Today's guest Molly Hegwood is the Executive Director of the Office of English Learners at Metro Nashville Public Schools. A former classroom teacher in Knox County and Nashville, she now oversees services for 24,000 multilingual learners speaking 135 languages across her district, and has led the shift from traditional professional development to embedded coaching models. Under her leadership, Metro Nashville Public Schools has expanded service models to meet the needs of one of the fastest-growing English Learner populations in the American Southeast. Her pragmatic approach and steadfast commitment to forging partnerships within her diverse community have garnered impressive results, and have made her a leader among multilingual learning advocates nationwide.
Molly: A service model is part of it, but a student's EL services are only most likely one hour of the day. So you could have this high-quality teacher that's working with that student for one hour a day, but the other six hours of the day, if they're not getting high-quality instruction, if they're not having scaffolds and strategies in their other classes, it's not going to make a difference. This has to be a whole experience for the students. It's not this golden ticket to your achievement and language growth. Brandon: Hey everyone. Hola a todos. I'm Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, and you're listening to Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning. Each episode we're exploring the leadership, the ideas, and the insights shaping better education for multilingual learners. Molly Hegwood is the Executive Director of the Office of English Learners at Metro Nashville Public Schools. She oversees English learner services for approximately 24,000 multilingual learners, speaking 135 languages across the district. She's a former K-4 classroom teacher in Knox County and Nashville. She has led the shift from traditional professional development to embedded coaching models, building a team of ELD specialists and coaches who support schools district-wide. And under her leadership, the district has expanded service models to meet the needs of one of the fastest-growing EL populations in the Southeast. I am really excited to welcome you, Molly, to our podcast today, and I'm excited to talk a little bit about your journey, but also really dig into some of the practices taking shape in Nashville. How are you doing today? Molly: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great. Brandon: I always start these with a question. Is there anything not on your bio or intro that you're like, I wish more people knew this about me, or it's something that's just part of your impact that you want to tell a story about? Molly: Well, number one, I'm a mom. My son's just finished his sophomore year at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which is where I'm an alumni as well, so it was cool. But that's a major part of my journey, is that I've been an educator and a leader in MNPS now for over 10 years and my son played a major part in all of that. So we were having some conversations on Friday night. He got home from school, and we were talking about some job-related things, and it's just been cool to now have him as a partner in these conversations with me, and he's like, I can't believe this is happening, Mom. How could that still be happening? And I'm like, I know. This is what I'm working on right now. But I'm, I've I've built a little advocate for in all students across the United States. He's a business finance major, but I'm pretty sure as he grows in his profession, he's going to be talking about equity and access. So I'm proud of him for that. Brandon: I love that. For me too, I'm also a dad and it shifts the work, at least it did for me. When I became a parent, I had been an educator before and then became a parent while in my career and, yeah, it brings a whole different lens and how you talk about it, how you explain what you do and what's pulling you away from the home life every day, how you describe your career, all of it. I see it. Molly: Yep. Brandon: Let me ask you this. What first pulled you into this work and what's kept you here? Molly: Oh, that's a great question. The interesting thing about me is when I was in going to college, I my I thought in my head I was going to be a preschool teacher. In Tennessee, we had the Pre-K program growing rapidly. I so I was when I first started out, I was Pre-K through fourth grade certified. And my first teaching experience was in a pre-K classroom, and I thought, hm, okay, this is not necessarily what I want to do. I loved it for the elements of that work, but it didn't quite make me think this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. So at that time, I had the opportunity to travel overseas and do some work there, not necessarily teaching, but I was living in various countries, not even in countries. I was living in Turkey and China, but I wasn't in big cities, I was within smaller communities within those countries. And I had my first experience with some of these pieces of being in a place where you're the only person that doesn't speak the language. When I came back to Nashville with my family at the time, that's when I entered the world of English learners in Metro Nashville Public Schools, and that was in January of 2008 is when I came back to teaching in MNPS. I'm also a Metro Nashville Public Schools graduate too, so I decided to come back to Nashville, work here. I loved my experience as a student, and so I that kind of drives me as well as along with my family experience with this, but my I had a wonderful public education experience here in Metro National Schools, and I want to make sure that all students have that. So that's when I became a classroom teacher here in Nashville, and from there, I was teaching elementary ELD at that time, and then I've just grown in that work. I also, when I was teaching in elementary school, I tapped into the offices of English learners' adult ed program. And so I had a lot of interest in that. So I again going, okay, I love the craft of teaching students language and content, but I really like working with the