Today's guest is a monumental figure in the world of multilingual standards and assessment. Dr. Margo Gottlieb is an inaugural inductee in the Multilingual Education Hall of Fame, a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Chile and holds a PhD in Public Policy Analysis. Dr. Gottlieb has over 125 publications and has authored or co-authored 25 books, including seven bestsellers. Perhaps most impactfully, she co-founded WIDA and was instrumental in developing the first published edition of their English language development standards.
Margo: I've always been a strong believer in the whole child, their whole identities, their languages, and their cultures. To have everything normalized through English never made sense for me. But most importantly, the whole educational system has never been fully accepting of our multilingual learners, and that has impacted assessment. 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 shape better education for multilingual learners. And today, I am very excited to welcome Margo Gottlieb to the show. Everyone knows who Margo Gottlieb is who is listening, because these are folks who are focused on this space. But if you don't know, she is the co-founder of WIDA. She's collaborated in designing standards frameworks, their derivative assessments and instructional tools in the US and abroad. She is proud to be an inaugural inductee into the Multilingual Education Hall of Fame, recognized by the TESOL International Association as an individual who has made a significant contribution to the TESOL profession within the past 50 years, and a Fulbright senior scholar in Chile. A prolific presenter and author and co-author on classroom assessment, you have over 125 publications, I don't know if you know this about yourself, 25 books, seven of which are best sellers. A PhD in public policy analysis, evaluation research and research design, and a master's in applied linguistics. I think that's pretty impressive. Thank you for being with us today. Margo: You're welcome. It's just me. Brandon: It's just you. Also, here's the truth, not in the bio: a lovely human being, hilarious and funny, kind and very warm, but also, if you just read the bio, wildly impressive and a pioneer in this work that we do. So thank you. Margo: Thank you. Brandon: I like to start each episode after I read someone's bio with asking them, is there anything that never makes it into your bio that you're like, I really like this part of my work or this part of my impact, and I wish more people knew about it? Margo: Well, ironically, Dr. Margarita Calderón and I have been working on a series of modules, pre-COVID, that we've called Juntos Podemos, together we can. And it's a really different conceptual view of how each major player in our world of multilingual learners can make a difference. We've worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. We have made videos, we have cards, we have little modules. It's not gone anywhere. And so we have become best of friends, but that particular chunk of I would say our shared knowledge has gone unanswered. Brandon: But brought in a bunch of other important things into your life, I'm sure. Margo: Sure. Brandon: Okay. I am not going to make you do the rundown of your career. But I am curious from a starting point. Tell me a little bit about what brought you into multilingual learning. You could do anything and you chose to do this work. So what got you here? Margo: As you mentioned, I was originally going to be an administrator because I was an ESL teacher, I was a bilingual teacher, I was a coordinator, I was going up that little administrative route. And I kept on going to school and I was going to school while I was a full-time teacher. And it came to the point where I'd finished all my coursework, I'm ready to dig into a dissertation topic. And I find out the University of Illinois Chicago was not accredited in giving any kind of certification to become a principal, an administrator, a superintendent. So I had to jump ship. And the person who became my chair had her own little evaluation research company and said, come on with me. And I go, fine. And off I went. I pursued evaluation research. I still do it. My love has always been assessment. And so my dissertation became a multilingual test for young multilingual learners that hopefully represented the state of the art at the time. It was very different from anything else that was out there in the field. And I just kept on pursuing it. Brandon: I love this and also a reminder to our listeners who are, some are classroom teachers, some are district level leaders, they're working across the spectrum of this work, that there are some really nice accidents that occur and turn out pretty well professionally when you just allow yourself to ride that wave. Margo: No doubt about it. Brandon: As you mentioned, you have a real love for the work in assessment and have had a profound impact. Can you pinpoint a specific moment or experience early on that made you realize the way we were or weren't assessing multilingual learners was fundamentally flawed? Margo: There was never a cohesive policy. There was a never a set of principles. There was never one system that really captured who our students are and what they can do. When I began my work in assessment, there were all these disparate measures out there. Each very discreet in its own way, and it didn't give you a full picture. And I thought that was so missing. I've always been a strong believer in the whole child, their whole identities, their languages, and their cultures, and to have everything