In this episode we welcome special guest Melissa Lambert. Melissa is a senior district and state-level education leader with more than two decades of experience advancing outcomes for multilingual learners. She partners with state education agencies and districts nationwide to align curriculum, assessment, professional learning, and implementation systems around strong Tier 1 instruction. She is currently the Executive Director in the Office of School Leadership & Engagement for Yonkers Public Schools – New York's fourth-largest school district, serving over 23,000 students across 39 schools. A former teacher, founding principal, central-office administrator, and consultant, Melissa specializes in translating policy, research, and high-quality instructional materials into practical, scalable systems.
Melissa: When we think about what is the missing component there with challenging educator mindset, it's student voice. I love having multilingual learners return after graduation to share their story. I love students in the high school sharing with middle school. We're really developing that sense of voice, getting their ideas on agency and autonomy and what that looked like to them going through the system. And that voice is invaluable. Brandon: Hey everyone, hola a todos. I'm Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, and you're listening to Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning. In each episode, we're exploring the leadership, the ideas, and the insights that are shaping better education for multilingual learners. And today, I'm excited to welcome my new friend, Melissa Lambert. Brandon: Melissa is a senior district and state level education leader with more than two decades of experience advancing outcomes for multilingual learners. She partners with state education agencies and districts nationwide to align curriculum, assessment, professional learning, and implementation systems around strong tier one instruction. She's currently the Executive Director in the Office of School Leadership and Engagement for Yonkers Public Schools, New York's fourth largest school district, serving over 23,000 students across 39 schools. She's a former teacher, founding principal, central office administrator, consultant, all the things, but she specializes in translating policy, research, and high quality instructional materials into practical, scalable systems. That is a beautiful bio. You are my type of person. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa. Melissa: Thank you so much. It is a huge honor to be here. I really, really appreciate this opportunity. Brandon: Oh, good. You were doing the work I love. I want to talk tier one instruction all day, and I want to talk about system alignment all day. So we're going to dig into some of that. But before we get started, you have this beautiful bio. You've spent lots of time thinking about, how do I get this career into five or six sentences? And that is a challenge because you have done so much and you've been leading incredible work to change young people's lives. But what is one thing that never makes it into your bio that you think, if there was just one more sentence, I wish people knew this about me. Melissa: I'm an artist. I'm a ceramic artist. I have a functioning ceramic studio upstate. So my other love besides linguistics and systems work is providing a really wonderful art space for people to thrive. And clay is the one element that is throughout all cultures, throughout all time. So it's a a great way element to connect through. Brandon: I think there's probably something here about your commitment to molding things and making them different than you found them. I don't know if anyone's ever told you that, but I, maybe there's a connection. Melissa: Brilliant. I like it. Brandon: Yeah, thank you. All right, we'll work on that offline and we're going to find a way to make sure you see the parallels in all of this work. But one, I want to see the work that you do, and two, I'm so excited to chat today. So, we're going to dive in. You ready? Melissa: Ready. Brandon: All right. So you describe your work as fostering inter-departmental collaboration structures and protocols to increase integrated courses for multilingual learners. It's wonky, but I want to unpack this with you. What does that mean? And in practice, what does that look like in a district like Yonkers or anywhere across the country? Which departments need to be at the table and what changes when they actually are? So tell me a little bit about this frame for you and what it means. Melissa: Wonderful. Well, you know, ultimately behind this work, there's a real sense of urgency, right? So I want to start with English Learner is a temporary status. Yet, too many students, particularly our long-term English Learners, remain in this designation for years. And they can be attending school every year, completing their work, but they're still not receiving the precise opportunities that they need to develop academic language to reach proficiency. And the problem is rarely located within one student or one teacher or one department. It is really about the way that we shape curriculum, instruction, scheduling even, language development, and leadership is a huge component, where when those systems operate. So this notion, I use the term cross-functional teams, right? And that's just a sort of a term for saying, we need everybody at the table. So it's about bringing multilingual learner experts, ESL, ENL, whatever we call them in the schools, bringing them together with