families as well. So that was something I was kind of working through internally. And then I also, you know, started being a leader at your school level and I realized, okay, I kind of work like the adult aspect too. Continued to build my way up to this position, but the entire time for I guess I'm almost going on 20 years here in Nashville has been focused on English language learners. Brandon: I love that and I love hearing, Molly, from you just about how your own experience of being in and surrounded by a language that you were experiencing barriers in accessing, how that really impacted the work on the ground and how you thought about, okay, where am I going to focus my career in education? And choosing us, choosing multilingual learners, one brings me joy. We're lucky to have you. But two, I'm just always fascinated how folks find the path to what is an incredibly important and viable group of young people across the country, but also a really small group in many ways. And so in some of our communities, we live in big concentrations, but nationally, we're small. And so I'm fascinated by folks who like get to us and are like, I want to support these vulnerable kids. So thank you. Molly: And I cannot honestly, I you know, after you've done this for 20 years, you think like, is it is it time for me to do something different? And I cannot imagine myself in a role that's not directly working with multilingual learners. I've thought about, you know, you go through these moments in your life where you go, is this what I keep doing? And I just cannot. I was actually talking to my husband about it recently, and I just told him, I said, I just can't imagine myself doing anything else because it brings me so much joy. I love working with adults to make sure our students have the best experiences and outcomes. So pairing those two together, like the family element and working with adults has really brought me a lot of joy in my career here in Nashville. Brandon: I love that. I want to get to the meat and potatoes, the like arroz con pollo of what you do and how you've done it. And so I described your district a little bit at the top, but is there anything else that you think, outside of the numbers, that you think's really important for us to understand as we dive in a little bit deeper into some of the work you've done? Molly: I think anyone in a school district understands or finds themselves at a point in these roles where you're like, I've made this progress, but I'm still not making the progress that I want to see for my students that I'm supporting. And so what I realized early on and have continued to grow is this work is all about your connections and relationships that you have with the stakeholders that you're working with, the school community you're in. If you're working in a large central office like me, you have to be able to have really positive reciprocal relationships with other departments, with school leaders, and building up them to become a leader in this work. So I I realized early on that the office of multilingual learners should not be a silo of all the answers or information, and so our job is to make sure other leaders across Metro National Public Schools have the understanding, the tools, to be able to support the students that they serve. It is not for them to call me and ask for advice, because I'm not building the capacity of a district of over 80,000 students if our office is holding all the information. So going back to that, it's really about these relationships that you have in the professional setting and really integrating into the larger systems of a school district and tapping into those systems rather than trying to do something in the office of English learners only. Brandon: And what a parallel process from the central office to the school, right? That like one person or one department cannot be the holder of multilingual learners, or it'll continue to operate as an intervention versus core instruction. But I love this is like the community organizer in me, you're talking about that coalition building and like building that across every department where you become the champion for multilingual learners. Molly: That's right. And I think that's hard for some because it doesn't necessarily, you don't have control over all of it. And so what it really becomes is how can I support and make sure English learners are a part of this literacy implementation? How I'm going to do that is I'm going to equip the literacy department to make sure they're able to speak to the scaffolds and accommodations that students need, and I start to scale back because now I'm supporting them to be leaders, and but I'm not necessarily the messenger of that. And so once you're able to kind of relinquish that and build up others within a school district or a school, then you're going to see the the long-term impact of that work for families and students. Brandon: That makes sense. All right. In Nashville, the community has seen over 100% growth in its EL population in the last decade. I said this at the top, one of the fastest growing EL populations in the country. When you stepped into the executive director role, what was the first systemic challenge you had to address to keep up with this rapid growth? Molly: One thing was to increase our teacher capacity and actual number of teachers and really working through some of the actual materials and instruction that we were providing in these settings. That was a huge piece I had to work through at the beginning. Another part was our community engagement, because we weren't using them in this, as you stated earlier, in this coalition type space. We weren't seeing our community partners as equal partners. We were using them when we needed them, but not having this partnership. So those were two things that as I started off in this role, were big pieces that I had to think through systematically to get us to a different space. Brandon: Molly, I love this, this, and it's bold of you to say it. We were using them when we needed them, but that's not enough to really move the needle, right? Because it makes the relationship not feel authentic, right? There's something fraudulent about, right now, I'm, fairweather friend. When it's the right time, I'm going to bring you in. I'm thinking about your community. There's 135 languages and 145 countries represented. How do you think about the differences between scaling services of a predominantly Spanish-speaking population versus the dozens of smaller language communities, like Nashville's large Kurdish community? Right? Like how are you thinking about those challenges and then doing that thing we were just talking about, like not just using you when I need you, but bringing you in all the time? Molly: So I think that's kind of two different questions, right? But the first one revolves around access, language access. When I started first started out in this role, it was making sure schools and the district as a whole understood what that means to have more than just Spanish-speaking students in their in their school and that just because there's only two to three speakers of that language, that doesn't mean that they don't also get all of the interpretation and translation services. But you have to be able to back that up with actions. So I can't just say that to someone and then not be able to find an interpreter for them or not be able to provide that access because that doesn't build trust for them. So what we had to do was, A, this is important, know who your students are, and know who who needs that level of interpretation or translation access. And then on top of that, here's the system that you can use, that you can get those resources, that is a credible system for you to get where you want to be. Because if enough times a person tries to get that Dari interpreter and they can't get one, they're going to stop trying to ask for it. So it's on our team to say like, yeah, we got to get it and we got to make it happen. And we got to make sure our translations, if we're doing written translations, get back to people in the timeline we said they were going to be because that's the evolving piece that we have to continue to be build trust and credibility within our teaching staff. And then they'll be like, okay, this is easy. This is better. I see the outcome for my students and families because these families know. So then they see the return on this effort. Brandon: This sort of second piece, we're talking about building coalition and bringing people along with you. Is there any sort of intentionality you have to do when the population is smaller? Molly: It's really about informing stakeholders of the entire population and not just focusing on only one population of students. One of the things that I started when I first became executive director in this role was working with creating, we call it our collaborative, which is where we come together with a few leadership members from the office of English learners with with any community partner that interfaces with multilingual learners in their setting. And we created this reciprocal piece of of like, I want to be able to share information with you as a community partner so that you can advocate for families and students because when you're advocating, you have to know you have to have credible and you have to have information that you can say this is what's happening. And we don't want advocacy to be based on something that's not necessarily true. But also advocating and sharing with them all of the different languages and populations that we serve. And so when we tackle topics within that large collaborative, we often talk about, okay, you know, what is this going to look like for our students that are speak Swahili and Kinyarwanda at home? Like, and then we have community partners that were like, yeah, within my organization, that's primarily the population that I work with. And so those community partners are able to kind of say, well, this is what this would look like in this community setting. So I think it's all about information and I think it's about setting expectations, providing information, but also being able to make it possible for for stakeholders to do it. Because if we say everybody needs interpretation services but we're not able to really do that, or we say we're open to feedback but we don't do it, that's that's the process that makes all of this happen. Brandon: I'm hearing something else too from you, which is sounds really intentional. It's particularly in some of the sort of low-incident languages in the community, it's like knowing what community-based organizations or partnerships already are there. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel. And it's like, great, we're just leveraging that. It sounds like that's what you're talking about too. You're like, let's just bring those folks in and ask them what they need. Molly: So it's interesting that you say that because that was actually one of the, you know, the community mapping pieces that we did when we, when I first started in this role, we had programs that we were offering within our office or our school system that community partners did as well, if not better than us. What we we really tried to do was this mapping of resources to say like, well, this is what it looks like for MNPS and this is what we're really good experts in. You as a community partner, this is what you're doing. You have these relationships with families, you're able to get to the families through these churches and and different communities over the weekend. I'm going to stop doing this because you're doing it more effectively than me and I'm going to drive my audience to the community group. And so that's been this leveraging of resources where we're not like spinning our wheels and trying to do the same thing and sometimes even compete, right? Brandon: Yes. Molly: It's more about like really making sure that we're we know what everyone's doing, we're doing this asset mapping, community mapping, and so then we're all able to kind of work together and and sometimes case manage even, right? If we have a family that crosses multiple organizations. That's been our goal, is really looking at our community partners within Nashville as assets, trying not to replicate their work, but really looking at what we can do together to help families be successful. Brandon: This is the hardest thing for systems and bureaucracies to do, which is like full inventory of what do we do well, what's, what's work that we don't need to duplicate. And I'm loving this idea too of like, that's how we build trust. Like if it's like if I have a friend who knows you and we're just getting to meet each other, I'm going to trust my friend who's like, oh no, they're good people. You can bring them in. And the same is happening. It's like, I already have my place. I go to my church, I have my the training center that I go to, or this is the youth group my kids go to that is culturally relevant and all the things. I trust them and now they're saying Nashville, you know, the public school system is a good partner. I'm going to trust it a little bit more. Molly: Mm-hmm. Smart work. Brandon: So smart. Molly: That was our goal. I mean, I think it's just like that we kept running into this piece of, man, we're working so hard. How do we have so many families that we're not reaching? And and I think when you look at a a large community like Nashville and you and you have to be honest with yourself that you are never going to be able to reach everyone. A lot of school districts really try and they and they create these experiences or these events, but when you do those in isolation, you're still only going to reach that same population of students. So you have to reflect and be able to say like, what is not working, who are we not reaching and why? And we may not be the ones that can do that the best. Brandon: And then it pushes everyone's thinking, particularly about marginalized communities where it's like, we're not disengaged. We're actually engaged somewhere. We're just not engaged with you. And that is a very easy problem to solve if you don't need to be the only conduit for information. Molly: Right. That's right. Brandon: So true. All right, I'm obsessed with something you have been doing in Nashville and I want to dive in to this. All right. So you have allowed each school to design its own EL service model annually. I want to hear a little bit about your thinking, the design elements there, and then as you're talking, and I'm just going to give you the floor, like what guardrails and non-negotiables exist to make sure flexibility doesn't lead to inequity across our schools? Molly: That's right. So, this is interesting. This is actually something I started when I was the director of the program prior to my role here as the executive director, was how do we make service models a part of our budget conversation? Because where we are right now, everything's about how much money various things cost and so and in Tennessee there's a in our state policy, state board rule now, every school district has to be within a 1 to 35 ratio. So that's one EL teacher to 35 active ELs plus transitional and transitional two. My thinking was when I was working on the budget pieces is how do I then match up service model decisions with budgeting? Because that's where I'm going to be able to get more engagement from the school leaders, but also kind of start setting up a year-long plan for EL services. So every school principal, they also have a student-based budget where they're getting funds to provide EL services in their school. We have a weight that I've tried to continue to increase. Right now, there's an EL weight of 25% on top of every student weight for every English learner in your school. So part of this conversation was is like, you have to use 100% of your weight towards EL services, but I want you to craft the plan to make these services your own, using these service models, but also using the data of who your students are and what they need. Because when you have a large district, the schools are very different in what service models the students need. Some some communities have more proficient students where the students are in more intermediate range and they aren't going to need many self-contained or pull-out settings. So basically I turned it into a math formula based on time, how much time you're spending with the student was equivalent to the FTE count which equivalent to the dollar, and then we we kind of went back that way. So the the overarching first question is on this budgeting process that I've started is, what is what is your ideal service model? What do you want to do? So I have them kind of craft that out. And then I say, like based on the students that you serve, what is it that you're working towards? And, the schools will then say, I really, really, truly believe in co-teaching as a service model. And so the next question is, okay, now use this tool to map out how many EL teachers you need to be able to provide co-teaching in a K-5 setting with 325 students. Because we, I had to make sure that they were staffed enough to do the model. When you went this way, like I can't, we couldn't move to some models because we actually physically didn't have the staff to do that. And so we're still having these conversations sometimes when we look at budgets and I say, okay, you said you want to do co-teaching, you have five grade levels and you have 200 students and you've budgeted for two EL teachers. That's not enough EL teachers to fully do co-teaching. It's going to result in pull-out. So let's talk about how we budget for the service model that we want. And so then we're able to have these conversations early, then when scores come back, they've already got in their mind the plan for what services look like. And at that time, which usually our scores come back in early summer, then we can go in and figure out exactly based on what you plan for, how we set up the service model. But they are given parameters on like what service models they can use and also when you can provide the services and so on. So we've worked our way towards that. Part of that process is helping making sure all leaders know understand the service models, why, what do you deal with when there's adult differences on what we should do for a service model. But, you know, as a leader of a school, as long as your decision is data-based, it's in compliance, and you're really truly