Kathy Escamilla is one of America's foundational voices in multilingual education. A professor emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder, she helped define the concept of the Bilingual Continuum, reshaping how educators understand language development in multilingual learners. She is best known for her work across the field of biliteracy development. In her decades-long career she has deeply influenced how schools nationwide approach both instruction and assessment, and has pushed the field into asset-based practices that build on students' full linguistic repertoires.
Kathy: I learn a lot from kids. Every school now, it's not "learn English as quickly as possible." No, no, no. Everybody's got, "being bilingual is beautiful." But then some kid misses school and comes back, and the teacher says, "Where were you yesterday?" "Well, I had to go to the doctor and translate for my mother." "You're never going to learn English if you don't come to school every day." Ugh, it's like a contradiction. The pressure of learning English is a lot. Brandon: Hey everyone. Hola a todos. I'm Brandon Cardet-Hernandez and you're listening to Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medly Learning. Each episode, we're exploring the leadership, the ideas, and the insights shaping better education for multilingual learners. Brandon: And today, we have a true hero in the multilingual learning community. And I don't think Kathy Escamilla needs an introduction, but I'm going to still give her one. Kathy is a Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the foundational voices in bilingual education in the United States. She is best known for her work on biliteracy development and for helping define the concept of the bilingual continuum, which has reshaped how educators understand language development in multilingual learners. Brandon: And for decades, she has influenced how schools approach assessment and instruction, pushing the field towards asset-based practices that build on students' full linguistic repertoires. So Kathy, estoy tan feliz. I'm super happy to have you here. Welcome to our podcast. Kathy: Well, it's my pleasure to be here and I love, of course, talking about this topic, so I'm here to have fun. Brandon: Good. So, there's always this moment when we introduce someone, and someone else tells our story. And it's nice, all the highlights of our career. But is there ever anything that gets left off that you're like, "I wish more people talked about this other thing that I did." Kathy: Yeah, that's hard to say, but I am going to say this. It's career related, but it's tangential. So it's not anything that would have ever gotten you tenure or recognition at AERA. But it's something that I'm very proud of. My husband and I, for the last 25 years, have sponsored a bilingual writing contest in Colorado. And it's called the Proud to Be Bilingual contest. We solicit and invite kids from grades three to five, and then middle school and high school, to write an essay about why they're proud to be bilingual and to write it in two languages. And so we've done that for 25 years. And I want to say that in spite of the ups and downs in policy, in spite of the all-English focus now, in spite of new reading initiatives, the essays have gotten better and better over time. Kathy: And so I'm very proud of that. And so this year, we just, as a matter of fact, two weeks ago, honored this year's winners. The high school essays were the best I have ever read, and the most creative reasons for why they're proud to be bilingual. So, I'm very proud of that, and I'm proud of the kids. We've had kids come up and say, "I don't know, you don't remember me, but I won the prize in the third grade, and now I'm going to be a bilingual teacher and I'm going to UNC." So I love that. I love spending my time doing that in the spring of every year. Brandon: I'm glad I asked this question. Good. And I love hearing about that. What important, incredible, meaningful work. And you're right, not the thing that's getting you tenure. Kathy: No, but I mean, the parents come, the teachers come, everybody's proud of the kids. I mean, it's wonderful. Brandon: I have to tell you this, and I'm going to, we'll start talking shop in a second, but the first time I met you, I was very, very nervous. And for folks who have not met Kathy Escamilla, there is nothing to be nervous about. Kathy: Oh. Brandon: But in my world, I think two things, and so I just want to name this at the top. There's, just in terms of the impact that you've had on the multilingual learning community as an educator, as a lifelong educator, your name is in so many things I've read and you've really impacted how I think about learning and what is possible for our community. So that's the first. Brandon: And then of course, there's this second piece, which is just being another Latino person in this space and leading, not just from the sidelines, but front and center. And I have been just wildly impressed with how, how much your voice is amplified in our, in our space, and it's just really is an honor to get to, to know you and be with you. Kathy: Well, thank you so much. That means a lot. Thank you. Brandon: I mean it. Okay, so I want to talk shop and get really deep, but the first thing I want to really ask you is what pulled you into this work? You could do anything, you are very smart, but you made a choice. What about this field brought you into it? Kathy: I wish I could say that it was