a coach if you have one, a grade level teacher, a special education teacher. Everybody has a specific lens, but let's all come together to do specific planning around our students, whether it's at grade level or grade bands, and we're thinking explicitly about how to look at individual students, their data, which I'll talk about in a little bit, and are we are we doing the best things possible for these learners? Brandon: I love this. It makes sense, and you and I know this is the hardest thing to scale because in so many districts, the support for us for multilingual learners lives in just one department. So everyone else sort of treats that work as their thing. That's for the ESL team. What does it take to shift that ownership? Talk to our listeners who are trying to create some of that change in their own community, their school on a local level, or their district doing district leadership work. What does it take to shift that ownership so that the outcomes become a shared responsibility across the system? Melissa: That's a great question. I think it takes really leveraging MTSS as a structure and thinking about how we're implementing. One way that's been very successful for my colleagues and myself is to leverage Title III funding to be able to actually utilize that funding to drive this cross-functionality, right? So an example of that will be many districts are looking at their whole all of their schools as a composite and thinking about how are we doing in ELA? How are we doing in math? How are we doing with multilingual learners? How are we doing with special education? And within that map, you can really start to sort and prioritize schools. So one way that I work with school districts is to think about their district as a whole, but then look specifically at the schools that are doing really well for multilingual learners and student or schools that are really struggling with what that might look like. Melissa: Then we have utilized Title III funds, we have utilized other other components of funding within the district to create, if we don't have time built into the schedule to meet on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, then we can provide some time beyond the school day, before the school day, highly structured to be able to bring all of those lenses or those that cross-functional team together to to look at that data in a way that, that does inspire urgency, but also really clear actions that yield results. Brandon: Do you think it's fundamentally the same process in a small district or a large district? You've worked in both. So tell me what looks different, what should I be thinking about depending on the size? You're talking about comparing outcomes across multiple schools. What if I've only got three or four in my district? Like, how do I think about tackling this then? Melissa: Yeah, sometimes, sometimes depending on it's urban and rural actually have a lot of similarities. It's it's interesting, right? So sometimes it's about framing the payoff. When we think about looking at data in a way that is compelling, we look at multilingual learners who do exit EL status, and you'll hear me going back and forth between English learner and multilingual learner terminology, right? English Learner is still the way that that the designation is termed, right? And and funding still follows that order. Multilingual learner is much more asset-based. But sometimes it's about framing the payoff. When you actually start to look at your data, whether you're rural, whether you're suburban, whether you're urban, when you look at English Learners who exit the status, often times they are outperforming their monolingual peers. And another thing we've done with larger districts, small districts alike, is we look at graduation rates. Some of those high graduation rates or sustained graduation rates are the multilingual learners who have exited EL status, who are bilingual, who are biliterate, are are really sustaining and holding those high graduation rates. So sometimes it's about framing that and and looking specifically at the power and the importance of all of that. And, and I think the conversation really is around, okay, sometimes we have no funding, sometimes we have some funding, but we all are data saturated. So everybody can on-board to the data conversation and look at it from multiple perspectives and really see, wow, there are some celebrations and some strengths here. And anytime there's a strength, we can always build upon that strength and then not only multilingual learners, but all students benefit. Brandon: We are speaking the same language. There is this asset-based thinking that I think really matters. It's why I love the term multilingual learner, but I'm the same, like I was an ESL student. So I still hold ESL as a frame because it was how I identified when I was just moving through my own experience as a kid. I'm curious in that sort of asset-based thinking, there's a piece of this puzzle and you talk a lot about this, which is about challenging the educator mindset. And you have spoken about this as a core part of your work. What are the most common mindset barriers you encounter when it comes to how educators think about multilingual learners? And then, if I'm a school leader or a district leader, what's some of the work I have to do to shift those mindsets? Melissa: Yeah, I like this too. And what I mean by challenging educator mindset is really around the digging into the why, right? So, why why are our multilingual learners sort of uh, um, maintaining this just before exiting, right? Like if you look at data nationally, a lot of multilingual learners, especially long-term English Learners, are stuck at this level right before exiting. It's a bubble. What is happening there? And in terms of mindset, a lot, sort of a root cause is core and content teachers, monolingual, general education teachers, really just don't know language development. I think in this country, we do a great job with content development. I think we do a great job with content progression. We don't do a great job with language progression and and learning language. So, I think I that's just sort of a big piece that that's over here. The the other piece to challenging educator mindset is whether it's a leader or teachers or groups of teachers breaking down the sometimes we just what we don't know, we we sort of avoid, right? And so that comes back to that idea of like, that's the ESL teacher's job. That's the ENL teacher's job. That's the special education teacher's job, right? Where we're really operating from, our best results come from an integrated model. And so, when we deal with or think about what is the missing component there with challenging educator mindset, it's student voice. So bringing student voice to the table, you mentioned it yourself, your own experience. I love having multilingual learners return after graduation to share their story. I love students in the high school sharing with middle school, from middle school students sharing with elementary students, right? We're really developing that sense of of voice, getting their ideas on agency and autonomy and what that looked like to them going through the system. And that voice is invaluable, particularly at the secondary level, thinking back about their K-12 experience and and helping teachers and leaders to do better. Brandon: Yeah. I want to go back two steps because you did mention this data. It's data we've talked about here before. I think it's really important. For me, it's one of the things that can really shift educator mindset too, because you see the power of the work and that's in the student outcomes. Like our kids, multilingual learners, we know they will outperform their monolingual peers and their multilingual peers when they exit out of status. That's true nationally. Like, we just become really high performers. We also know what happens when we get stuck in status, right? Where we are just not moving. I have lots of theories around over-scaffolding and, you know, the failure of tier one instruction, and all of a sudden, everyone's getting a full response starter and a word bank, and but you're a level four, like this doesn't make sense anymore. This support, it's coming from a good place, but it doesn't make sense. So, I'm thinking about that and you have built professional development for site leaders and teachers across again, urban, suburban, rural settings. What's different about PD that changes practice for multilingual learners versus PD that's about compliance? And we've all sat there. I sat through it as a teacher where it's, it becomes more about instructional minutes and not instructional quality. So, how do you get that shift to take place? And tell me a little bit about what it looks like given the limited time people have for real professional learning. Melissa: That's a is a great segue, and I love what you said about the over-scaffolding and just the clunkiness around grouping for multilingual learners, right? So, one compelling way that we've been able to break through some of this, it's the way we effectively look at data. We know we're data saturated, we have a lot going on, but there is a lot of great language development data that can help inform in so many ways, right? And so one way that we've been able to do that is move from sort of the ethereal or the, you know, too many things happening and programs and, you know, this student gets this and this student gets that, is to really take a look at our, we do data. As you know, New York is moving from NYSESLAT to WIDA. Right, this is an annual assessment. WIDA ACCESS is an annual assessment that looks at a student's language development and really breaks it down in the four domains. So, listening, reading, speaking, and writing. And where where there's power in that is not just to get this sort of like summative score of, you know, he's a two, he's a three, it's it we really need to go deeper and look at the data effectively. Melissa: So what we divide or what I've been working on in the last couple of years with these cross-functional teams explicitly is to take that data and look at by student, where are their strengths in what, uh, in what area. So you have a scaled score and you get the scaled score for each of those domains. But we've taken that and created a formula, if you will, for where is their strength domain? Where is their area of need? Right? So that, uh, then transfers over to you can actually calculate points to proficiency for each student. And and that to me has been one of the most sort of eye-opening, if there if anybody does have any hesitation or concern or confusion, what's been so great is they can now place that with the student's name, right? So they can look specifically at, oh my, this student is within two points of exiting. Like, do they know this? Does the student know? What does their teacher team look like? We've been giving them scaffolds all day every day. They don't need scaffolds. They need practice with academic language. Their their speaking is high, it's writing is where we're going. Oh, look, we have a schoolwide writing component. How are we getting everybody onto the same page with the appropriate scaffolds? So, that is going from, you know, sort of like theory and and policy and all of these things, how are we actually leveraging the data to look specifically at, there are patterns and trends throughout our schools that if we hone in on that at tier one, and we're not even talking about tier two language development is not a tier two intervention is not a tier two, you know, uh, strategy. It is tier one. So, how do we look at building on strength, um, being strategic about what students need, thinking through the language development that that takes, and that is so much more effective with a summative score like this in terms of your planning and then you can ramp on to, where are we in the materials? Right? Maybe we've adopted a large-scale ELA curriculum. Maybe we've adopted a large-scale math curriculum. Maybe there's science that is the the focus of of the school or district right now. Those are all opportunities for language development. This this is not an ELA, we're not going right from the ENL, ESL teacher's job to the ELA teacher's job, right? This is literacy and language development happens throughout the day. Brandon: It's everywhere, all the time. Yes. Math is a language class. Melissa: Yes, precisely. Brandon: I love your thinking about this and we have talked about this before, and I, it's the, I'm, listen, you're probably not the only person doing this, but it's the way that you've spoken about it is the first time I've heard about it with this type of intentionality because it's not just about a single person understanding this data. It's like, how do we team around it? And what I, you didn't say, but I suspect is part of this, it then starts to help us deploy human capital in a much smarter way. So if we actually see, I don't know, uh, the speaking and listening, which was true for, it was true for me as a school leader, was really where our kids were struggling, mostly because sometimes it's the most vulnerable activity as a language learner to be like, now go talk and it's like, oh, this is where it gets scary, you know? And if you see that there's these needs across a building, then you can focus the ENL or the ESL or the ML staff who's supporting sort of instruction across a building to help tune into the growth zones for our students and design accordingly. But if the data just lives as like, all right, this is just we're trying to move it all without any real strategy, you keep finding yourself stuck, and it feels actually like a compliance exercise instead of an instructional tool. Fair? Melissa: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm so glad that you said the compliance piece because we get caught up on minutes. No matter where you are, depending on the way you interpret your policy, right? But the that that is precisely what we're after. We're after working smarter because the the students that we're talking about here are bringing strengths to every classroom. So when when we do this well, when we deploy our our, um, our expertise, and I mean that in in all of the teams, well, all the students are going to benefit, right? Because this notion of integrated time is so essential to, um, uh, Andrea Honigsfeld likes to say, you don't have to leave to learn, right? Like there's so much that happens within the classroom that we can build upon and that language, adding that language on-ramp is powerful for all learners. So, if you only have one ESL or ENL teacher, that we can't schedule around that, right? We have to be able to do this in a way that it's shared. So every all teachers are thinking about the way that language is working within the content area and in very, very simple ways can yield hugely powerful results. So that's very thoughtful to think about compliance as a component, but the majority of it is, if we look at these patterns and trends in our schools, we can now think about, this is a great tier one intervention to be able to do before we move. And and we also like to ask, who's doing the talking? Right? How are we going to learn academic language if we're not practicing it? Right? We learned it through lots of verbalization and talk and the ability to talk before we write, which is another huge, um, piece that that we like to go into when we're thinking about, uh, teacher mindset. Uh, that is that is a a really valuable way of entering into the conversation. Brandon: You're talking a lot about the way we're thinking about time and using that time in a school. That's everything from how we look at data to the instructional decisions we're making and and what it's actually supporting and what it's and what it's targeting. You've designed pre-K to 12 curriculum in ELA, ELD, ENL, and as well as content literacy. When you think about integrated instruction, as we've been talking about, where content learning and language development happen together at the same time, tell me what does that require of a curriculum and where do districts fall short? If I'm listening, tell me what I might be missing when I'm taking inventory of my own community. Melissa: I think it lives in, uh, under this umbrella of curriculum literacy. Right? Right now we're in a phase in education where a lot of districts are really focused on implementing high-quality instructional materials. And we we have organizations that are working behind the scenes to help developers create more inclusive materials in and of themselves, right? But we're not there yet. So, what what is within our sphere of influence in schools and in districts, particularly at the leader level, is to think about how we're providing that opportunity to really become literate about our curriculum, right? How are we evaluating the fact that these materials are addressing language development alongside content? And if you don't have high-quality instructional materials, how are we developing our teachers and these cross-functional teams to have some really solid ideas and approaches around what is going to be appropriate for students as they're learning the content and developing language simultaneously. And that can be as as small as, let's look at how much we're providing the opportunity between the domains. So are we providing time for speaking? Are we providing time for listening? What does that look like? What does it look like when it's high quality, not just quantity, right? We want quality as well. So bringing that academic discourse into every day learning throughout all of the content areas and then also thinking what that looks like in progression, right? What does that look like as we plan horizontally, as we plan vertically, so that what happens at third grade is reflected in in fourth and it's not going to be brand new when we get to sixth grade, right? What are some of those through ways that, that keep the instruction high quality? Brandon: Yeah, it's so often I've seen this a lot too where there's just like, and sometimes this word becomes jargon, but I like really mean it for its definition, like there's a coherence around the language skills that are being developed. And so you're right, we see the same instructional moves as well as the same instructional goal in a third-grade classroom as a fourth-grade classroom, and they're not building off of each other, it's just repetition. I don't know, that's demoralizing for a learner sometimes, right? Like they could feel really stuck. Melissa: Usually. We have the data. We have the data to show it. Brandon: We have the data to show it. Which brings me to one of your favorite topics, which is MTSS. For our listeners, they know this, but it's supposed to provide tiered support for students who need it. And I would love for you to give us like the Reader's Digest version of MTSS because I think it's one of the things institutionally that we talk about that I actually think less people fully understand than and and it gets so far away from us that then we're afraid to ask questions. So, you know, it's supposed to provide that tiered support for students who need it. Multilingual learners often get caught in this gray zone, right? Are they struggling because of learning needs or because they're developing new language? And it's really easy for us to like, you know, tier three a student who's learning language versus giving them high-quality tier one instruction. And you can't tier three your way out of out of tier of bad tier one instruction, like that's just it's not going to work. Tell me how we should be thinking about building an MTSS that distinguishes between the two and serves both, right? That does serve our learners who are multilingual and having learning, have complex learning needs and profiles. Talk to me a little bit about that. Melissa: Yeah, I mean it goes back to what we were have have sort of like the through line of all of this, and it's language development. And I think the more that we amplify language within our content areas, that that this conversation around MTSS becomes totally different, right? Because a lot of it is in the way that you define MTSS. Because we need the data component, we need all the pieces that show where tier one ends and tier two begins and, you know, what constitutes tier three, but at the end of the day, you really like, I really love the way we think about MTSS is is the teamwork and the process that happens regularly, right? And I think if we're really going to center at tier one, it is about how how often do students who need the most supports, how often are they pulled out of their general classroom, right? Of their of their everyday? That that can be hugely problematic. Sometimes the students who need the most supports have the worst schedules, right? The students who need the most consistency are being are moving 45 different times within a day, right? Like we're intervening for phonics development, we're intervening for all of these things. That that is just simply cruel. Brandon: Yes, cruel is the perfect word, Melissa, cruel. Yep. Melissa: And we we need to we need to move beyond that and really think about what is the experience of the student and how are we looking at what are the grade level expectations, not only with content, but what are the grade level expectations with language, because all of our students are struggling with this, right? And we the more we integrate, the more we see how those two pieces are connected, the the better you can start to conceptualize and understand a a MTSS system. So a lot of this is based on the way the district or the school looks at MTSS. It can become very mono-focused and and sometimes, you know, we're so dogmatic, but the the idea really is to, if you're thinking from a district perspective, is back to that idea of, how are we doing in all these different categories, dashboard style, and how what are the things specifically that we're going to do with that school, and then within the school, what are the things that we're doing that are contributing to this? Right? So you have to ask some really hard, if you're really doing MTSS well, you're having uncomfortable conversations, because it could be around teacher quality, it could be around, well, there's been a sub in that room for the last two years, it could be all of those different things that we're going to have to pull to me, it's an opportunity to pull together and not leave it to somebody else at tier three, not to leave it to somebody else at tier two, but what are we actually doing? Um, I can give a like a concrete example, one of my favorites, is a school, it was an elementary school in a semi-rural area in Mississippi, and we worked with a K to two school and they were implementing all of the science of reading, right, which is of course hugely important, and I'm a strong believer in the progression of language, particularly at that grade level, has a great way to work together. So, in this particular situation, students were going all over the place. Like there was a a grade band of first grade, and in the first grade, they had, uh, five different teachers, and in each of those classrooms, there were all kinds of level, you know, all levels of all kinds, including multilingual learners, but everybody in the class was learning language, right? So, so what we did was instead of like kind of go each of the teachers going all over the place all day long, they actually took that whole time block and they they moved the students this way. So the more students, once they worked out of a level, they were able to go right into the next level, and within six weeks, it had almost completely leveled out, and then there was a very clear data about who needed a tier two intervention, eventually a tier three intervention, but within six weeks, the whole group was moving. Brandon: Moving. Yeah. Melissa: So if we think about MTSS in action like that, that was it's it's a creative out of the box way to say, going back to what you talked about before, which is not every student needs the four scaffolds, right? It's not a one-size-fits-all situation. Brandon: I think two things as I'm, as we're chatting, like it requires a real data focus. Like, good instruction is not based on vibes, as much as as much as I love that. Like, because that's where that's where inequity starts to really pull and our biases start to show up, right? Like I can't just, I think you need a tier two support or a tier three intervention. It has to be rooted in something, and it has to be a consistent experience that's showing me there needs to be something else in order to get you where I need you to go. But there has to be a destination that I'm trying to get you to. And I think sometimes we just layer on supports because it feels right. I do this as a parent sometimes where I'm like, why am I doing this? Like you do not need me to order for you right now, right? Like, you just layer on these supports because it feels like you're doing the right thing and at the end of the day, what we're doing is creating young folks who then end up feeling stuck and helpless. Um, I love that model that you gave, and really like, there's really a data cycle in it that's helping inform when intervention is necessary versus the assumption of intervention from the beginning. Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. You know, at the core of all of it, not only do we have work to do as a nation around really amplifying language, but we do have a lot of work in education and and this is in every school and district that most school and districts that I've been in, which is the data literacy part, right? Like how do you actually look at student data? What are we pulling? What are we doing? One way that's been very successful that I I call it like the transition from vibes to to actual, is to look at student work. So the the more time, that's data, right? Listen to what students are saying, that's data. So if we're struggling as a school or a district to like go to from numbers to, like that's really conceptual. It's kind of like I I was a math teacher for years. It's really, it's really hard to go right to the conceptual, right? It's really important to sort of build knowledge and get comfortable and then we can go into very conceptual understandings of of mathematics. It's the same thing with data literacy. So start with what you have, right? If the if the grade level expectation is here and and I have clear models, that's the other part, right, in teacher mindset is we're not, the expectation is not here low. The expectation is high. So all of my scaffolds then become more appropriate because I'm trying to get us to this next level. When you start to look at student work in that way, and you have clear models, right? We had first grade students, kindergarten students writing sentences, multiple sentences. We had students utilizing their own life experiences to talk about it, um, or write about it themselves, talk about it with peers and partners, go back to your writing and and develop, uh, building up ideas with one another and and creating these original pieces that were exquisite. So utilizing those from year to year as samples and examples of what the standards look like can really not only help clarify for the learner what's important and where they are in their journey, but also calibrate across grade levels, vertically around what the expectation is because I think another place where we fall short is where we think, oh multilingual learners are talking to me, they they understand, they they repeat back to me that they can understand the assignment and they're clearly getting along with their peers, but there's a an issue with the language and the use of academic language in in a formal setting. And that's that's where we're talking about pushing over the edge and making sure we're creating opportunities for students to exit EL status. Brandon: It's the thing that requires the most practice. Yeah, so like, can I now talk to the lunch lady and or gentleman or whoever? Or like, you know, order, you know, ask to go to the restroom. And so it feels like, great, there's this, these communication skills are happening. But it's like, am I really getting the more that that more complex conversation, that academic vocabulary? Am I finding a way to build that into a pattern in my own communication? Brandon: I see you. Okay, I am furious at the clock because it's starting to run out and I don't blame us, I blame time. But I want to, you know, we we we grounded this conversation, part of why we brought you here today is because like we're gearing up for back to school. Our educators, some have gone back in the last few weeks, some are starting today, my son started two days ago. Um, but so we're really thinking about that like back-to-school energy that I think as an educator is one of the yummiest parts of the job, you know, like we're ready to get it, to do it, do the best parts that we did the year before, and then get it even better year over year. So, I've got two drills for you and I want to hear your response here. I want to revisit our teacher clarity discussion. For a teacher starting this year with MLs at multiple language proficiency levels in the same classroom, what does teacher clarity look like in that context? What do you want to send them with? Melissa: I want them to have deep conversations with those students and find out what their strengths are, academic strengths, because if you can build on those, it is a win-win situation. Brandon: I love that. Okay. You've talked about the importance of getting departments out of silos for multilingual learners. That's how we started our conversation. What does the coordination look like before the school year starts and what should it look like now that we're in the middle of the school year, ENL, special education, student services, all doing this work together right now. What can start, what if I wasn't doing this pre-work over the summer, what can I do right now? Melissa: I think you should audit. If you're a district office or if you're coaches, I think you should audit the amount of time that teachers are actually sitting together, co- or collaborating and co-planning, and what does that look like and give yourself sort of a an entry point. If the true exit is cross-functional teams, whether that's at grade levels or, you know, grade bands, what is it going to take to get there? Brandon: Okay, I'm going to do a bonus one because, you know, I'm just ignoring the clock. Educator mindset, it is a big part of your work. At the start of a new year, our teachers are, they're getting their rosters, they're going to see the little dash or whatever the code is that's giving us a student's status, and they're now figuring out who they're going to serve. What's the most important mindset shift a content area teacher needs to make in those first few weeks and how do they create those conditions for it early on? Melissa: That to to know that those students who are sitting in front of you, we have no idea what they're capable of. It is infinite. And so if we can think about how we are developing belonging, how we're developing a chance for those students to have some agency, all students that we have in front of us, some agency, some autonomy, and that we're ready to accept that agency and autonomy in its different forms, that we have, we really have no idea. And it's not our job to limit that. It's our job to really provide every opportunity. Brandon: Okay, mic drop. Hermana, you are good for kids and that's my kind of person. So I am really thankful for this conversation. I'm really glad we're in each other's sphere now and we get to do good things for kids together. Thank you for sharing so clearly and and intentionally your work, how you get it done, what you hope we could be doing better. And it's really, it's just been a pleasure. So thank you so much for joining me today. Melissa: Thank you. You're amazing. Brandon: Oh, before I let you go, we are in parallel process. You're talking about all this professional development and mindset shifts and the work we've got to do, and I love that I'm with you. Uh, what's something you're learning from right now? Someone, something, tell me about your learning journey today. Melissa: My learning is and and I and I love this part of it is really about, um, learning about learning indigenous languages, part part of the work in language revitalization, um, particularly with Kanienʼkéha, or the Mohawk language, and being able to learn from elders and being able to see sort of the the depth and the importance and the connection of language to just a whole culture and a whole way of being. It's it's a beautiful language that comes from spoken before it was written is it's just really powerful, and I think especially in New York, it's it's just such an important part of the history. Brandon: Yeah, and we need people like you to keep some of those languages alive. And so I love that. You've inspired me. It was great to have you. Melissa, we're going to have you back on. We've got more to talk about, but until next time, thank you again. Brandon: And thank you to everyone for listening to this episode of Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning.