Ortiz, through the process of writing a language objective because he says, "That's an area I'm having a hard time with," and it's maybe 4 or 5 minutes. But you just watched the conversation unedited and she pulls out her binder and she says, "With this lesson, here's what I would do." And so that's a really nice bonus, I think, to that to that clip, because I know your your audience has a lot of interest in language objectives. That's one thing I would mention.

We have a new fun resource called Colorín on the Go, which is something called a web app where you get to it by going online or getting a QR code. You don't have to go to an app store, you don't have to download anything. It's not gonna get out of date when your phone updates. It's very light. It's not like a heavy clunky app that takes up a lot of space.

But we have more than 100 strategies on there that are just quick, easy, and it's designed to be shareable so that you can add a shortcut to your phone and it basically works like an app and then you can share a strategy with a friend. You could, we also have our multilingual family resources on there. You could share multilingual resources with families, if you wanted to send through WhatsApp and we did a lot of testing across different user, different phones, different operating systems to sort of try to make it as seamless as possible. I would definitely recommend that.

We have several multilingual video series related to, to families, so we have one which is available in eight languages. And that really highlights the benefit of being bilingual. There is a corollary related set of tip sheets in 16 languages as well that connects with those steps. But we have a family engagement guide that you could use family workshops and since I talked with you, I actually had the pleasure to do a workshop in Spanish with migrant families, migrant farmworker families through the Migrant Head Start program, and it was so moving. It was just to to see kind of them feel by the end of the session empowered about their language and their culture and what they could share, and they sort of came in, I think, maybe feeling very humble and maybe a little bit limited that they didn't speak English and in some cases, and that their education was maybe a little bit, their education level was a little bit more limited, but by the end, we had them singing songs and looking at books and talking about how they can preserve their language, sharing stories, about, you know, how do you have a conversation around, you know, when Dad comes home and his nails are dirty because he's been picking onions and how do you take these family experiences and turn them into meaningful conversations and interactions? So I can say now officially, I know that that material is really powerful. I suspected it was when we created it, but I've actually now seen it first hand, and that's really special.

We also have a bilingual series in English and Spanish about literacy at home for all families, regardless of literacy level of the adults, and speaking of Indigenous families, we have a series that is trilingual in English, Spanish, and Mam, which is a language from Guatemala from a trilingual educator from the Bay Area, Henry Sales. And he does these PSA's in three languages. He records them all in English, and then he does them in Spanish, and then he did them in Mam. And we have a video interview and he was someone who really pushed his culture away as we were talking about before, it was something he was not proud of, and now he is like the ambassador. He has done health PSA’s, he's done events for the Public Library, he is pursuing further education, he is a teacher, he’s started a radio station. He is just such an incredible ambassador. And so that was really a pleasure to put together.

I know you are on the cutting edge of technology, so I wanted to tell you that we're doing some work around AI. And we are mostly from the point of view at this point of what do teachers need to know? What are some of the tools they can use. What are some of the promises, the pitfalls, the benefits, the risks? What should they be learning and coming at it from the point of view that in many cases the students are already using it and so this is, it's not getting on the bandwagon, like the bandwagon is already rolling, so we sort of need to help develop that expertise and that familiarity with it at the very least. We have a great new article about using AI in ELL instruction just to kind of provide an overview, and we're doing some resources and we're going to create, keep doing that. We have a survey up where people can put in their experiences. So that's really valuable.

And then the last big, big, big exciting thing that we've been doing is our work with you, Tan, the ELL Strategy Library, which has just taken off and been so, so, so well received. And so for people who don't know that and who are friends and fans of Tan, I will say this is a must-see resource; it has already won some recognition and what it is is a collection of dozens of classroom strategies that follow a template. So you always get the same elements, you get the step-by-step instructions. Then you get the lessons learned on using them and ideas for differentiation, and ideas for co-teaching. Maybe there's some examples. How do you incorporate students languages?

And just to give your audience a little bit of background, when we started putting this together, this followed our app, which by the way, Debbie had been very helpful in, in helping me think through. I also had reached out to Beth Skelton, your friend and co-author, so when it came time to do the strategy library, I said, "Beth, how would you like to contribute some strategies to this new project we're doing?" And she had already mocked up all of these slides and put all these ideas together. It was great. And she said, "Well, I'm writing this new book with Tan. How about I bring him in?"

And so that's how we got that started and it just just blossomed, which was tremendous. What is so amazing to see is that people have really taken it and run with it. They're using it in PD and coaching, in their co-teaching and they keep coming back and saying, "Well, what else do you have? What else do you have? What else do you have?" So now we have some slide decks highlighting target high-impact strategies. We have a whole slide deck just on introducing the strategy library. We have strategy BINGO!, which I saw someone posted on social media the other day and now we're incorporating it in new resources we're doing. We have tip sheets for content-area teachers, we have a new slide deck on teaching math.

And so where it just keeps going and in particular will be working with teachers in New York City and they just keep saying, "Well, OK, so if we did that session, what's the next session we can do? What do you have for the next thing?" And I said, "Well, I don't have anything yet, but let me see what I could put together!" So it's been very organic and I think your contributions have been fabulous. And we've had a great time talking about water wheels. And I love the story that you have about showing the video of the Industrial Revolution machine and your kids' eyes, glaze over, and then you have to break it down and figure out. "How do we do this?" And so when I wanted to bring that to life, I spent a lot of time looking at pictures of water wheels and thought of you. And then I saw water wheel on my daughter's field trip and I was like, "Oh, that's for Tan, there you go!"

So that has truly been a a success story and just really gratifying to see how that does, which you helped make happen. So thank you. And those are some of the things we've we've been able to do and we're looking forward to do a lot more in the coming year.

Tan: Well, as you were sharing your list of incredible resources, Debbie was shaking her head and I like joined that like and we, the back story. Is that like you think there's a team of like 20 people. It's just Lydia doing this and she collaborates with others. I'm like, how do you? You're like a publisher and company, but you just by yourself and you do it with you both do that.

Dr. Debbie Zacarian, you give so genuinely from your experience, but you make it so practical. And of course you would partner with Lydia, who is just focused on, "Let's take the research. Everything that we've seen from the literature and how do we make it like ready for teachers to use on print, on text, ready to use right away," and you keep on innovating that and that's why I think I want to go back to what you said, Debbie, in the beginning. You said this guide is about building schools where MLs can be seen and I think that mirrors what Colorín Colorado does. And so that's wonderful way to end.

Thank you for helping us through this podcast through your resource build schools where MLs can be seen and we can see MLs better, we can treat them in a way that they deserve and you are helping us see in a different way such bright lights in our field. So Dr. Debbie Zacarian and Lydia Breiseth, thank you so much.

Lydia: Thank you, Tan. Thank you so much for this opportunity and we couldn't do it without you and Debbie and the many, many friends and contributors and wonderful audience members we have. So it's a team effort for sure and thank you for for bringing this to light.

Debbie: I'll say the same. Thank you, Tan and Lydia, my partner, thank you so much. It was an honor to collaborate with you on this project. And I'm so glad we had the opportunity to speak with you, Tan, about it. Thank you.

Lydia: Thank you, Debbie, likewise.

Tan: I'm sure there are many projects coming up in the future with both of you.