normalized through English just never made sense for me. That was one thing. Also, I discovered early on the way we assess multilingual learners was kind of skewed. The instruments we used to measure them, as I mentioned before, really didn't reflect who they are, what they mean to the teaching and learning process, rather than a standardized tool that had to be categorically sorted, for example. But most importantly, the whole educational system has never been fully accepting of our multilingual learners and that has impacted assessment. Brandon: That makes so much sense and I think a lot about this. In many ways, and tell me if you think I'm thinking about this wrong, but this work in many ways is a newer body of research. And you were part of that early work, right? It's not a body of research that has existed for multiple generations. There's really you sort of pioneered the beginning of thinking about our students and the learning frameworks that will allow us to make greater growth and how we assess and measure our own instructional progress. I'm curious from your end, when you co-founded WIDA in 2003, what was the prevailing approach to assessing language learners and what specifically did you set out to change? I think this is helpful too, particularly think about the audience here for some of our newer folks in this space who need to understand the history of where we were not so long ago. Margo: Prior to WIDA, language proficiency assessment was an assortment of different measures, none of which were calibrated on the same scale, none of which really reflected the state of the art. As you said, about 40 years ago is when that we made this giant movement towards more uniformity in looking at assessment practices. WIDA was born out of No Child Left Behind. I would say it's one of the more positive aspects of No Child Left Behind, but with No Child Left Behind came this huge system of accountability, which for the first time was inclusive of multilingual learners, but on the negative side did not accept bilingualism. That was a major flaw in the law. It stripped bilingualism completely, which was on the verge of flourishing, I would say at that time. And what happened was we, because it was mandated by this RFP, request for proposals, that states join to create a consortium. And through the consortium, what emerged was a set of language proficiency or language development standards along with an aligned assessment. On one level, it brought cohesion into our system, but it treated multilingual learners, well, that was not the terminology at the time and I'm not going backwards, as a homogenized group of students. And there wasn't the realization that they come from all around the world with all different kinds of perspectives and languages and cultures and backgrounds, and that was never really fully embraced. It because again, as I mentioned before, English was the predominant way of measurement. Brandon: When I think about your work, and I'm actually curious what you think about my thinking, when I think about your work, which I really value, I think about your impact and how you have focused on what we can do as multilingual learners. It feels very asset-based. And I'm curious, what does that look like in practice versus the standardized testing reality that most teachers face today? When we're thinking about the focus on what multilingual learners can do, what does that mean? Margo: In terms of instruction and assessment, it means that we value our students' languages and cultures, which sounds like a pet phrase. But in doing that, we really give them voice. We let them bring themselves to the instructional or assessment situation. We let them make connections between their home community and school. We use inquiry to help them understand how to answer their own questions that are meaningful to them and that hopefully we as an educational group have embedded within curriculum to make it meaningful and reflective of who they are. Brandon: And I'm going to get specific here. I think you like that, so this will be fine. I'm going to go, we're going to double click. For a school leader who is like us and they're bought into asset-based philosophies, but they are staring down state accountability metrics built on monolingual norms. What do you think is a concrete first move they can make to reconcile those two realities? What's something that you're like, you know what, start here, this is what you can do. Margo: Start here by creating a school-based portfolio that's representative of your school population and use it as a complement to large scale standardized testing, that hopefully emanates from your curriculum, which is linguistically and culturally reasonable, sustainable. And so the true portrait of that multilingual learner and your multilingual population can offset some of the detriments that are endemic to standardized testing. Brandon: I'm thinking about that for our school leaders who are listening too. That assessment of your current state of play. Is the work affirming? Is the curriculum asset-based already? And then if you're ready to go one step further, yeah, that introduction of portfolios as a way of allowing a student to own that learning process much more deeply. Margo: And today it's so much easier because everything is digitized. And the students themselves can archive their own data along with more interim assessment data that is, has stronger reliability and validity, but all the data count, just not the once-a-year annual. Brandon: Yes. I love that. I think you also ask any young person, and we know this, but what was the thing that was the most memorable, the most memorable learning experience while you were in school? And they're not naming the test. They're naming the thing that they did, the presentation they made, the opportunity they got to share something much bigger, their knowledge. And so, yeah, what an affirming way if we do that with a cultural relevance and a linguistic relevance as well. I'm going to switch gears to some collaborative assessment conversations. In Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers, your book, you distinguish between assessment as, for, and of learning. So for folks who are listening who aren't familiar with those distinctions, can you explain how they play out differently in your mind and then in a single unit of instruction? Margo: In my mind, assessment is relational. It isn't based on scores or percentiles or numbers. It's the interaction between and among people. And that's how I've set up assessment as for and of learning. It isn't my invention. It's taken in large part from Australia, the UK, and Canada. It's not very prominent or hasn't been here in the United States. But I've twisted it a little more because I wanted to give more credit for students. And as is often combined with for learning into a dichotomy. It's either formative or it's summative and never the two shall meet, when they're both formative and they're both summative at the same time. I won't go into that. However, the as is the interaction between and among students, and we don't give our students enough credit for initiating, for being able to document their own learning. Their oral language development, their inquisitive nature, the curiosity in inventing and being able to document, as you said, their work in multiple means, through multiple modalities. That's what assessment as learning is, kids learning from each other. It doesn't mean they're not guided by teachers, but it's the student who is the centerpiece. And for learning, it's the interaction between teachers and students so they can co-create targets of learning. They can co-create their portfolios. The students can say, "Hey, this is what I want to put in my portfolio. And I'm going to show it through student-led conference that I'm designing and then we'll negotiate." So it's a negotiation really between teachers and students which is for learning. So both teacher and student are learning simultaneously from each other. And the of learning, yes, that's most equated with the summative end if that's what you use, or summative practices. But for me, within units of learning, it's the end product. It's a project, again, that can be crafted through a professional learning community or a grade-level team or department, but it's a student that is going to operationalize this because hopefully within this project or product or performance, students have a say in the evidence they want to use or what counts for them. So again, student is always at the center, and if you consider it more like an onion, you can do it that way. You can use it as a set of concentric circles. There's many different ways of conceptualizing it, but the most important part for me is that you're humanizing assessment. Brandon: I'm thinking about what I would want to hear when I was a teacher and when I was a school leader. And it takes away some of the assessment fear if you really hold that this is actually about the relationship and you said something that I really love. Margo: Building trust within that relationship. Brandon: Yes. And that then you're in parallel process. You're learning, they're learning, everyone is moving in at different speeds and different ways, but the adults and the young person are in a process together. That's why I became an educator. That's the magic of school. Margo: And they're both gaining agency as they do it. Brandon: Yes. Margo: Instead of being dismissive. Brandon: Yeah, that's exactly it. I wonder too, long-term, when that is really the experience, what happens in all of the ways we build connection and relationships and belonging and the durable skills, forget the language skills, but the durable skills of collaboration and cooperation, if you're really existing in that ecosystem, all the yummy benefits that occur as a result. Margo: Well, hopefully out of assessment as for and of learning, we're designing, we're building, we're gaining a culture of collaboration. Not only within the classroom, across classrooms, within a school. And it's so palpable when you walk in a school with multilingual learners and you see artwork and murals and it's just, to me, you said you get goosebumps, that gives me goosebumps. Brandon: I hear you. You know when you're in that building too. You walk in the door, you're like, yep, they've got it. I haven't even walked in a classroom yet, but I know it's happening. I see it. What does student agency in assessment, the way that we're talking about, actually look like at the elementary level, where say a young person doesn't have the same metalinguistic awareness to reflect on their own learning? How do we think about it for our younger learners? Margo: First of all, we have to know our younger learners because some of them are going to be exposed to their other language every minute of the day after post-school. Others may only interact in their other language, let's say with grandparents that they see twice a year or through FaceTime. So you have to honor where they are in this bilingual continuum. That's the first thing. You can't force our multilingual learners to become who they won't be. And their identities are built from that soundness of language and culture, what it means to them, not what it means to the outside world. And I think that's critical. Brandon: You know, sometimes in these conversations, at least for me, and this is also because I'm a secondary person, I was a middle school and high school principal. You're asking about young kids. Yeah, I'm like, how does this, help me, and maybe I'm also selfishly thinking about my own child. What do I want to be thinking about at these elementary school ages when that metalinguistic awareness may not be as strong, but we want them to do that reflective thinking. Margo: I would say you have to give your child opportunities to access languages and cultures, to access content that will be meaningful to them that they can draw from and keep on building over time. For example, my son, anything with cars. Since he's two years old, it was his first word. I had no control over it. He is now a grown adult, and guess what? He knows about every car ever manufactured. Again, it was his passion, his interest, and he chose to pursue it. Children will do that. They're going to perseverate on something that's really important to them, not necessarily, if they're two or three, maybe it's dinosaurs, and that evolves into other forms of science and STEM and. And you're there as a guide on the side pushing them, but again, it's their decision, it's their choices. And at 10 years old, they know. Brandon: Yeah, we feel this intensity to focus on the curriculum as we know it, and I think that deeper awareness happens when we double-click on what a kid is interested in. And we say, I see you, you like music, you like cars, you're into missions to the moon, and my son right now is all of the Apollo missions, right? Let's just stay in this lane and really go deep there. Margo: Not only stay in the lane, connect the lanes. Make them different pathways. Brandon: Yeah. Margo: Somehow, how is the moon related to everyday weather? How is the moon related to shadows? So take that interest of that child and keep on incorporating it into the curriculum in some way and then creatively make assessment so it draws that child in. And if they choose to extend that into their own experiences, you will be able to see their conceptual development over time. Brandon: Right. This is good. Let me ask you this. In your book, Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners and Teachers, you include protocols and templates for teacher collaboration around assessment. They're lovely. And I'm curious from your observation, what's the most common way you've seen schools misimplement collaborative assessment? Like well-intentioned but getting it wrong. What is the distinguishing thing that's happening on those teams that allows that to occur? Margo: I would say two things. The first thing is that there's a power imbalance in the collaborative team. So one dominates over the other. So instead of looking at the integration of content and language as equal partners, one tends to override the other. Brandon: Not a collaborative team doing collaborative assessment. Margo: No, it's not, but in name, they are. Brandon: This is not where I thought we were going. This is good. Margo: And the second thing is something that Andrea insists upon. And she says, if you don't have dedicated time, if there isn't some kind of niche built out for collaboration, it isn't something you do in the hallway in between classes or something you catch during lunchtime. It has to be built into a master plan. Brandon: That makes sense. Margo: And that's where administration has to support coaches and teacher leaders and teachers and families and students. So it's a collaborative network. It isn't just a collaborative assessment. Assessment goes hand in hand with instruction. Brandon: Yeah, and that is from the leadership move, that is really about how we design our school days, right? Are there spaces that, you're right, are not in a five-minute passing in the hallway, but are we designing around assessment as the priority? And if so, then how do we build the space and the day for that to occur? Margo: Not that assessment has to be the priority. Assessment has to be embedded within curriculum and instruction. It isn't something you do on Friday. We'll have a half hour every Friday and then we'll use those data to make our decisions. No. Brandon: Yeah. Margo: Assessment's built on everyday feedback and how to build knowledge and learning over time. Brandon: Well then maybe even one step further, it's then that collaboration in design is the priority and collaboration in data review is the priority and that we are building space for those relationships to norm and storm and do all of the things that relationships do, but that there's time for that collaboration to occur. Margo: And to share the love of teaching of our multilingual learners. We never give ourselves that time. And it's critical. Brandon: I appreciate you for saying that. Since I've been doing this work, leaving the classroom and the principalship and moving into a policy and now into the ed tech space and in design, it has been one of the times professionally where I've really had this opportunity to just ground myself in how much I love the work in a way that when you're in it day to day is much harder to do. It doesn't mean I didn't love it, but I have a lot more air to just situate in the joy that I find in driving instruction for multilingual learners. Margo: And something we haven't mentioned yet that's so critical for everyone involved is self-reflection. From everyone, you just need to have that time to say, where am I, where am I going, what are some of my things I need to improve? Brandon: Yeah. I have recently watched an educator who, similar to how we think about a read-aloud when you're reading the book and you're naming the literary elements as they're happening and modeling what good readers do. And I love when people do that with language moves too, modeling how I'm thinking about words as I'm reading them. But there was an educator I saw who was doing a self-reflection on the previous day in front of young people. Margo: Inspirational. Brandon: It was remarkable because it was modeling such vulnerability and it wasn't apologetic. It wasn't like, I'm so sorry for yesterday. It was, I was thinking about these things and this is what I thought went really well and this is what I thought I'd do different. Margo: And then she should ask the class. Brandon: And she did. Margo: Oh, wonderful. Oh, that's just so it's a mutually beneficial experience. Brandon: They may not even remember it, but their central nervous system will, that there was something happening that was so great. Last year, I want to talk about academic languaging. Last year, you published a book with Gisela Ernst-Slavit on academic languaging. You and Gisela made a distinction between academic language and academic languaging, which might sound like a small shift, but it's actually a pretty fundamental one. So can you explain what changes, what happens when we move from thinking about language as a thing students need to acquire to languaging as something students are actively doing? Margo: That in essence is the difference. We want to ensure that we take the theoretical underpinnings of academic language because most teachers hold them dear to themselves, and that's fine. But it's 40 years old. Brandon: Yeah. Margo: And what has happened in 40 years? The burst of technology, social media, language has changed. And so our theory of action has to change. We have to be on top of it all and the shift in mindset allows us to use language for specified purposes, to make it much more actionable, to immerse students in the learning process rather than be recipients of it. And so it goes along with everything I've talked about so far. And hopefully people understand that with this new mindset, we're acquiescing to certain, some of our kind of focus of control and saying, all right, it's your turn. The students are going to become the citizens of the next generation. What can we do to ensure that they're going to be successful in their own right? So that's part of it, that they need to really take hold and ownership of their own learning. And they haven't done that through academic language. We're very busy dissecting words or learning new vocabulary at what cost? We want languaging to take hold and be part of who our students are. Yeah. Brandon: I think a lot of teachers, myself included, were trained to think about academic language in terms of vocabulary tiers. Margo: And it's still alive and well. Brandon: Right. And there's a convenience in that thinking, understanding what words should I be paying more attention to, right? I guess maybe not to throw it all out. But we're like, here are the words students need for this lesson. How does academic languaging push beyond that? And what does it look like when a teacher designs a lesson around languaging rather than what I spent many years doing, which was designing lessons around a word list? Margo: It's incorporating that word list into something that is meaningful, into something that is not static but is purposeful for that student. One of the examples, going back to Andrea and my book, I think it's in this book, is that I put a third grade classroom, let's say. And they're very upset because somebody got hurt at the crosswalk. So it's a real problem. Languaging happens when we need to use language for a specific outcome. And so the students decided, oh, we need to have signs. And so everyone did different kinds of signs. They used different kind of media, they had a campaign. And ultimately the languaging came in because they took it to their Board of Education, they took it to the little city council, and these eight-year-olds had presentations, they had signs, whatever media they chose, made a difference in their community. So they used language as an action, not as something we learn. Now we know that a stop sign is an octagon or whatever it was, and they've made a difference in the world. Brandon: Amen. Margo: Yeah. Then there's impact. And that's at the core what learning is for. Brandon: You helped develop WIDA's Spanish language development standards. What did building standards in a second language reveal to you, one, congratulations. It is a gift of service. It takes bilingual education five steps more seriously. I don't need to tell you all the things that it does. But what did building standards in a second language reveal about the limitations of English only frameworks that you hadn't fully appreciated before? I'm sure you went into it with a million knowings, but what were some new discoveries you found? Margo: First of all, I'd say rather than a second language, it's another language. Brandon: Fair enough. You're right. Margo: In my mind, there is no second. Everything is first, and always will be. You know, they could be consecutive, they could be simultaneous, but they are of equal importance. What we found interesting in co-designing the, we call it Marco Dale, the Spanish Language Development framework, that we were able to bring in additional big ideas. So we had these ideologies that we had put into our 2020 English Language Development edition of the standards framework. But here we had more freedom because, first of all, we knew it wasn't going to be directly tied to accountability. So we had more leeway. There wasn't some annual test looming over the teachers. They had more flexibility. And so we were able to add this notion of multimodality. It was mentioned in English language development, it was blown up in Spanish language development. The notion of multiliteracies, that we draw from more than one literacy in expressing ourselves, that was another one. But the most important one that kind of penetrated the whole framework was this notion of interaction. Again, noted in English language development, but blown up as a separate mode of expression in our Spanish language development. So we have the interpretive mode, we have an expressive mode, and we have an interactive mode, because we didn't acknowledge that assessment as learning piece within the ELD framework. And we were able to bring it into play in Spanish language development. So for me, that that was mind-blowing, the fact that, and with multilingualism, we were able to also bring in trans-languaging at a much deeper level. Again, noted in ELD, it isn't that we didn't know about it, but we were able to really incorporate it a lot more seamlessly into Spanish language development. Brandon: There, I'm glad you brought up trans-languaging. There is a growing enthusiasm for trans-languaging in instruction. It brings me incredible joy as an educator to watch this happen. And it's my favorite way to speak, just so you know. I just, I'm Cuban from Miami, so we just call it Spanglish. But I love moving between, I love moving between language and thinking between languages and dreaming between languages. But in assessment, it's still tends to be siloed by language. What would it take to build assessments that genuinely reflect how multilingual students actually use their languages? Margo: First of all, I would say that trans-languaging would have to be built from the inception of the design process. It has to be reflected in both the linguistic and learning theory on which the assessment would be based. And that has to underscore the thinking that goes into however you're going to conceptualize the assessment. And it has to be operationalized through a sound theory of action. If in fact you wanted to be of equal weight. Now, within the classroom, if in fact you don't wish that, you can use trans-languaging as students interact with each other in a first draft or if you want to again use your other languages to write some things down, to take notes or to use it as a means of support. Because for me, trans-languaging, I have a laundry list of about 10 different conceptualizations of trans-languaging, and it can run the gamut from quote translating, which I don't believe it's equated with at all, to a policy, to an ideology, to an idiolect. So for me, it's hard to measure because you don't know where that child starts. As you said, *para ti*, you used which is in and out. And I tend to do that as well. But what is the pressure for that child? What is the register that's expected? There's so many factors that come into play and you have to be kind of acclimated to the possibilities within trans-languaging. It could be used for brainstorming, that would be nice. The advantage is AI. Brandon: Yeah. Margo: Not as a Google Translate tool. No, no, no, no. As a way of looking at how we can use trans-languaging for the more, I'm going to say esoteric, and that's the wrong word, but the languages that aren't common. Brandon: Yeah, where we might not have staff in our building who are speaking as well. Margo: Right. And if the child chooses, if the child is a newcomer and is stronger in their other language, why not use it? Brandon: Yeah. Margo: But you have to think about what you're measuring as well. If you're measuring conceptual development and you just want to know if the child knows the concept, any language goes in my book. Brandon: But sometimes yes. Margo: If you're measuring English language development or Spanish language development or Urdu language development, then it's a different story. So you have to know what you're measuring and how to measure it. Yeah. Brandon: Which is why you said, we start with what we're measuring at the design. Margo: Right. Brandon: Before I let you go, what's something you're learning from right now? Margo: Something my husband's been pestering me for umpteen years, that came Mother's Day, I acquiesced and I went out and I hit golf balls. Brandon: I, that is not where I thought we were going. Margo: So my husband is a very avid golfer and it's always bothered him that I've never had this tremendous interest in the sport. Brandon: So he says you have to learn. Margo: So I did it. I did. I hit five golf balls, but... Brandon: How'd it go? Margo: I'm learning. Brandon: You're starting somewhere. Margo: Poco, poco, eh? Brandon: Exactly. In our next conversation, it's gonna start with some big golf analogy. You're gonna be fully in. Margo: Well, I'm also going to be looking out for Juntos Podemos as well. Brandon: Well, ojalá, one day. Margo: Yeah. Brandon: Thank you again for joining me and thank you for everyone for listening to this episode of Leading Multilingual Learning. I loved this conversation. You have made my day. Thank you again, Margo, for joining me. Margo: And thank you for being a collaborative partner in the process, so I've enjoyed it as well. Brandon: Thanks to everyone for listening to this episode, Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning.