Podcast Transcript: Behind the Scenes of Colorín Colorado w/ Lydia Breiseth

Tan: I'm so excited to have a longtime friend and colleague, Lydia Breiseth, from Colorín Colorado, on the podcast. You know of Colorín Colorado's resources and articles, and now we get to hear from them directly. Lydia, bienvenido, to our podcast.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Tan. I'm so excited to be here and really honored because I am a huge fan of this podcast, I'm a huge fan of your blog. I am always so impressed with all the questions and the way you're able to pull these big thoughts into great takeaways for people, so I really appreciate you having me here. Thank you.

Tan: Well, I really appreciate all that Colorín Colorado has given to the field. I know that before I started this podcast and blog, I knew it as one of the most trusted resources. It was Larry Ferlazzo and Colorín Colorado. And every time I saw one of Larry's or your posts, I would always stop to read it because I'm like, "OK, it's speaking teacher-speak, practitioner-teacher speak and not academic-speak." But really great scholars that have written articles for you and I'm like, "Yes." And so you always make it practical. Actually, let's start there. What is Colorín Colorado and what were its origins?

Lydia: Thank you. That was a great intro to the project because I think that highlights a little bit about the origin story as well. But we're the nation's leading site serving English learners, multilingual learners. We reach more than 3 million unique visitors a year and we are actually a public media project based in Washington, DC at PBS station WETA, which is a home that not all of our audience is as aware of and we're part of a phenomenal department within media called the Learning Media Department.

And some of our sister projects are the ones that you're are you may be familiar with, such as Reading Rockets, focusing on early literacy, AdLit.org, focusing on adolescent literacy and older, and we have LD OnLine focused on learning disabilities, Start With a Book, which is also a Reading Rockets project focused on building background knowledge, themed booklists and themed activities. We're actually going to be launching a new project later this year focused on comprehensive information about teaching reading and writing (Reading Universe). And we also have another site about traumatic brain injury, and that is called BrainLine.org.

So we're a very small team, but we have these great national projects that have really loyal, engaged audiences around specific issues that are really hard to get your arms around where there is a lot of research, but that doesn't necessarily get into the hands of the people who are doing the work. And so we've always tried to be a way to bridge research and practice, I think. And then of course, we do that on Colorín Colorado with ELLs, so that is the mission. That's how this all started, to bring the research to the field, but in a way that's very practical, easy to access, easy to use, and then easy to share as well, which is a big part of it. A lot of it has been word of mouth, and I often hear people say, “Oh, I just came from a session and people said we have to check out Colorín Colorado” and so that gives a nutshell of the big picture.

And in terms of how it began, LD OnLine and Reading Rockets were the first websites in our project, but they started getting requests for information about English learners and, "What you have in other languages?" and "Do you have anything in Spanish?" At the same time, the American Federation of Teachers teachers' union was getting questions from their members. What do you have about English learners? And so that all came together.

And I want to especially mention Giselle Lundy-Ponce at AFT (pictured at left) because she was really instrumental in putting that all together and then saying, "Let's start a conversation with WETA to see if we could pull this together in a way that that would really serve the field." Because there was not anything like this and this was 2004. There was a lot developing in the ELL field. And I don’t know if you've seen those maps that used to be published by NCELA, where they would show the percentage growth in some of the states, of how the population was changing, but there were states that were having 100%, 200%, 300% increases, up to six, seven, 800% increases in their ELL population at that time, and Giselle had the great idea to bring a group of practitioners -- you said this feels like it's practitioners talking to practitioners, that's because there was our AFT ELL Cadre. (See a more recent map that shows percentage growth from NCELA.)

And most of the people who were originally on the cadre have retired or have moved into other roles. One of them, Susan Lafond, is still there. And I actually found her resume recently when we were cleaning our offices out for some renovations that are being done at the building and so, it's really well-informed by that voice and that I think is what has made the difference, with Giselle bringing the cadre together and then later on we started partnering with the National Education Association and so that brought us to a new group of educators and a new group of staff members.

And that's great because there are ELLs everywhere and you know across the country and you know whether it's rural, suburban, urban, you know, there's just so much diversity in the population and so much diversity in the level of preparation that schools have to teach this population, and so I think we are often kind of a front line, I don't want to say first line of defense, but we are a resource that people go to when they don't know where else to go. And so I think that has been a part that has shaped the project as it has grown over these nearly two decades that we've been doing this.

Tan: I didn't know that Colorín Colorado was birthed from Reading Rockets. I was like, that is amazing. And I see the connection there. How do you spend your days at Colorín Colorado?

Lydia: My role as the director of the project is many different hats. I work on the partnerships with AFT and NEA. I'm in charge of developing the content. And so, I think there are 2 examples that really bring that to life and they both have to do with current events. So when we knew that we were going to be having a lot of Afghan families coming from Afghanistan, we started looking around for resources and I came across an article from the Austin Independent School District in Texas, and they actually had held a press conference to talk about what they were doing to prepare for the Afghan families that would be coming because they had a very big Afghan community already, so they had a lot of language support. They had a lot of cultural support. A lot of the teachers had been had some training on cultural norms and so they were really trying to prepare and thought maybe other districts could be an example. And as it turned out, they had never held a press conference like that. They had no idea how it was going to go. But then this article got out and then they started getting all these calls and we called them, and so I think it's a great reminder to share the work you do because other people really can learn from it.

I reached out to them and ended up interviewing the Director of Refugee Services for the district, the Director of Multilingual Education, and an Afghan interpreter and a parent liaison and we didn't publish her name for safety reasons, but they were able to give me a sense of how they were preparing what they knew about the community, what teachers needed to know about, maybe some cultural norms that they could expect to see. And I then wrote an article based on the based on those interviews.

But I think it's a good example of trying to go to where the story is a little bit and then who are people that we can learn from? So let me put myself in the position of a teacher who has not taught any Afghan students, but I may have some families coming and I don't really know where, who can I learn from? Well, this is a team I can learn from. They have been already doing this work.

After so then, fast forward to a different situation in a different part of the globe, after Russia invaded Ukraine, we were thinking again along the same lines. If eventually Ukrainian families are coming here more regularly or if there’s a big group coming in a short time, how can we help schools prepare for that?

We first did a resource page and it talked about what are some considerations for all students who are impacted by this. So after a few months, we kind of regrouped and I spoke with Dr. Ruslana Westerlund had been so kind to review the first page for me and give me some feedback and tell me which resources were worth keeping and which ones were not worth keeping. And then I said, "What can we do that really can highlights the experience of the children and the families who are coming?"

So she pulled together a phenomenal group of Ukrainian educators who are working in teaching in this country and I put a Google doc together. I put my questions in and they all filled it out. And so we had questions that were very much in the immediate...what are families going through? What are you seeing when they come? What can we learn?

But then they really had so much to say, because many of them had come to this country some very recently, some had been there for a long time, but they all had that experience of coming here and knowing what was hard for them, what was challenging, and then having supported other families, they started realizing, “Oh this is something that...a lot of Ukrainian families have this question.” So it's a really nice case study of what it looks like for a cultural adjustment. What's different about the language? What's different about the schools, what's different about the expectations around XYZ? And so it turned into just a really great showcase that sort of highlights the urgency of the moment.

And so those were resources that when I started, I didn't know what they were going to look like. I didn't know who was going to help put them together. I just knew they were needed and so then it was sort of a puzzle of saying, "OK, how do we get there and what do we do?" So if you're sort of coming back to the question, you had said of how do I spend my day? You know, it's reading the articles, it’s reaching out to somebody on the phone, it's sending the e-mail saying, "Hey, what are your ideas here?" It's being introduced to the other teachers who can contribute. And then going through there and saying, "OK, how do we put this together and make sure that it can be useful, it's sensitive, it's accurate?" And I'm sure we are not, we don't get it all right all the time. But we certainly try to have a lot of people involved who can help steer us in the right direction.

We're not working in a school, we are not in the classrooms every day. So it really helps to have the teachers and the families as well. And so it's just kind of jumping around between all those things. And no two days have ever been the same, I certainly can say that without hesitation.

Tan: I'm sure you often get this question of like, “Oh, Colorín Colorado. That's in Colorado, right?" So would you tell us about the name?”

Lydia: Sure, it’s great question because we do and I remember one time seeing that Denver Happy Hour had tagged us on Twitter and understandably, a lot of people do think we're in Colorado and as I mentioned, we're in Washington, DC but "Colorín Colorado" is a phrase that's used in storytelling. So this is something new for people who don't speak Spanish. For people who speak Spanish, it's a little bit more of a familiar reference, but there's a phrase when you get to the end of the story, "Colorín Colorado, este cuento se ha acabado/el cuento se ha terminado.

It doesn't translate to "happily ever after," but it's kind of that same idea, of a refrain that you hear again and again at the end of a story, and we actually have a quote on the site where someone says, "When I hear this, this just reminds me of the stories I heard in my childhood and brings me so many good memories." So there is a population for whom it's a very meaningful reference. It's sort of a learning curve for a lot of other folks, but it's a beautiful reference, I think, to that cultural connection and that the power of the storytelling and and reading.

Tan: Let's move to talking about some of your articles on your website. Let's talk about building relationships with ELLs and then another one about language objectives.

Lydia: Sure. Well, building relationships with ELLs, I think if there's one thing that I have heard more than anything, if you were to say, "What is the one piece of advice you've heard more often from veteran teachers of ELLs?," it would be build relationships with your students and there's so many layers to that. And I was thinking, you could almost do a Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 like RTI of this and the article is not structured this way, but you have that first level that everybody can do: be kind, be welcoming, smile, positive body language, learn how to pronounce people's names.

And we have a quote from a teacher that someone put on Twitter, where he said, "A student came up to me and said, 'You know, you're my favorite teacher.'" And he said, "Thank you so much, but I'm not your teacher." And (the student) said, "But you're the one who smiles to us and you're so kind in the hallway." And so you think, "Well, what a great job he's doing, making that student feel welcome. But what's going on in his other classes that he doesn't feel like he's getting that from those teachers?"

So there's kind of that level and then there's the next level, Tier 2, getting to know the kids, getting to know their strengths, their talent, getting to know their interests, a little bit more about their background. And then there's the Tier 3, of really getting to know their background education, where are they with their literacy, are there other social emotional issues that need to be addressed and so that you're not doing all of these at once, but everybody can start out at Tier 1 one and it really makes a difference.

And what this looks like is different everywhere because you also have cultural considerations coming in and you have all these different pieces of it, but it is so central, and the teachers we talk to who feel that this is so important say whatever time you invest, you're going to get that back later on because you're going to have a better rapport with the students and families as well. Then you're just going to know them better, you're going to be able to improve engagement and this really matters.

At an even more basic level, Dr. Ayanna Cooper has a few different video clips on our site where she tells about assumptions that people make about students. She has two separate stories in which Haitian students are mistakenly thought to be African American, U.S.-born students, and what are the implications of that. In one case, an administrator calls a student out, or calls two students out and tells them they're in the wrong class and finally, the students say, "This is our class. We are ESL students." And they have to be the one to tell the administrator that they're in the right place.

And in other case, it's a young woman who has come from Haiti after the earthquake and she is having a really hard time in U.S. history because everyone thinks she has this background knowledge because she's been in U.S. schools as an African American student all the way up through high school, and she has not been. She has just arrived here. So she has some information. She's not starting from scratch. But she is not, and people keep saying, "You should have seen this, you should have had this already. You should have had this already."

At the most basic level, who are your students? Where are they from? What languages do they speak? And so it's it really, it can be very powerful and make a huge difference. So that's something that we really try to make sure is easy to share. We have great examples. We have great videos, bringing it to life and we also have some really nice examples of how you can do this in virtual spaces as well that we developed in the pandemic.

The second article you asked about language objectives is actually our most popular article for educators on the site. It has been viewed more than 1.2 million times since it was posted, written by Jennifer Himmel. I saw her present this information at a conference and went up to her and said, "Jen, would you be willing to write this article?" She said, "Sure." And we worked on it. It's in-depth. It's got a lot of substance, and we never knew it would be this breakaway success that it is, but I think it just shows that people want substance. They want information, they want really good guidance on something that is pretty sophisticated as a topic around developing language objectives alongside content objectives.

Tan: Before I go talk a little bit more about the language objective part, you're right, the relationship part is, there are things that we can teach you, strategies that we can share with that we can learn as colleagues on how to teach instruction, language instruction or English academic language instruction.

But developing relationships is really hard to teach, yet it's the most important part. If kids trust you, they're going to risk saying things in a new language, they're going to risk following instructions in a new language. They're going to try something different. Without that trust, we go nowhere.

Would you return back to the language objective and talk a little bit more about what did Jennifer Himmel say about language objectives?

Lydia: The first thing is to help people understand what language objectives are, and I think that's a really hard thing to pull out and to be successfully meeting the content objective. So are we needing to talk about it, or are we needing to write about it? Are we needing to understand specific vocabulary? Are we needing to do something with the text or with the information like comparing and contrasting? That is different than the information we are learning in the content objective. So the first is to sort of explain that distinction.

She provides a lot of examples and then she walks through, how do you get there and what are the steps you take and what are the pieces of that process that will get you there at the end? And she's providing good examples along the way, so she's providing standards. So you're starting with what is our our objective coming from this particular content standard, for example. And then what would it look like at different levels, at different ages, to go through and actually walk through that whole process, which is why it's a little bit more in-depth because she really just kind of breaks it down in each piece.

And actually we have a new project coming up which is going to focus on teacher evaluation and observation of teachers of English learners. What was interesting to me was at the very end of the whole process, the teacher is meeting with his evaluator and she says, "Do you have any other questions for me?" And they have had a lot of conversations that we have on camera around this whole process and he says, "I'm kind of having a hard time with language objectives. Could you help me out with that?" And she says, "Sure, here are the resources I pull," so even someone who's really experienced in this area, in this population and you know he's still trying to get his head around it and I just think that's indicative of this is just, it's a hard thing to do.

But it does illuminate the process and the language, and it really makes language the focus where a lot of teachers have not had that practice. And that's something that English learner specialists are trained to do and other teachers often don't have that experience of learning how to tease that out, so that's the article in a nutshell and tha'’s what she had presented on at this conference and I thought would be so helpful to see it laid out.

Tan: Right. Dr. Brené Brown said that, "Clear is kind," and I think when we write language objectives, they provide that clarity to a lesson to that focus to say, "OK, today we're going to be learning how to analyze our data from our lab experiment. So everything we are going to do today is about analyzing."

Let's move on to, instead of articles, let's move to talking about SEL.

Lydia: This is something we've been focused on for a long, long time because it has always been apparent in terms of the work that we do on this site that it's all in the mix and it's all impacting the classroom and it's impacting students. And it's impacting teachers. And there are a lot of different ways we've come at it over time, which has included relationships with families and getting to know your students. What responsibilities do they have at home? What are some of the concerns they may have? What are some of the experiences they have? What are the traumas that they've had? That there are a lot of different pieces. A student who maybe is referred for special education and it turns out that she's never had an eye exam, and she just needs glasses. A student who he is really uncomfortable because he hasn't had a dental appointment. And so it also brings in immigration status and what kinds of health and mental health resources families have access to, as well as just the general feeling in the classroom and how does that all work together?

And I think we, perhaps, have been doing that for a long time because the ELL community is at the intersection of all of those issues for their students. They are often the connection to the family, the connection to whatever social services might be in play, whatever support the students need in the school, how is this impacting their students. And so ELL educators, I think, have a really unique perspective and often role and even what turns into a responsibility that is not their job to carry alone, but sometimes they are the person who is doing most of that work. So I think it's something that it's been on our radar for a long time.

So there are two projects that really bring this to light. One is in Dearborn, MI. This was an AFT project and we featured two schools that are right across the street from each other, a middle school and an elementary school. They serve a big community of families, most of whom are from Yemen. Not everybody, but of course this is a country that's been going through a very difficult civil war. And so a lot of kids have trauma, they have family separation. There's a sort of an unusual pattern where often part of the family comes and then other family members come later. Sometimes it's the mother who stays and the child comes to join a father or an uncle. So there are a lot of kids who aren't with their mothers and the level of education that they’ve had access to as the war has gone on has dwindled over time.

But the school has so many rich supports and it's such a beautiful, vibrant community and they've come up with all these different ways to support the families, to engage with the parents. There are gender roles to take into account. And what does that look like? They're very culturally responsive. They've got a lot of bilingual staff. You feel this warmth. There's artwork everywhere. And it just feels calm and they talk about how these kids need a stable, calm environment. They need a place where they can be afraid, as you said, to take risks. But it's going to take a while for them to get there and they just, as the principal said, they just need to be for a while, they just need to be here and we just need to be ready to meet them where they are.

So we were so fortunate to do this film which won an award. It won at Michigan Emmy. It's about 20 minutes long and we have it on our website and then we were so fortunate to be able to go back and show it and we had subtitles in Arabic and our director, Christian Lindstrom (pictured at left with Dr. Rola Bazzi-Gates), was heroic in getting that done so it was ready for the screening. And we went back to the community and people said, "You know, you always come back to Dearborn, you always come back to Salina." And there we were. We were back at the same school, showing the film, and by then one of the mothers of the students we had interviewed had come and she we had interviewed the daughter about how about that separation. And then the mother was there. So that was amazing.

Then we stayed in touch with the school during COVID. And so we learned about their family engagement. And their hands-on learning, their STEAM, their wonderful school garden, their family outreach during the pandemic. And then their more formal SEL training, so they were already doing this and they still wanted their staff to get SEL training when they came back to in-person learning because they could see at times like recess when it was really unstructured because they were having a hard time and so even with all this background, they said, "We still need more." And it made a difference. It really made a difference. So we've stayed in touch. It's a really fruitful relationship.

I will say this is a district that has a lot of district-wide support for English learners, for the training of teachers working with English learners, including whether or not they are ESL certified, and they're also those certifications and credentials are structured into what different roles need to have certifications and which roles need to be bilingual because they have so many Arabic-speaking students in the district, as well as other languages. They do something they call the New Teacher Academy, where people get training on a variety of topics, including English learners. They have a lot of cultural responsive training, and it's worth mentioning that the superintendent, Dr. Glenn Maleyko, was actually a teacher at this school that we had filmed at, in the 1990s, he taught Iraqi refugees who were coming from the Gulf War.

And so he knew what it felt like to see a really disturbing drawing and not know what the child had been through and just to not know what to do with that. Like, "Where do I even begin?" So he knew that lost feeling that I think a lot of teachers have. And so it's really that area of strength of the district. And there's also the phenomenal team at the ELL Department administrative level.

So when you have everybody on the same page as a leadership priority, the principals, and the superintendent, I mean, there's just so much you can do and there's so much that's needed. So that's a great example. And they also work very closely with their teachers' union and that has been factored into some of the more structural supports and expectations, so that is one example.

The other project we did was in Brockton, MA, and this was a district that had really excellent multilingual supports before the pandemic. They had multilingual nurses, multilingual community support facilitators, paraprofessionals. They had at least three or four different roles that interfaced with families regularly.

Not coincidentally, their superintendent also taught English learners as a teacher. Their union leader taught English learners. She in fact, remembers befriending an English learner as a child in Brockton, and many years later saw the woman who said how much that meant to her. So again, you're bringing this in and they have a great Director of Bilingual Education and Multilingual services named Kellie Jones who got me in touch with more than 30 people in the district because we really wanted to highlight all the different roles. What was happening, especially with the COVID response and what's so interesting like the nurses. They were contact tracing, eventually they were doing administering the COVID vaccines, and not just for the students and families, they were actually doing it for the city. And so the nurses became part of the citywide response and support team because everybody was able to work it out. And of course, in that case, having that union partnership really helped because they could work out the staffing and contracts. But they had mental health support and they had food deliveries to homes.

There was a story a woman shared with us of a woman who was given a SNAP food benefits card and couldn't access the benefits and didn't know why. Finally, they figured out that, because in this woman's country you write the date differently, she was putting the date first and then the month, and it wasn't going through the system. And when the paraprofessional said, "Tell me again how you're putting the number," because she remembered that the child had the same birthday, they had a birthday in the same month that she did, she said, "Tell me how you're putting the date in." So that relationship, talk about building relationships, that relationship gave that family access to this food.

So it's just really interesting to visit places where it's happening on a system level because it's different. And they can't imagine doing it any other way. They are always kind of like, "We're so happy to share our story, but we just don't understand why you wouldn't do it this way," and I think those are examples we'd love to lift up. Because they're so important and valuable.

Tan: After this podcast is over, I know what I’m going to do first. I’m going to look for that award-winning documentary. What education documentary wins an award? That is worth watching, right? And I think both of those stories tell, and they have a common theme between them. It's about bringing the community together and going beyond the school and saying how can we all serve students and how can we serve the community? How can we serve their families together? It's not just enough to educate them. It has to be a community thing. Isolation is the Achilles heels of our work with English learners.

Lydia: That's so true. And we saw that in COVID. So the schools that had relationships with their ELL families had a had a better chance of reconnecting with the families, staying in touch, getting the kids eventually back to school. And if the schools didn't have the relationship, that didn't mean they couldn't put it together, but it took a lot more work because they had to figure out how do we get in touch with them? What are our tools? How do we reach them? What if their contact information had changed?

That's another thing I'll say, that one piece of advice that we have heard regularly is it's so important for schools to keep contact information updated and to make it easy for families to understand how that is done and why, and that can be, I mean obviously COVID is example #1 where the school all of a sudden shut down and schools needed to contact families.

This comes up in terms of immigration proceedings. You know, there are stories where there is a perhaps an immigration raid in a community and the school cannot find caregivers for children at the end of the day. And that was something that someone shared with us whose town had been through a major immigration raid and it can make the difference between whether the child goes off to foster care or Child Protective Services or goes home with someone they know. That's something that we can at least remind schools, keep this updated and help your families figure out how to keep it updated, and if your system is an English-only website that they're supposed to access, maybe you need to think about whether there's another way to make it easier for your multilingual families to do that because they really could be impacted by that. So all of these things do end up intersecting for schools in their work and often need to be addressed even before the learning is really getting underway.

Tan: That's why Colorín Colorado is a great source. It's a reminder of things that work for English learners, so keep on reminding us because we sometimes forget.

Lydia: Thank you.

Tan: Let's talk about the dual-language side. Can you say some resources about dual language instruction?

Lydia: I should have mentioned up top that our website is bilingual itself. It's in English and Spanish. We have resources, a lot of resources for Spanish-speaking families, and we have a lot of information about dual- language instruction and one of the programs that we did, we did a video project in partnership with the NEA and we went to an elementary school in Arlington, VA and we showed how their day works, how the kids are doing the morning in one language and and then they switch and we actually film the switch. We see them making the way to their other classroom and we see two lessons, one in English, one in Spanish. It's different conten,t but it's the same learning objective and they're talking about the same topic in terms of what they're trying to get at, which has to do with the the level of questioning. And so we see this happening in English and Spanish. So they're getting this support.

But not only do we see that, we see the meeting, I know this is very exciting, we see the meeting, the grade-level meeting where that is all planned out. And guess who's there? The principal is there. The coaches are there. The bilingual support staff are there and then the English and Spanish teachers are there, so it's really a team approach to saying how are we collaborating? Because also with dual-language instruction you have to be very intentional and efficient with your time and how you're using it. And so you see all this in place. It also is a school that is so warm, so welcoming, and you walk in, there are beautiful artifacts from the countries of the families. There flags hanging in the cafeteria. And I'm very happy to say the principal, Dr. Jessica Panfil, won the Principal of the Year Award for Arlington last year. And she's just a tremendous leader.

Tan: You've kind of already touched on this, so we can talk about it briefly, but you talked about the field is highlighting the virtues of collaborating and you were talking about that last lesson where everyone is involved and collaborating. Let's talk a little bit about that.

Lydia: Sure. I have learned so much from Andrea Honigsfeld and Maria Dove. And I know you feature their work and have them as guests as well, and one thing that I've talked a lot about with them is grassroots collaboration. So that even if the formal structures are not in place and support is not in place, it is still, there are still things that individuals can do even if the whole building isn't necessarily operating this way.

For example, we interviewed an itinerant teacher who was working between so many buildings, he just couldn't build relationships with all the teachers that he was collaborating with. So every year he sends a letter at the beginning of the school year introducing himself and explains what he does, how he can support them, how he can work with them. It's such a simple step.

But I think it's especially helpful for really getting at this question of the role of the ESL specialist and what they know and what is their expertise? And so he puts that out there and it's been a great way and I think that's a wonderful strategy to think about doing, saying, "Here I am," and introducing myself and here's how I can support you and I'm happy to answer your questions as well, #1.

#2, a colleague of ours, Katy Padilla, who is an ESOL Coach in Fairfax County, Virginia, she likes to celebrate collaboration, so in staff meetings she'll ask people to share what's working. So not only does that kind of lift everybody up and show how this can help, it gives people ideas and plant seeds because now we have a really practical application of it.

Another colleague of ours, Kristina Robertson, one of our early AFT cadre numbers is still a contributor to the site wrote a wonderful blog post for another website where she says that she kind of does troubleshooting. She asks people, "What are your questions? What's an issue with a student you can't resolve?' She kind of rather than saying, "Here's what I know how to do," she says, "You tell me what you need and let me see how I can help problem solve it with you."

And then we talk a lot with Diane Staehr Fenner about the elevator speech. How are you talking about your role? Do people, how are you helping people understand? Because there is a huge gap in terms of what people understand about the role of the ESOL teacher and what administrators.

We work with Karen Woodson, who often gets questions from principals about what ESOL teachers do. And so she is someone whom she was a principal had a regular standing meeting with her ESL specialists every week. That's how important it was to her to keep that communication strong.

And so she shares a lot of information with other colleagues and leaders in the field about what are some things you should know about this. So I think all of these speak to helping people understand the role, taking very concrete steps to establish relationships. And again, there's a lot in there in terms of relationship building, building trust. How are we viewed? As equals, as partners? Where are we in the room? You know, you sort of get into the mechanics of co-teaching, but that can be tricky for ESL teachers. And I will just say that we have worked in a couple of schools and yet most of the schools I've mentioned, I would say have very strong professional learning community cultures, if not sort of baked in kind of collaboration time.

Even if that is 1,000,000 miles away from your reality, you can still take small steps to find that one person, maybe, who's open to working with you. That one person who's having trouble with their language objectives. That one person who really wants a little bit of support, but doesn't know where to start and then once it starts working, here's where Katy's idea comes in. You share the ideas and then other people see, and then eventually you go to the administrator and say, "Hey this is something we've been doing, it seems like it's helping. Can we have a little more co-planning time? Can we think about maybe having a little more push-in time?"

And then it comes together, so I think, we've really tried to focus on the role, the professional responsibilities and how we can support that and how we can empower teachers and I will just say that one of the amazing things about working for Colorín Colorado is that people feel such a deep appreciation and sense of gratitude because I think it is empowering and validating and affirming, as you said, in a profession that is often very isolated.

And so we've had people say things like, "I tried this idea. No one was interested and then I brought one of your articles and they were ready to try it." We are pushing great information out there and a lot of times our audience already knows; it's not necessarily new. Sometimes it is, but they're then able to take it in that package and present it to an administrator, present it to a colleague, and so we're sort of lifting up their role and making them more visible. And I think that's part of the reason why people feel such a deep affection for our site.

Giselle was at a conference and two teachers came up with tears in their eyes and they said, "This project saved our jobs because we were not ELL teachers and we were transferred into the ELL roles and we did not know anything about where to begin. And we found Colorín Colorado."

And I think it really speaks to this wealth of information and expertise that the ELL community has, that is often not deeply understood in a way that really you're really harnessing it as the resource that it is. So that's that's a more nuanced that's part of the job that I've come to appreciate overtime, but I think it really is part of the power of the project and why people feel so deeply, you know, appreciative.

And I know you interviewed Paula Markus recently. I was with Paula when TESOL was in Toronto and she was taking a group of us to a site visit of a school that was a largely immigrant community in Toronto. And she said, "I just have to stop and pick up a friend." And the woman came in and Paula was driving so she couldn't really introduce us, and she said, "This is Lydia, she runs Colorín Colorado." And this woman was a teacher in Edmonton, and she said, "What?! You run Colorín Colorado? We love Colorín Colorado!" And so we were in the backseat having this conversation.

You know, we know that people use our site in other countries. We know we have a lot of fans in Canada. Hello, Canadian friends! We know you're out there! But it was just one of those moments that was really special because you know it's to me, it's just you know, it's what I'm doing every day. We're putting information out there. But it's just really exciting to meet people who are in the midst of it and it was really special to get to have that connection, thanks to Paula so it's really on so many levels I think that things are working that way.

Tan: After the US, the people who listen to the podcast the most are Canadians, and they are so kind and passionate and dedicated teachers. I've had the privilege to work both in the East Coast and the West Coast, and they are some of my favorite teachers to work with when I ever an engagement, I'm like, “Yes, Canadian teachers!”

Lydia: And they have such a diverse student population and so many of the same questions and situations that we're working through here. So there's a lot and we have a lot of Canadian resources. They have some Ontario put together some great things. Paula, when she was the director of ESL Services in Toronto, did amazing outreach work. And so there's a lot we can learn from them. I think it goes both ways for sure.

Tan: Let's talk about administrators, which you've actually talked about several times. Would you talk about what recommendations you have for administrators who are supporting ELs and their teachers?

Lydia: I was very fortunate many years ago, early on in this job, to interview one of our advisors, named Dr. Cynthia Lundgren. What she said early on in our interview and kept coming back to was that administrators set the tone. And as I you know, all of these schools I have described, when you walk in, you know the community is valued. You know the languages are represented and there's active engagement with this diverse community. That's not to say it's not happening in other places, if you don't get that feeling that right away, but there is something about walking into a building where the the principal is fully on board that it makes a really big difference.

A lot of administrators are new to this population. In fact, the principal in Salina, Sue Staney, had not worked with this particular community, where she is a leader and she said, "There's a big learning curve and I made mistakes. And I had this sort of approach this with a lot of humility, but I had wonderful people who, we all wanted the same thing. We all wanted the kids and families to succeed."

So I think it's, you know, humility and asking questions and really being ready to face what you don't know is a really important part of just saying you don't have to have all the answers and one of Susan Lafond's favorite recommendations is that when the ELL teachers go to, if there's the ELL training, you don't just want to send the ELL teacher, they probably know the information. Send them with a team, ideally that includes an administrator, because then you can really start those conversations.

So I think knowing you know, just being ready to admit what we don't know, knowing that your actions, your tone, what you're prioritizing is seen and is felt and is heard by the staff, by the families, and that you can really make a difference. I think that's one really critical piece and then being willing to support the collaboration and the outreach and and appreciate the work that's happening behind the scenes is another. Because in the end, it's you, there are resource decisions to be made, there's staffing, there's scheduling all those things. But the more informed you are about what's happening, the better those situations you will be.

So for example, just a few of the other folks that we've worked with, Nathaniel Provencio, we interviewed him when he won The Washington Post principal of the Year award a couple of years ago and I said, "What's your favorite professional development that you've attended?" And I thought he would mention a great conference or something he went to, but he actually talked about shadowing a student, and he had a timer, he had a stopwatch. He started it every time the student was involved in really meaningful instruction, and this was a student who was in and out of a lot of classes, had a lot of transitions. And at the end of the day, he had clocked about 15 minutes of instruction total. And he said, "This is malpractice. This is unconscionable." So their school, partly out of that experience, but partly from some of the other things that they were dealing with, came up with a new literacy model where the literacy team pushed in to each classroom. They did the literacy block, and then they moved and the kids didn't move.

Reading performance improved. Gifted referrals improved. Behavior improved. Behavior referrals decreased. Special education referrals decreased. When you look at a student's schedule from a student's point of view, and you see, especially for ELLs, and particularly if ELLs need interventions or services in addition to everything else, they may be in and out of the class multiple times in a day and they may need missing long stretches of core content, so he really made that a focus, which I thought was so interesting and valuable.

And then going back to the social-emotional piece, we had the privilege to interview a principal named Victor Tam. He works in a school that supports newcomer students from China in San Francisco, so he's working in a very unique context in terms of families who have recently immigrated.

And he actually talked about his own experiences. We connected around the bullying in the AAPI community that was happening in COVID. So he talked about what school leaders can do. Again, you need to be out in front you need to know this is impacting your community and you need to know they are, that they're likely worried about it, and even if that's not being brought to your attention, that doesn't mean it's not a concern. And then he went on to talk about his own experiences being bullied as a young Chinese immigrant in a school, in a community where there were very few, if any, families like his when he was growing up here as a new immigrant. He was very vulnerable and sharing that, but I think it just, he felt that the moment called for it and and to say, "This is a place where we school leaders have a commitment to create these safe and welcoming communities for all of our students," and to know that there are a lot of different issues and a lot of different communities are bringing a lot of those different issues, but you need to you're ready to engage.

And then we interviewed another wonderful leader named Dr. Jennifer Love, who's in the Prince George’s School District in Maryland and she is the director of language access for the district. She is making sure that people have access to interpretation services, translation and she is, her standards are high. And she knows the laws inside and out. And so to see what that looks like in a school in a district where they're taking it really seriously and they've staffed it and they put resources to it and you have multilingual staff across the district, that was really inspiring too, because it it shows what it can look like. It doesn't look like that in a lot of places but. She is someone who's very specific about, "This is an OK case. This is not. And how do we do this better?" So we had a wonderful conversation and I learned so much from her in that area and her own journey in becoming ELL educator.

So all of these different perspectives and different issues, you know, they're coming in at different places, but it's really a privilege to be able to bring these stories because I think as you said, you're lifting up the examples, you're showing what this can look like. And then hopefully you're giving individuals ideas of little steps that they can take, even if you know their context is not there. But maybe it could be one day, and often it is the work of individuals who go one step at a time that makes the change. So that's what we're trying to do.

Tan: I always say that administrators are my co-teachers even if they're on the room because they set the tone like you said, and then they create the staffing for that and then they create the systems that support the work that we do with our English learners. They are our partners. Let's talk about another partner, our families, students' families.

Lydia: Well, this is a great chance to highlight three wonderful new resources we've done with AFT and I will say we were so lucky, Tan, to have your input in that as well. The first one was an animated video available in eight languages. One of those was Vietnamese and we really appreciate you reviewing them and giving us good feedback early on. So those have voiceovers and text on screen in these eight different languages that just talk about different ways that families can play a role in supporting language and literacy. There is a set of related tip sheets that has a lot of that information available in 16 languages as well. But it's a great outreach tool. And we wrote a guide to support what the outreach around those videos could look like.

We did a second series that features PSA's in English and Spanish around literacy and those are really geared toward families at all literacy levels. So we really wanted to you know, help families feel like everybody can be a part of this journey, no matter what your own experiences with, with literacy and with education, those are presented by a wonderful early literacy teacher in the Bay Area. And so there are six of those and they're presented in English and Spanish.

And our third one is also featuring an educator in the Bay Area named Henry Sales and he is trilingual. He speaks English, Spanish and Mam, which is an Indigenous language from Guatemala. We really wanted to highlight the Indigenous communities here from Latin America, which so often schools assume they are Spanish speakers because they are coming from Latin America. But Spanish may be a second language, or maybe even a third language and English is a third or fourth language and so there may be a lot of stigma in their home country. And so they do not sort of willingly share that they are Indigenous and they may have some basic Spanish skills or more advanced Spanish skills so that they can kind of operate as Spanish speakers, but that is it a second language. And when you like, one school we worked with in Baltimore called Wolfe Street Academy, had Mixtecan speakers and they didn't know. They all of a sudden they saw a spike of Spanish-speaking students in special education and they didn't know why. When they dug into it, it turned out these students were actually Mixtecan speakers and Spanish was the second language. So they thought they were doing the right thing by assessing them in Spanish, but it turns out that was also their second language.

So Henry shares a lot about his story in the series that we did. We also interviewed him and really highlighting, you know, again you have to build trust. You have to be ready to kind of meet families where they're at, give them the opportunity to share their culture. And be maybe ready to go slowly, if that's what they need, but also know that they're bringing so much to the table and so you just have to create the conditions so that they feel like they're welcome and they're ready to share that.

So those are three great projects, thanks to our wonderful partnership with the AFT, that we've been able to do and and each of those series has an outreach guide. And so that we hope that that will give people ideas about how to use them.

Tan: I remember when you asked me to review the Vietnamese video, I almost got teary eyed at the end of it because it was the voice was so warm. But the message was exactly everything we've learned from the research about supporting students' heritage language. And I wish that someone would have said like my mom, when I was a kid, really wanted to help me in school, but she didn't know English, so she was like, "Just do your best. Just follow instructions. I can't help you," but I think if she had this video and the teachers had this video, the teacher could have like, opened the laptop and push play and let her watch this very quick three-minute video and she would then feel part, wholly involved in my education as a young kid, so I just missed it as an adult, but man, there's going to be generations of Vietnamese families are going to appreciate what you've done.

Lydia: Thank you for sharing that. And it's funny that you mentioned the voice of of the speaker because we did review a lot of different voices for all of these and we really wanted to get that warmth and that sort of family feeling. So I'm glad that came through on the video that you watched.

Tan: How does the team so small be so nimble? The examples that you gave really show, "Oh, Colorín Colorado has their pulse on the educational environment of America and saying, 'OK, this is what's happening. This is what's coming up. We got you.' I remember you have a series of COVID articles as well, I'm just so impressed.

Lydia: Well, thank you so much. I do think the AFT ELL cadre, they, you know they have been there all along and those voices really inform what we do and we are able to really harness a phenomenal network and Tan, you are part that network. I mean I pulled you in that project and said, "OK, I need, I need a Vietnamese speaker, I should write Tan," so it's a really a group effort. I'll just quickly say with COVID, we sent out a survey to our audience because we knew there was no playbook. We got that and then based on that, we were able to start putting these together and we had an article up by the end of March 2020 because people wrote back. They wanted to share their experiences; sometimes no one else was asking them about what their experiences were. Colorín Colorado comes along with the survey and says, "We want to hear from you. Can you tell us what's going on?" And so then they can they can put it together.

Tan: I continue to be impressed by the things that are keep on coming. What's coming up for ColorinColorado.org?

Lydia: So what is coming up? We have, as I mentioned, a new teacher evaluation project. A long time ago, AFT had done a project where they were looking at the evaluation of teachers of English learners and I sat in on some of those meetings early on. And the emotion of the teachers describing what it was like to be evaluated by someone who did not know your practice, who did not know your field, it was a very emotional meeting and that always stayed with me.

And so we were sort of thinking about different project ideas and Syracuse, New York has a very unique peer evaluator program, where a number of the content areas have an evaluator who is a specialist in that area. The English as a New Language bilingual evaluator in Syracuse is Areli Schermerhorn and I said, "Wait a minute, This is a perfect opportunity to capture what she is doing," because they are really trying to change the conversation about evaluation to turn it into something that is related to professional growth and support.

We filmed a full evaluation cycle. So we have a teacher, Mr. Jesus Ortiz, he's who people say one of the mayors of the town because whenever you go anywhere with him, everybody knows him. All the family knows him. He started as a as a teachers' aide and moved up to become a teacher in this community and and was courageous and gracious to go through this whole process on camera, so we see him have a pre-meeting where they sit down and talk about what the lesson is going to be and what are some of the things she's looking for.

We see him then teach the lesson where she is taking your notes at the back and then we see the conversation that happens after. And so we get that whole cycle and I think particularly for teachers of English learners it’s really interesting because he's able to talk about the students, language levels, the languages they speak, how he's scaffolding, what he's doing. It's actually a dual-language classroom. All that we focus on instruction in English and then she's able to show where she has questions, what maybe didn't quite make sense is, is there a reason that this happened this way? What are some things that she saw that were strengths. What are the resources? And then that's when he brings up this question, "What are language objectives? I'm trying to get my head around this and can you give me more information." That's a really exciting project that we are in the process of editing.

We also are going to have a Spanish-language version of a wonderful resource that's on Reading Rockets. It's called Reading 101 for Families and it's really nice guide of all the things that you can be doing, parents can be doing at different grade levels from basically from pre-K through 2nd grade in the early literacy realm and it's got a lot of nice, really fun strategies and ideas around things like vocabulary and letter recognition and so we're going to translate that into Spanish.

We're going to have a new database of our books. We have a lot of wonderful multicultural, diverse books and you're going to be able to search by language, by age, by topic, by community.

We're going to have an ESL strategy library as well coming up, and then we also are working on building some professional development resources because we know a lot of people pull our resources into courses and so we want to kind of help streamline that a little bit. So that's looking up ahead to the next year. There are a lot of big projects. There's a lot of content we're going to be working on. But I think it's, it's all trying to respond to what we've heard and the needs that we've heard. So yeah, we're excited about all those things.

Tan: Forget working, if you're a high-functioning person, forget going to Amazon and Google. Come work at Colorín Colorado because those people are highly effective and efficient with their time, with all these projects. Wow, Lydia, let's finish the podcast with giving us a big takeaway from all of your years of experience working with them as an organization.

Lydia: I think it would be to think outside the box. I think it's to say that if you're doing something well with English learners and with multilingual learners, it's probably going to look different. That's especially true with family engagement. You know, we've talked to people who have group parent, teacher conferences. We had the privilege to talk with Juliana Urtubey. She had written an article for us about special education and English language learners, was then named Nevada Teacher of the Year when we interviewed her during COVID and then after that interview she was named the National Teacher of the Year. She herself is an immigrant from Colombia. It's an amazing story. She has been a teacher in different schools, but she has a lot of experience of working with students in Las Vegas and a lot of the families work on the strip and work in the service industry. That is not a group of families that is on a sort of typical school schedule system. And not only that, a lot of times in the jobs, they can't open, they can't respond to texts, they can't receive phone calls.

If you are measuring their engagement by whether or not they come to XYZ meeting at ABC time whether or not they have returned this phone call, whether or not they have come to this meeting, that is just a non-starter and these are families who are here to provide a better life for their children. So it's not a question of their intent or their dedication. So she talks about in this in this clip using WhatsApp and different ways of saying, "Let's meet the families where they are. And so I think that's a really powerful example to say it's going to look different."

And you mentioned Larry Ferlazzo, he has a great book around building engagement with families. And he says we really need to push back from involvement to engagement, he sort of helps make that shift, saying that this is not the school saying, "Here's what you need to do, and here's where you need to be," and he shares this beautiful story about families, Hmong and Cambodian families at the school was working with and they decided to pull together to do a garden. So they said, "Well, let's have a meeting about the garden," and very few people came and they said, "Well, they let's not be interested in the garden, but OK, well, it's already scheduled. Go ahead and do it anyway." Well, more than eighty people came on gardening day and they had tools and these were people who had generations of experience and working in the land. And they said, "We don't do meetings. We do gardens."

So how often are we starting with, "Has this family come to the meeting?" as our first kind of criteria, whether or not they are "engaged" or involved. It really is knowing that it is going to look different in every place. And knowing that every school, if it's working, is going to look different than the school next to it because you're actually starting with the families from in front of you, you're starting with the students who are in front of you.

And then you're also bringing some empathy for your colleagues and the administrators who may be new to this. And maybe not quite ready to admit what they don't know yet, or maybe very hesitant about doing something new and just saying, "We know this is going to look different. It feels different. It may be a little intimidating. It may be a little scary. You may not be there, but we know that when we have this two-way street and we are ready to think creatively."

And I will just close by saying that I spoke to some teachers at one point and a teacher raised her hands. She said, "I have some ideas about ELL family engagement, but they're kind of different and I think maybe what I am hearing you say is that I should think outside the box." And it's like she was looking for permission. So I think our job is in part to give permission to people to say, "It's going to be different and that's OK and what it looks like when it works is going to feel different too."

But when it works, the sky's the limit. This is such a rich community. We don't talk a lot about their strengths and their talents, but they have so much to offer. And so if you can tap into that, if you can tap into what the students have and what they can bring to your community, you have a whole new set of resources that you weren't tapping into previously, so it's really worth it. It's hard. You have to be vulnerable, you have to take a risk, but sometimes you just need one teacher who says, "We did this differently and it worked and I think you guys should try or at least think about trying and I'm here to help you if you want to."

So I know that's a long answer for a big takeaway, but I do think that being ready to...your starting place is not status quo. It's how is this going to look different? We're just going to assume that it's going to look different. The question is how. And then from there you know we can figure out what the particulars are. It's really been a privilege to hear so many of those stories, meet so many schools that are doing a great job and find out how individuals have made a difference because they really do and I see it every day. And I'm so lucky to be able to bring those stories to other people, which I hope provide comfort and inspiration and a little bit of a bright light when things are not so bright. So that would be my big takeaway.

Tan: Well, Lydia, this was a podcast worth listening to twice right away when this podcast has finished, I recommend that teachers go back and listen to it again, because you will be inspired, but also take such tangible tips. You said early in the podcast that we aren't really in teachers' classrooms, but I would say just based upon this conversation, you definitely are our partner. Every time someone reads your articles, use your resources, you are with them, with their students and with their colleagues and their families. So Lydia, and to all of your colleagues at Colorín Colorado, continue to shine your light for us.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Tan, and thank you so for bringing so many great resources out to your audience, I know we appreciate it. We all appreciate it. Thank you.

Tan: Thank you. I have a favor and an invitation. My favor is to ask you to please review this podcast if you found it valuable. My invitation is for you to enroll in my Scaffolding Learning or Teacher Collaboration courses. I've taken the principles that I've learned from experts in the field. I've applied them to my classes. I kept the things at work and I'm sharing all of them in these forces. Now on to our recap.

Lydia Breiseth has been kind enough to create a resource page featuring everything we talked about, so it's easy for you to find it too. That page includes some things we didn't have a chance to talk about, like Colorín Colorado's video project on community schools and in-depth article about how the substitute teacher shortage impacts ELLs and the ELL teachers, and a new free web app called Colorín on the Go, which features more than 100 strategies in a format that is easy to share. You're welcome to share these resources with colleagues and families, and we know you'll find some new favorites in this collection. I know that as long as I teach in this field, I will turn to Colorín Colorado as a lighthouse in our field.

Thank you, Colorín Colorado, and thank you, Lydia Breiseth, for brightening the way. Thank you for listening. Be safe and be rooted in peace. It's your turn to play traffic light teaching tweeted me. Either you're red, yellow or green light from this particular episode.