this, I grew up wanting to be a this. No. I didn't have a clue what I was going to do. So, but every summer when I was in college, I worked for the Colorado Migrant Council, and I worked with children of migrant farm workers. I loved the work. It was purposeful work. It was, it was language, but it was way beyond language. I mean, we did the migrant services included healthcare and legal advice and all kinds of things that I didn't know anything about. So when I graduated from college, I said, I was a Spanish major. So, I studied the literature of Unamuno and Siglo de Oro and all that, which didn't do me much good working with the migrant kids. But I knew I wanted to do something that combined my love for language with this work with the migrant workers. And so I fell in, I mean, literally fell into the very first federally funded bilingual program in Colorado, and I ended up teaching first grade with absolutely no preparation. Not any advice I would give to anyone. You need formal preparation to be a good teacher. I did not have a very good idea of what it involved, teaching 25 first graders, half of whom spoke no English, half of whom spoke no Spanish, but it was great. Kathy: A year of sleepless nights, not knowing, going and saying, "I can't teach that. That's a really dumb, what was I thinking?" I mean, it was just a year of growth for me. So, at the end of the year, I said, "Okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to go back to school, I'm going to figure out." But there weren't any bilingual programs for teachers then. It was such a new field. It was sort of like we're figuring out as we go along. And I actually liked that about it too. I liked that there was this curiosity, that somebody else hadn't already figured it out and gave you a manual and said, "do this and everything will be all right." And that there was a social justice purpose to it too, because there were a lot of people in the community where I worked who weren't all sure that Spanish belonged in the school. English after all was the language of the United States and the kids needed to learn English and all of that. So they weren't all altogether convinced that native language instruction was going to work or was even in the best interest of kids. And they weren't mean or nasty people the way sometimes they're portrayed in books. They were just people who genuinely said, "I think this might confuse kids. This might put them farther back. We're trying to keep, teach kids." And so they were unsure. Brandon: And that's what, like, started the course for you of being like, "We will convince them, we will provide them clarity." Kathy: We'll muck around until we figure out what, what might be a good plan. And I, I ended up working in inner city Los Angeles, ended up being even more convinced of the value of native language. And then I saw the uglier side of, you know, institutional racism and all of that kind of stuff. But, you know, for the most part, it was great. I mean, I kind of knew that this, this was the work I wanted to do. Brandon: And we're glad you did it. What was a field that, you know, had a grassroots element to it, everyone's like, "What do we do?" is now very different. It is real research, a full body, a discipline, to say the least. And you have been an incredible part of that creation. And has allowed other educators to come in, maybe who would have been less interested in a grassroots effort in education, to come in and have a little bit more contours and support in how to deliver really strong instruction. Kathy: Had it not been for my opportunities to work out in the field, in the inner city, in rural Colorado with Spanish speaking kids, I don't think I could have done the research that I did, or it wouldn't have been as impactful, at least on, you know, it's impactful on me, who knows if anybody else, but it informed me in a way that, of course, you know, getting a PhD was something I wanted to do because I knew I needed it. I needed it to do the kind of research I wanted to to do. Brandon: Well, we're glad you were able to move both. And I think that research and reality connection obviously has informed the quality and the sort of the type of questions you've been able to ask and then get answers to. Kathy: Pretty important, yeah, it is. Brandon: All right, so I want to talk a little bit about this reframing of biliteracy from deficit to asset and thinking about, and helping our audience too, understand how do we start to build language when we're communicating with other people about this skill set? How do we start to do that in our own world, in our classrooms, in our systems? And so I want to ask you a little bit, you know, you've spent your career pushing against this deficit view of bilingual learners. What do you think we're still getting wrong about how we see students? Kathy: I think we're evolving in the right direction. I want to say that. But I want to say that so many things are such deeply ingrained beliefs that it take, especially if you're U.S. educated, that it takes a lot to go, "Oh, wow, I didn't realize the contradiction between what I said." So I believe there's still a lot of subtle ways that, I'm going to give you an example. So I learn a lot from kids. Every school now, it's not like learn English as quickly as possible. No, no, no. Everybody's got being bilingual is beautiful. Bilingual is a superpower. But then some kid misses school and comes back, and the teacher says, "Where were you yesterday?" "Well, I had to go to the doctor and translate for my mother." "You're never going to learn English if you don't come to school every day." So, I, it's, it's like a contradiction. I mean, and I do think people really do are getting to understand and be more proud of the fact that they're bilingual or they're emerging bilinguals and, you know, the bilingualism of the U.S., the Spanish that's spoken in the U.S. or the Chinese is not an inferior type. It's just as good as any other variety of Spanish, but it takes a while to unlearn what has been so deeply ingrained. So that, you know, the bilingual is beautiful, but then, you know, the kids who have to stay out of school for whatever reason sometimes get chastised. And then if you ask them, "Is bilingual beautiful?" Well, no, because if I weren't bilingual, I wouldn't be at the doctor translating for my mother. And translation, my gosh, is a very high form of bilingualism. Kathy: A second one is the still the really subtle, "you don't speak the right kind of Spanish." So, you know, what are we doing in this dual language program? We're learning academic Spanish because with academic Spanish, you can be a good reader and writer. I'm sorry, but some of the best literature is written in the vernacular and you want to keep turning pages and you like the way people are talking to each other. So I'm not against academic anything. I mean, I spent my better part of my life in school, but what I'm against is having somebody think that one register of a language is superior to another one. You need a broad register. You need a broad way to talk about people, about not just about people, about things, about phenomena, about science, about how when you go out to the community, you want to talk to people in the community in a way that they understand you and that doesn't mean in an inferior way. So I think that we still unconsciously push this idea that there's an academic Spanish and that somehow a lot of our kids don't, don't have it. Brandon: I feel that on a personal level. So you know, I'm, I grew up son of Cuban immigrants. And my Spanish evolved. I did not have the privilege of going to a bilingual school. I went to a bilingual elementary school, but then it we phased out. But there was this, this tension for me of like, "Oh, my Spanish is not as academic as my English," or "I'm speaking in Spanglish and not in full Spanish." And rather than thinking about how to level up and okay, now I'll grow those skills, there was something that because of the way that it was mentioned to me or shared with me, it actually pushed it down. Kathy: Yep, yes. I, I absolutely do. Yeah. Brandon: I appreciate that frame that you were giving us too. When you think about a system or a classroom where we are treating bilingualism as an asset, what are you looking for? Kathy: You know, I think the system, I'm going to speak at the system level because that's a little bit, it's a little bit broader. I can speak to the classroom level too. But when I look at systems, I think of systems that are saying, "we're interested in assessing for trajectories toward biliteracy and not how well or how quickly our kids are making transitions to English." And there are some. I mean, I think of the most recent work of Doris Linville Chavez and her dissertation where she had these 13,000 kids and they were making very good progress toward biliteracy when you looked at them and compared them to other emerging bilingual kids. And so I look at those systems and I go, "Okay, we are at the beginning levels of this, but we are making progress. We are changing their ways of thinking and we're saying, if we're about bilingualism, then we have to assess bilingually." I see teachers' classrooms, if we're going to go to the classroom level, where they are very intentional about telling kids that we read this in English, you can talk to your partner about what it means in Spanish and allowing that sort of level of expressive language is more difficult to acquire than receptive. So I might understand something in Spanish, but when somebody asked me a comprehension question, I go, "Hey, can I answer that in English?" Because if I can answer it in English, I sound a lot better and I can demonstrate that I understood. Now we got to keep, you know, encouraging and pushing the expressive skills too, but I, I see at the classroom level teachers who know when to allow kids to say, "I think you understood that. Tell me in Spanish what you think you understood," and I'm assessing them for comprehension. Another time I can push expression. Brandon: I love this. Yes, yes, yes. Let me ask you this. Back to the sort of grassroots start of your journey. If I'm an educator, school leader, teacher, even a district leader, a multilingual learning director, but in a community that isn't showing that same value for biliteracy, are there, without a complete system overhaul, are there ways that you think educators should be thinking about promoting it in systems where we're still measuring if a student is a long-term L but not checking to see if they're growing language skills in both languages, the sort of more traditional space most of our kids are living in? How do I think about that and push? Kathy: There's not one monolingual English teacher I know who doesn't want a kid to succeed. They may not know exactly how to engage them in the conversation. They may not know exactly how long it takes. If they haven't studied a second language, if they have, they'll say, "Oh yeah, you know, took four years of French, didn't do me any good." And so I'm expecting this six-year-old to learn English in a year. I mean, there are a lot of people who have that level of sensibility, so that's a lot to work with. And then you can say, "Well, okay, how about if you really, really try to make sure that they understand some basic things about what you're talking about, and then they can tell a, they can tell a bilingual peer." Because very rarely is there only one kid in a class who doesn't speak English. They're generally several, and they're are varying stages of proficiency. So making use of their, the children's native languages in classrooms, a long time ago, I remember things that we used to do. We used to think that it wasn't good to put kids, we'd put one kid here, one kid there, because we thought they'd learn faster. Now we know, no, they, you know, your peer group is a powerful tool to learn also if we're using the peer group wisely. I remember observing in a class one time where this one little kid, he was dying to learn. He was, he didn't speak a word of English and the teacher would say something, he'd go, "y que dijo?" And the teacher said, and the teacher moved him because she didn't want him talking. I was like, "Oh god, that's exactly," but she didn't know. And you know, I said, "You know, he's asking, what did the teacher say? He wants to know what you're talking about." I wish I had, you know, in some classes, a kid who would say, "I want to know what she's talking about," because I had some who could have cared less, you know, not very many, but some, but you know. Brandon: Of course. Kathy: You know, and she goes, "You know, I hadn't thought about that." So, just like we say, start where kids are, start with where teachers are. You know, and most of them will listen because very few teachers are like, "you know, let them suffer." I don't meet people like that very often. Brandon: I agree. I think even in the, the classrooms that I visited where our kids are ignored, it's rarely from a place of malintent. There's the "I don't know what to do," and so I'm just sort of avoiding what I don't know how to do. We do all of us do that in our life all the time. And that's without the right strategies. But I'm with you. It's like we are here because we want to see kids win. Kathy: Yeah, yes, exactly. Brandon: I'm really holding this and I want folks who listen to hold this too. For so long, and definitely when I was growing up, there was this idea that if you are speaking your home language, if you're speaking Spanish in front of non-Spanish speakers, it's almost rude. It's inappropriate. Kathy: Yeah. Brandon: The moment that you said it's like, "Well, sometimes I'm just trying to get clarity. I just want to understand. I actually want to participate and engage. I want to belong here." Allowing that to happen, actually encouraging it, what a, what a beautiful way of thinking of biliteracy. Kathy: You know, if I could sometimes I wax like, like back in the dark ages when I started working, but I did work at a school and observed lunch. It was a high school. And the kids would sit together in the cafeteria and speak Spanish, and other kids would sit together and speak English. But the teachers at the school were particularly worried about the kids speaking in Spanish. And one day I got frustrated and said, "Well, what do you think they're doing? Plotting to overthrow the government? I mean, what do you think?" And, you know, I said, you know, ask them what they're talking about. They're talking about boyfriends, they're talking about lipstick, they're talking about what they're wearing to school. It's a safe space. They said, "Well," and at that time, again, talking, starting from where they are, this is a safe place to be like, "Okay, the pressure of learning English is a lot, especially when I'm a high school kid and I'm trying to take literature and biology and all of that and graduate on time. But at lunchtime, I can sit with my friends and I can relax." That that probably helps their English when they go back because it's enough of a rest. And it's called the psychological saturation point. We reach our saturation point grows as we get better in the language, and we know that. But again, when you explain that to people, they kind of go, "Oh, okay, that's right. Yeah, that's right." But you start where they are. And fortunately, I don't see that very often. I mean, people right now are usually very willing to allow kids to use their first language to to try to solve problems of communication. Brandon: Yeah. And then I think, you know, what's important for folks to think about as well, and I thought about this a lot when I was a principal. I was a principal in the South Bronx. Two things were true for my community: a wave of new immigrants, students who had very limited English proficiency. And then a lot of bilingual kids who are growing up in homes, their third, fourth generation even, but they speak Spanish, they're moving between both languages, truly bilingual, at least in speaking and listening, right? And when I allowed for those community opportunities for my beginners to work and build relationship and belonging and connection with other students who had different experiences, but different language experiences, that's how I could hook in a newcomer, for lack of better words. That's when I would hook in my kid, because they were like, "Oh, now you have friendships." And you know what? Just like in the world of work where sometimes we're going in to see, you know, the friend we're going to have a coffee with. The same is true for kids at school. They're coming in because they want to be part of a community. Kathy: Oh, of course. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Brandon: Those opportunities to build that and then to build it around language, they're, they're beautiful. All right, you think about this often, so I want us to dive in a little bit deeper, and you can get wonky here. Like, this is a very safe space. As we think about assessment and accountability for bilingual learners, how should we be thinking differently about assessing our students? And how should we be thinking differently in the assessment from a system level to a classroom level? Like, how should we be thinking about assessment in both developing languages? Kathy: So, I think the bigger field doesn't deal with issues of linguistics very often. So if I could get just a little bit wonky, I would change a belief from a belief about a parallel language view, that you got to truly separate languages, you got to do it in Spanish, you got to do it in English, two languages interact. When there are two languages in your brain, you don't close a drawer in Spanish to open the English drawer. The both drawers are open. And we have to change that. So the parallel bilingual view is still a pretty dominant force. There are still people who believe that, you know, if kids are using two languages, that's some sort of bastardized unless you're an elite speaker of the language. So if I say "chargé d'affaires," you think I'm cosmopolitan. But if a kid mixes two languages, all of a sudden they're cognitively confused. So I would change that view to more of a holistic look at developing bilinguals. You know, so it's from a prescriptive view of linguistics, which is what's right and what's correct, to a more descriptive view. Isn't this interesting what kids do with this language? So I will admit that I don't always understand young people and the way that they talk, but I really listen to it. I go, "God, that's interesting." At some point, like 30 years ago, all of a sudden we said, you know, he's a bad dude and that meant a good thing. That was a compliment where all of a sudden good became bad. So now there's a different jargon and I won't even pretend, but it's interesting to me. And so if you look at language from a prescriptive viewpoint, people adopt, they adopt language depending on their context and what they need language for. Doctor, "que es lo que haces?" "Well, I'm a sheet rockero." Okay. "Sheet rockero." What's that? Well, it's somebody who's a sheet, lays sheet rock in construction. Well, they adopted that term and that's what they do and because that's the way they make themselves understood. And so that's a more prescriptive. Isn't that interesting? Is a more prescriptive view than that's incorrect. Brandon: That's exactly it. Are there states or districts that you're following that you think they're doing interesting work in this space, in thinking about assessment? Kathy: Well, I think California is leading the way with their new, their new literacy bill, in general, and the specifics about native language assessment and screening kids for early difficulties in reading and doing that in, I think they've got, they've got assessments now in five or six different languages. So definitely an interesting state. Illinois in their MTSS, they've got some of the leaders in the field identifying kids and making sure that we're not confusing, which is the age-old question, confusing language acquisition with learning difficulties. So those are two really interesting states, I think. I think New York is always on the verge. I mean, they're always on the verge and I don't mean that they're not quite there, but some places is a little bit harder than other ones. But so California, New Mexico, I think is a very interesting state because they're one of the only ones that are really interested in looking at indigenous language groups and the value of maintenance and vitality of those languages because Octavio Paz, the philosopher, the Mexican philosopher said, "If you lose a language, you lose the people." There's so many Native American tribes that are on the verge of their languages being lost, that attention to language maintenance and again, it's subtle, but when somebody says, "Well, why do you care if somebody doesn't speak Navajo anymore? It's not like it's a world language." That's not the point. That's not the point at all. Brandon: I love this. Yeah, it's not the point. And at the same time, too, there is just a magical way and you think about this and do a much more academic way of sharing it. But I'll, but you're good at doing it from the heart space, too. There is a way that our brains can create such creative outputs when we are blending languages. It has taken me a long time to really hold that magic. That like, yeah, sometimes I'm in a meeting and I cannot remember a word, but when I start blending it together, I'm producing much more poetic language. I am thinking deeper and different because I'm drawing from so much more. So sure, you can, you know, someone can make this argument. Navajo is not a world language, but it is a way of changing the way our brains work and for that kid to hold on to an identity and a way of thinking. Kathy: Absolutely, and for that kid to say, "You want to understand me, here's who I am. Here are the stories my grandfather told me, here's how I made them understood, the ones I wanted you to understand." Brandon: Yeah. Kathy: It opens up cultural and identity possibilities that just aren't there if you say, "Well, nah, you know, who cares about Hopi?" you know? Brandon: Absolutely. As you think about the work that you've done to bring WIDA, in many ways, to life, watching implementation and activation around schools and districts, where do you see the bright spots and where are you still hoping for greater growth? Kathy: Whoa, the, well, the bright spots a lot of times are in classrooms where teachers are never going to get credit for what they do, unfortunately. There are a lot of bright spots. There are bright spots in individual schools. I was just on Doris Linville Chavez's dissertation committee, and as a part of her dissertation, she interviewed school administrators. And surprisingly, you know, I would have, I, I wasn't looking forward to reading that part of her dissertation, I was like, a bunch of bureaucrats invested in the system. No, no, no, these were people, they were all bilingual, they were very astute and very good observers. And then they said, "You know, at our school, it doesn't matter, it's baked into the system, the ethnocentrism and the linguicism is baked into the system. Here's how I try to mitigate that for my teachers and my school, so they don't feel bad, so the kids don't feel bad," and it was really quite interesting. So I think that's absolutely a bright spot. What we've got going on, we're making, we're making a dent. Where I think we need to try, not try harder, I don't know what we need to do, but is at the policy level. Brandon: Yeah. Kathy: Is the how we look at the outcomes. It's how we look at how children are are progressing. Because I still think we are much too focused on a very narrow set of English reading outcomes, not even writing. I mean, very, very narrow way of looking at are our kids developing into proficient people who can use language. And by that, I mean, not just receptive, listening and reading, but expressive, writing and oral language. We have something that I think is pretty exciting initiative in our state, in Colorado, where we're going to change the Seal of Biliteracy to put more of a focus on oral language, because people have come and said, "You know, this kid earned the Seal of Biliteracy, but I wanted them to work in, you know, they, they went to be a flight attendant and you got to give the announcements." Nobody cares if you're a good writer or if you passed the AP test. They want you to say, "Fasten your seatbelt," and, and, you know, "and listen up." And they want you to do it in a way that people understand. So we need to broaden our view of what it means for to earn the Seal of Biliteracy to really focus on the the expressive skills as well as the receptive ones. Brandon: Is there anywhere an educator's listening or a district leader is listening right now where you suggest folks go to learn more, to think, to be able to do that system-level change and really think differently about biliteracy program development? Where should they look? Kathy: Where should they look? I want to mention Doris Chavez Linville's work because that's very, very interesting to me. Margo Gottlieb and all of her work about formative assessment and how we look at what it means. I know so little about this that my ignorance is going to show, but there's some really interesting AI work. For example, we know that AI tends to want to tell us what we want to hear sometimes, right? Depending on we put in a profile of ourselves, "Okay, Kathy's interested in metalanguage." Okay. So when I put a child's writing sample in there, they'll give me back, "Well, this child's got pretty good metalanguage." But I put it in somebody else's platform and all of a sudden they say, "What the heck is this kid talking about? They're not even writing in English sometimes." So I think the people who are really looking at AI for in terms of how can it help us better understand how two languages interact, that's really exciting. My, I have a colleague, Jody Slavic. I follow her. She's now the executive director of Literacy Squared. They're using AI to help pair Spanish and English books according to themes, topics, objectives, literacy objectives. All that's pretty exciting work, you know, that I, like I said, I'm admitting my ignorance and saying I don't know much about it. Brandon: This is a new frontier. So it sounds like you know more than than you're giving yourself credit for. And it's true for people listening, right? Like it's to feel like you have to be expert in order to engage will be a limiting factor in staying close to the technology as it advances. Kathy: Exactly, because it's there and it's going, yeah. Brandon: And it's moving fast and you know my work outside of this podcast. I'm very committed to thinking about AI for our kids and how we use it without watering down content, without reducing rigor, but really to support language development and leverage home language when learning's taking shape. Kathy: Uh-huh. Brandon: Before we end, there's two things I want to know. Is there anything you want people in our field to be thinking and talking about right now? Something that feels really urgent for you? Kathy: Oh my goodness. Okay, I'm going to give you a scenario because it was a school I was just in. Okay. And the scenario is this. For 20 minutes, the first 20 minutes I got there, the kids were learning English as a second language, ELD. And the teacher was good. She was well prepared. I will not, I do not disparage teachers because believe me, I was one, made every mistake one could possibly make. So she, very good. But the kids were doing grammar: I walk, she walks, he walks, you know, they were doing that. They were doing pretty successfully, but some of the kids were struggling with it. At the end of the 20 minutes, "Okay, ELD time's over, put away everything." And in this case, it's the, you know, the laptop, not just the book or whatever. And we're going to watch a video, and the video that we're going to watch is on the Industrial Revolution. Okay. All of a sudden, we're talking about the Industrial Revolution and why all of the people who lived in agricultural areas — you couldn't call them farms — had to move from the agricultural areas to the urban areas. You couldn't call those cities. I mean, and I am not opposed to scaffolding kids' language. You know, the agricultural, the farms, those are called agricultural areas. And the video that the kids watched explained none of that language and it wasn't, you couldn't intuit. I'm a native speaker of English. I couldn't intuit from the language in the, first of all, what I was supposed to get out of it. And then the teacher said, "Which words didn't you understand?" Well, at the end of the time, how do I know which words I didn't understand if I didn't understand them to begin with? How do I recall them? So it was the agricultural workers had to, and it was called industrialization. Well, what the heck does that mean? And I'm a seven-year-old in second grade and I now know how to say I can, I walk to school or I take the bus. That's what I was doing in one setting. So I'd like to see us sort of align. I mean, I think that there is a lot that we can do with thematic teaching around things like vocabulary that scaffold what the kids know to what they don't know. And this was just a missed opportunity. And I'm seeing that more and more because people, again, this is subtle, but people say, "Well, if you got high expectations, I have high expectations." So I showed the film. And besides, there are a lot of visual cues in the film. Well, yes and no. Brandon: I do believe that the teacher knew it. I think she was afraid to say, "I don't want to use this," because somebody would say that means you have low expectations. Kathy: Yeah. Brandon: Instead of, "I understand your kids don't understand. How do we make this more comprehensible to them?" I don't mean that to sound negative, but I see that way too much. Brandon: I think it's, it doesn't sound negative at all. It's something to hold curiosity about. Yes, bring in the high-quality instructional material, raise standards, increase rigor, and all the while, where, how are we being intentional about language connections and scaffolding language, even if we're showing a video or we're doing a reading or we're just communicating, scaffolding that language and providing language clarity when we're moving through an idea or a concept. And that meaning has to be at the center. You know, it doesn't matter if you're, you're accumulating vocabulary, if you don't know what the word means or you can't put it together in some connected way, then it's likely not going to get us where we want to go. Kathy: Meaning has to be at the center. That is exactly it. Brandon: Yeah. What's something you're learning from right now? Can be a person, it can be a place, it can be a thing. Kathy: Oh gosh. Where's learning happening for you? So, lots, lots of learning. I mean, so I'm, I'm working now, you may know, with the National Center for Effective Literacy and there are so many talented individuals there that, quote unquote, aren't researchers per se, but I'm learning about ways of communicating with people, you know, so that you don't, sometimes you can come off a little strong with people you don't agree with and that doesn't win you any friends. So, you know, I'm, I'm learning from people like Amelia Larson. I'm learning from Jody Slavic and the new way that she's looking at AI in literacy squared and helping to pick text. I never, ever would have thought of that. I learn from Margo Gottlieb and her formative assessment and I like the way she talks about formative assessment. So I said, you know, I wish I could, yeah, I wish I could talk more. I have my first love, I shouldn't say this, I don't mean this in a romantic way, I mean this is my first love in the field was Jim Cummins. I continue to learn with him, from him. From since he wrote about the two solitudes and and likened that to parallel bilingualism to where we need to go with holistic bilingualism. I've been a fan of his ever since and he never disappoints. So I've got, you know, people that I've learned from for forever and then people I think who are up and comers in the field. José Medina, Ofelia García, all of that work on translanguaging and understanding it more deeply. And then there are people like Danielle Solorzano and how they write about culture, how we can't forget that. It's not just about language, it's about language but much, much more. Brandon: It is about language and so much more. Thank you so much for this conversation and thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Leading Multilingual Learning. Kathy, it was a real, real pleasure to have you on, so thank you for doing this with me today. Kathy: My pleasure to be here. Thank you.