On this special encore episode, we revisit the topic of collaborating, co-planning, and co-teaching with content teachers with Tan Huynh. Tan is a career teacher specializing in language acquisition.  Tan has taught students from fifth to twelfth grade in public schools, private boarding schools, and charter schools.  Internationally, Tan has taught in schools in China, Laos, and Vietnam. He shares teaching strategies on his blog, Empowering ELLs, and has provided professional development training in places such as China, Thailand, Singapore, Italy, and Canada. Tan’s goal is to support all teachers who are committed to empowering English learners whether it be in a tweet, a blog post, a book, a training, a course, or over coffee.

Tan and I discuss how EL specialists can establish and nurture relationships with content teachers who work with multilingual learners. You’ll leave the episode with some simple strategies that can help make co-planning and co-teaching easier for all teachers as well as some ways to encourage content teachers to allow their multilingual students to participate more fully in their instruction.

Tan will be presenting at our Impact 2021 Conference, a free virtual event that will take place over three days on December 6th, 7th, and 9th. If you are interested in joining us for Impact 2021, please visit our website at ellevationeducation.com/elcommunity and join our community. We’ll send information on sessions and registration on our weekly community brief emails that all community members receive.

In this special episode of Highest Aspirations, we feature one of our 5 Ellevation scholarship winners, Paola Gutierrez. Paola recently graduated from Tahquitz High School in Hemet, CA. She is currently attending UCLA where she is studying Human Biology on a pre-med track. As an aspiring physician, she looks forward to caring for people in low-income communities in the future.

As you’ll hear in our conversation, Paola surfaces some of the challenges she has faced as a multilingual learner, but also many of the assets she and her fellow students bring to their schools and communities. She also offers some useful advice to educators about how they can best support their multilingual learners and put them on a path to success. As such, this conversation is particularly important for listeners who work with multilingual learners of any age.

If you have an idea for a topic or guest for a future highest aspirations episode, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.

On this special encore episode, we revisit the topic of ensuring multilingual learners have highly qualified teachers to help them achieve their Highest Aspirations - with guests Amaya Garcia and Alexandra Manuel. 

The lack of teachers who have the training necessary to effectively support multilingual learners has been plaguing school districts across the country for years. The pandemic has only exacerbated the problem, putting multilingual learners at greater risk. We will be addressing this challenge at our upcoming Impact 2021 virtual conference, a free event that will take place over three days on December 6, 7, and 9th. New America’s Amaya Garcia, one of this episode’s guests, will be moderating a panel from school districts and organizations around the country to discuss how they are responding to this challenge and the plans they have moving forward. Amaya will also provide a perspective on what the research data is telling us.

If you are interested in joining us for Impact 2021, please join our community and we’ll send information on sessions and registration on our weekly community brief emails.

How can teachers help students assert positive identities so they have the confidence necessary to achieve academic success and advocate for social justice in their schools and communities?

What are some strategies teachers can use to infuse language concepts into content lessons while simultaneously providing students with the skills they will need to be successful in school and beyond?

Why is it so important to have a network or “professional family” to rely on for professional learning and support and what are some ways to find one?

We discuss these questions and much more with 2021 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Natalia Benjamin. Natalia Benjamin teaches high school Ethnic Studies and Multilingual Learners in Rochester, MN. She is dually licensed in K-12 ESL and reading and holds a master's degree in Language Acquisition and Teaching. She advocates for multilingual and multicultural education and is part of Education Minnesota's Facing Inequities and Racism in Education - Racial Equity Advocates (FIRE-REA) program, where she has worked on Cultural Competency Trainings. She is a member of several organizations that support teachers and students: Education Minnesota League of Latinx Educators, Employees of Color Resource Group, Rochester Education Association, and the Women Issues Committee for the National Education Association. She is passionate about the liberation of marginalized students and works on important issues such as identity work, Heritage Speakers, and humanizing pedagogies in education.

What current limitations do we face in our educational system when it comes to data collection about students with limited or interrupted formal education (or SLIFE students)? How can project-based learning and group work help support SLIFE students and their classmates so they can better learn from one another? What are a few steps educators can take to be more equitable and mindful of SLIFE students in instruction and assessments?

We discuss these questions and much more with Orly Klapholz. Orly's expertise includes Special Education and second language acquisition with specialized training in Orton Gillingham curricula. She has extensive experience teaching multilingual students, particularly those with limited or interrupted formal education, and has presented her research at numerous conferences and trainings. In 2021, she co-founded Inlier Learning with Merary Martinez-Cobian, taking a tech-forward approach to creating integrated solutions for the multilingual population.

As is the case with most of our guests, we learned about Orly’s work through a member of our ELL Community. If you have an idea for a topic or guest for a future highest aspirations episode, please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.

How can teachers structure one-to-one student conferences to help ELs own their academic growth while also building relationships? What are some innovative ways we can leverage everything from testing data, student work artifacts, and portfolios to help students and teachers set and measure progress towards goals? How can schools make these conferences and learning celebrations more widely practiced and systematic across their classrooms?

We discuss these questions and more with Sarah Said. We first featured Sarah on Highest Aspirations back in 2018, and we are excited to bring her back. Sarah Said is the Director of Language and Equity Programs at the Elgin Math and Science Academy in Elgin IL.  Sarah has spent 17 years working with language learners. Currently she is launching the Stand Up Stumps, which is a social justice based public art project in Elgin. Sarah has written various articles in EdWeek Teacher and Confianza and appeared on Highest Aspirations to discuss cultural responsiveness back in 2018.

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.

What’s in a name, or in this case, a label? Why do many prefer the term “Emergent Bilingual” over other terminology like English learner, LEP, or even multilingual learner? On the 40th anniversary year of the Castañeda v. Pickard Case, what progress have we made and what do we still need to do to ensure the civil rights for our multilingual learners? How might a name/title change lead to significant changes in how we perceive and educate our multilingual learners?

We discuss these questions and much more with Araceli Garcia. Araceli grew up on the South Side of San Antonio and is the daughter and granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. She is the first person in her family to attend college, and her passion for immigrants’ rights stems from seeing her family and community insist on dignity while struggling to navigate their immigration and socioeconomic status. A graduate of Stanford University, Araceli has received several awards for her academic excellence and community service including the John Gardner Fellowship for Public Service, Newman Civic Fellow Award, and Stanford's Porras Award for Visionary Leadership. Most recently, Araceli served as an inaugural Education Policy Fellow with IDRA, where she focused on rights of emergent bilingual (English learner) and immigrant students. Araceli graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in Chicanx/Latinx Studies and a minor in education. Currently, she is pursuing a law degree at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, where she was named an Equal Justice Scholar and plans to continue serving low-income and racially marginalized communities.

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.

What are some ways mindfulness activities can help multilingual students succeed and how can teachers get started using them successfully? How can educators proactively elevate the voices of their students while decreasing teacher talk time? How can we apply concepts from exercise and other training programs to academic language instruction?

We discuss these questions and more in Part 2 of a two-part series with Gina (Lahpay) Lappe and Kent Dwyer. One key to their success has been intentional and sustained collaboration - which as many of us have experienced, can be more difficult than it seems. we’ll get into how they went about creating systems that made it easier for them and their colleagues to work together to support all learners.

Gina Lappe is heading into her 10th year teaching inquiry-based science. She started teaching in Great Smoky Mountains National Park before heading into the classroom at an Expeditionary Learning Charter School in North Carolina. She currently teaches middle school science at an international school in South Korea. She is passionate about using science as a pathway to get students curious about and connected with the world around them. Please feel free to reach out to Gina via email at [email protected] and Instagram @Lappe_labs.

Kent Dwyer has been an educator for 17 years, focusing primarily on language acquisition. He taught Spanish in Pennsylvania for 11 years, serving as a demonstration teacher at Julia Reynolds Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School and then as a master teacher at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School. From 2016 to 2021, Kent worked in international education to support English language acquisition, first in Qatar and then in South Korea. Kent has facilitated professional development sessions on topics including digital storytelling for language acquisition, tiered units of instruction, differentiated instruction, interpersonal language use within the classroom, data-driven decision making, integrated performance assessments, and the use of technology to promote communication.

He can be reached through his professional instagram at kent.dwyer or via email at [email protected].

Here is a link to their Edutopia article.

Here is a link to Choice Words.

Here is a link to Fluency through TPR Storytelling.

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.

What are some easy ways that content teachers and ELL specialists can collaborate to better support their multilingual learners? How can schools and teaching teams build out systems for housing key instructional resources to support practices like scaffolding? What can educators do to ensure multilingual learners have equitable access to high-quality instructional materials and content - particularly in STEM courses?

We discuss these questions and more in Part 1 of a two-part series with Gina (Lahpay) Lappe and Kent Dwyer. One key to their success has been intentional and sustained collaboration - which as many of us have experienced, can be more difficult than it seems. we’ll get into how they went about creating systems that made it easier for them and their colleagues to work together to support all learners.

Gina Lappe is heading into her 10th year teaching inquiry-based science. She started teaching in Great Smoky Mountains National Park before heading into the classroom at an Expeditionary Learning Charter School in North Carolina. She currently teaches middle school science at an international school in South Korea. She is passionate about using science as a pathway to get students curious about and connected with the world around them. Please feel free to reach out to Gina via email at [email protected] and Instagram @Lappe_labs.

Kent Dwyer has been an educator for 17 years, focusing primarily on language acquisition. He taught Spanish in Pennsylvania for 11 years, serving as a demonstration teacher at Julia Reynolds Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School and then as a master teacher at Plymouth Whitemarsh High School. From 2016 to 2021, Kent worked in international education to support English language acquisition, first in Qatar and then in South Korea. Kent has facilitated professional development sessions on topics including digital storytelling for language acquisition, tiered units of instruction, differentiated instruction, interpersonal language use within the classroom, data-driven decision making, integrated performance assessments, and the use of technology to promote communication.

He can be reached through his professional instagram at kent.dwyer or via email at [email protected].

Here is a link to their Edutopia article.

Here is a link to Choice Words.

Here is a link to Fluency through TPR Storytelling.

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.

What are some steps that educators can take now to build positive relationships with students and their families this school year? What experiences can educators pull from to build empathy and appreciation for multilingual students and their families? How might we go beyond language so we can also build an understanding of diverse cultures, and how might that investment play out in interactions with families? 

We discuss these questions and more with Rosalie Metro, an Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Rose has taught social studies at the high school level, and currently teaches TESOL classes for pre-service teachers as well as supervising student teaching interns. Metro is the author of two books, Teaching US History Thematically: Document-Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom, and Teaching World History Thematically: Essential Questions and Document-based Lessons to Connect Past and Present, both published by Teachers College Press. Metro has also been researching Burma/Myanmar’s education system and working with refugees from that country since 2001, and does Burmese language interpreting for her local school district.

You can find additional resources and episode takeaways on our ELL Community page at ellevationeducation.com/ellcommunity. If you haven’t done so already, we invite you to join our ELL Community while you’re there so you get weekly resources, strategies and tips from that you can use right away.