trying to do what's best for students, as a leader, you should be able to choose what service model you want to do. And then we can look at it as it goes throughout. But that makes it their own and leaders are much more invested in in their program if they've they've really mapped that out and created it on their own. Brandon: And Molly, let me ask you this. I love this because it's, you know, it's part of the existing budget process. It requires educators to front-load the thinking around instructional design and to then allow folks to go into their spring, summer months thinking about how they're delivering instruction and in an inclusive way. At the same time, I'm wondering, how do you then, and how do you think about this from the central office, you're right, you have to have folks who are trained in the instructional model options. Like this is the universe that we are operating in. And how do you do that with folks who are new to the principalship? And how do you do that with folks who may, who are not new to the principalship, but are not having the outcomes you want to see and need to begin to really adjust the model that they're delivering? Molly: So there's kind of two different. The first part is like the new principal. And so typically, we don't, you know, we have 100 and I'm estimating so I don't, but there's there's over 120 something actual district run schools along with charter schools. So as new principals come in, I let them kind of settle for a second and then I reach out to them and say like, let's talk about what your predecessor kind of planned and is this something you want to continue? And here's what your predecessor staffed. It may be this year that we're going to have to go with some of that, but I'm going to touch base with you throughout. And so we we have those conversations early on. Every school in MNPS also has an EL coach, and that those are funded through Title III. We have 17 coaches and they're assigned out across all schools based on incidence of EL students, right? And they are then kind of take over and say like they're the person who can help be your thought partner at that point. And often time the early principals are honestly the ones who are like really lean in the most because they they can see the outcome data and they don't know the service models well enough, so they're going to lean in and see what what they need to do differently after year one or year two. The more veteran principal can be challenging just because sometimes it takes the student population's outcomes to dip before they want to step back and be vulnerable and think about their service model. I'm 100% behind like, I'm not going to tell a principal what service model they have to do, because if they, if I told them they have to do that service model, it's not going to go well either way. Because that's not their model, they don't own that model, and when the first thing that goes wrong, it comes back on, well, why did the office of English learners make me do this? I told them it wasn't going to work. So there has to be some building up and allowing that school to make choices around the service models within what's allowable. They also know the teachers in the building. So if you've got 75% new teachers, which is the reality sometimes, you may not be ready for co-teaching. You may have to go to a little bit more sheltered pull-out as you train folks so that you have a successful year. And schools need to be able to have that flexibility as long as they're meeting the compliance. And then of course, as long as you're seeing progress on your universal screening and benchmark data and achievement testing, we look at all those things and we evaluate like, is it working? Brandon: Yeah. That makes sense. And I, you know, I appreciate the honesty too, which is, and this is true across the country, but really true for us in large urban districts. There are times where we just have a school where over half the staff is new that year and they're within their first three years of teaching. And that requires some leadership moves and some generosity from the central office as well as on the ground with the principalship to be like, what can we actually handle this year? We're training new teachers in this work. Molly: And then also being realistic with the curriculum aspects now, right? And that the high quality instructional materials are what we should be using with all students, but they also require teachers to have time to learn the materials and do that well. And so how do you balance those pieces with your service model to make sure you're truly getting, you're truly preparing teachers and schools for what you're asking for. Brandon: Is there a school that you think of that has moved through this process and that you're just like really proud of the journey they went through, the outcomes they've achieved? You can name it, you can not name it. We can talk about it however you feel comfortable, but like, is there like one of the places where you're like, you know, we did really great work here and in turn did really great work by kids. Molly: Yeah, I think one, I have several examples of those. I think one of which would probably be Cole Elementary School in Southeast Nashville. It's one of our largest schools. And they've really, really looked at their service model and what's best for students. They've trained all their staff members and continue to have the instructional supports for multilingual learners as part of their planning, as part of their ILT, as part of their collaborative planning cycles each week. So it has to be that whole process together. It's not going to be the service model is not going to be what this is. But I would say they're a really great example of one that has adapted and changed, increased staffing, etc., based on, you know, what they want to do for students. And that's been very successful for that school. And we've got many, many others too, honestly. We're we're seeing our EL outcomes continue to go up every single year. It's, you know, I think if you're a person in a leadership of multilingual learners, the achievement testing can be hard because you have a population of active students, many are not going to be proficient right away on your state achievement testing. So as these accountability metrics come out, there's this gap, and you're always trying to close the gap and you want that growth. But I have to remember and remind myself, once a student is proficient in English, they move out of that subgroup. And for us, they're outperforming their native speakers, former ELs are and and honestly our transitional students are too. So those are the things I have to keep reminding myself. But as a school leader, I'm going to bring this back to this service model conversation. Many times school leaders will say to me, okay, well, our outcomes weren't the way they wanted them to, it must be the service model. And I would say, a service model is part of it. But a student's EL services are only most likely one hour of the day. So you could have this high quality teacher that's working with that student for one hour a day, but the other six hours of the day, if they're not getting high quality instruction, if they're not having scaffolds and strategies in their other classes, it's not going to make a difference. This has to be a whole experience for the student. So the service model is part of it, but it's not the answer to your your achievement and language growth. Brandon: Molly, you know you're speaking my language. This is like the thing I think about all day, every day. You're right. And the responsibility for our ML, ELD, ESL, whatever our communities call the educators who are laser-focused on multilingual learners, that's key and that service has to be great. But at the end of the day, our kids are spending the majority of their time in content areas without ML supports. And so it begs this question of like, how is everyone a teacher for ML students? And how do we make sure from a district level that's the way we're thinking about teaching and learning, and then from in parallel process that person on the ground, the ML support is also championing that type of pedagogical approach with their with their peers. How do you think about that? Molly: So it's interesting because I think I've gone lots of different directions in these different things and when I when I kind of go back and reset every summer, I have to think about it from the large picture myself. Sometimes, you know, when you as a leader in this work and you think like the outcomes are going to be great and then you're like, gosh darn it. I only went up three percentage points this time and I was really anticipating more and I have to realize like there's a lot of factors in that. Something that's been really rewarding for my team is we've and we're trying to move this across all the varying levels of our work is the achievement and language data is a lag measure, right? It's what you get much later on and it's just a snapshot in time. We need to be looking at different measures throughout the year that we can say, yes, this is the impact we're having. And so, you know, look at that on a monthly basis, a quarterly basis, being vulnerable enough to say this isn't working, do we need to change it at the end of the year? Do we need to change it now? But that kind of incremental monitoring and looking at data and evidence has been pivotal in helping everybody understand, yes, I'm making an impact. It may be these writing rubrics that I'm using, it may be this, but I'm measuring this across time and I'm able to see the impact there. So when the achievement and language scores come back, it's not that you're necessarily predicting them, but you're able to use this data you've collected to paint a picture of what's truly happening. Brandon: Yeah. And you know where you're going. You have something, it shouldn't be a total shock of what the outcomes are if you're doing these dipstick measures along the way. And then doing that work, which is the work I'm obsessed with, which is like day to day getting the right scaffolds in front of a kid and then doing the hardest part, which is fading the scaffold so that I am not over scaffolding and I am able to make sure that kid is having the right sort of cognitive lift and productive struggle so that the language growth is accelerating, not slowed down by the scaffolds. Molly: So here's the reality on that, and I I've had to continue to have to tell myself, that is what the goal, but that is really hard. That is what we are working towards in every single classroom with every single teacher, but it's also so content dependent too. So because you're integrating language and content, it just makes it really challenging. So we kind of looked at that a little bit differently this year and trying to think like, okay, we've done this amazing work where we had our high quality instructional materials. We had teams of EL teachers and content experts come together, look at the the supports available in the in the materials, then say, okay, based on our experience of what we've seen so far in implementing the materials, here's some additional potentially like language objectives, language supports that this lesson or unit needs, and then we kind of help them move along that sequence of removing the scaffolding. We last summer had a moment of going, okay, we've done all this work with curriculum supports. I mean, they we've had various people across the country say, these are great, we want to use these different things, right? But we're still not seeing those supports being used intentionally in every single classroom every day across the district. So we had to take a step back and say, I think we missed the mark in in rolling out these materials and these supports because we didn't make sure that it was embedded in the district's leadership, instructional guidance and all of the various moves that are going to make their way into the classroom. And then is the data that we have now with ELPA 21 visible enough to instructional leaders, to coaches, to teachers to really be able to do what you're saying, to be able to say like in the moment, this is their, the student has a writing level of a two and I'm going to apply this scaffold, but now they don't need it anymore. And so there were a couple pieces where we had to step back and say, A, our data wasn't quite visible enough for that, so we created a tool where principals, teachers could pull up a basically at a glance, all the students in their class and their language proficiency levels and goals. And then another piece was working with the principals to help them understand how to use this tool in both their ILT, instructional leadership teams and collaborative planning so that you're having that level of conversation during collaborative planning. And then as a leader, when you're going in classrooms daily, you're able to see the students in there and you as a leader are able to provide the teacher with feedback around that scaffolding piece and whether those are being removed, etc. And part of that was on us because they didn't necessarily have those tools. And so if you don't give them that granular of understanding of really what that looks like in the sense of the student's language proficiency level on all four domains, you're going to end up with these washed, the student is a level three and so they're going to get this support everywhere and you're not going to have the intentional supports that that are going to lead to the outcomes and then they're also where you can pull things away because you haven't been intentional enough from the jump. Brandon: Yeah. And you may find yourself just over scaffolding because you're giving, it becomes tier one intervention versus a tier two decision. Molly: Yeah, yes. And we saw a lot of that too. But we had not given them the right tools yet. And so this year has been super helpful in rolling that out through our leadership structures in MNPS, but also pointing making sure that we're realistic with is there an opportunity and how can teachers access that data in a way that's meaningful to them for planning? And so we had to do some some adjustments there. Brandon: I imagine too that the transition from WIDA to ELPA 21 gave you this opportunity. You know, sometimes these big changes become opportunities. Like, it gave you an opportunity to start diving a little bit deeper into these questions, into proficiency levels. Is that is it a fair assumption? Molly: Well, I think you're actually reading my mind. But yes, so that we were able to take advantage of this opportunity. So we had, and this is why we started this last summer, because this was our, last summer, which would have been the summer of 2025, was the first summer we had the ELPA 21 scores come back, which looked very different from the WIDA scores. And so we were able to do some resetting at that point to say, what, what's not working? How do we want to make this rollout of summative scores look different than the past to get to the level that we want them to be? And so that really helped us with the planning portion around each of the domains. A difference between ELPA 21 and WIDA ACCESS is that there's not a composite score. So that helped kind of with the direction that we knew we needed to head, which was pushing people past the composite score. So that was helpful. But also now it's got a lot more information that the user has to understand. So there's some pieces there. But that was really, primarily the the way that we were able to rethink the EL data literacy across the district was because we had a new assessment. And so, A, we need to tell you more about this assessment. B, we need to tell you how to use it and provide you with the leadership skills, executive principal coach, to be able to lead conversations around the new data set. Brandon: What an incredible opportunity. You know, change is hard, but it sounds like you were really thinking about it in a way that would lift up kids and also leverage leadership in the sort of growth opportunity of it all. That's exciting. Molly: Yeah. Brandon: Thank you for all of this and all of your work. It really means a lot to me that you decided to spend your time with us. Molly: Well, I appreciate it. I love talking. We could talk about a whole bunch more. Stay tuned for Metro Nashville Public Schools' future. So we have a strategic plan and this year we're really focusing this upcoming year, we're going to be really doubling down on family engagement as a driver, rethinking that across our entire team, how we're pulling in the academic sides with family engagement at the EL office. So, stay tuned. More to come. Brandon: There's going to be a second episode with us. Molly: There will need to be, yeah. Brandon: Okay, done. Before you go, I always ask this question as the final question to our guest. What's something you're learning from right now? Molly: I like to be in parallel process with with our educators. So what are you learning from right now? Brandon: We've been diving into some strategic leadership pieces. The book is called Strategic Leadership and thinking about how we, it's we've been working in conjunction with Harvard. We've also been pulling in some of the Covey work around leading with mind and goals and how are we looking at that as a as our office? Because that's that's one of the pieces that we felt like was really missing in our learning and execution was making sure that we were implementing programs that were successful, we were measuring the outcomes of those programs, and that we're evaluating those programs to say like this isn't working, it's time to remove that program, but not necessarily add back. So as a leadership team, those are the two things we've been studying and and I really thought through last year prior to bringing them to my team is how do we make sure that we're we're making these very strategic decisions, we're building the humans along the way to be able to do that, but we're doing things that are data-driven and not just because we think they're the right thing to do. So that's what that's what I've been really digging into right now in my journey. Molly: I love that. And thank you so much, Molly, for joining us today, for the work you do for our kids, for the leadership you provide in a very complex environment during a very complex time. Brandon: Thank you for having me. Molly: Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning. Brandon: