Today's guest Ryan Zak is the Director of Multilingual Programs and Community Outreach at Township High School District 211 — the largest high school district in Illinois. Ryan's career has spanned the full multilingual pipeline — from biliteracy teacher and instructional coach, to English Learner Program Coordinator, to directing a PreK–8 two-way dual language program. He joined D211 in 2025, and in his first year he assembled a multilingual leadership team, organized a district-wide symposium, got all 16 academic departments engaged in ML professional learning, and expanded the Seal of Biliteracy from five languages to nearly seventy.
Ryan: It's been very important to us as a district to provide language-based content instruction so our students are graduating on time and can be on pathways to pursue whatever college or career pathway is best for them. Education is not only about rapid acquisition of English, education is about empowering human beings to enter our workforce, even if it's delayed because of college. And so, we're trying to serve our students through content-based learning. In addition to just being college and career ready, it's the most interesting. Brandon: Hey everyone. Hola a todos, ¿qué tal? I'm Brandon Cardet-Hernandez and you're listening to Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning. Each episode, we're exploring the leadership, the ideas, and the insights shaping better education for multilingual learners. And today, we're joined by Ryan Zak, Director of Multilingual Programs and Community Outreach at Township High School District 211, the largest high school district in Illinois. Brandon: Ryan's career has spanned the full multilingual pipeline from biliteracy teacher and instructional coach, to English learner program coordinator, to directing a pre-K through eight two-way dual language program. He joined D211 in 2025, and in his first year, he assembled a multilingual leadership team, organized a district-wide symposium, got all 16 academic departments engaged in ML professional learning, and expanded the Seal of Biliteracy from five languages to nearly 70. That is some good work and we are so excited that you are here with us today, Ryan. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Ryan: Gracias por la introducción y invitarme a participar en este, en este, en esta oportunidad y estoy muy feliz de estar aquí. Thanks so much for having me and I'm excited to be here on the podcast. Thanks for that little bio about myself. Brandon: I love that. Well, one, thank you for doing that in Spanish for us. And then two, I get to read your bio. I always ask this to folks who come on: What's one thing that never makes it into your bio that's maybe less big news, exciting, programmatic stuff you've been able to achieve for kids, but that you're like, this really matters to me and it grounds me as a person in the world, as a professional? Ryan: I'm a second-generation Polish. My grandparents were refugees after World War II. My name Zak is actually Żak in Polish, which means pupil. And I'm a second language learner of Spanish. I've lived in Spain and I've lived in Chile, and I started my teaching career doing adult education, teaching Spanish classes and ESL classes. Brandon: I love that. Well, a little fun fact about me is when I was in college, I did my study abroad in Poland. All the other kids were like going to like Italy and Paris, and I was like, let's go to Krakow, which was remarkable and amazing and I… Ryan: I went to Krakow last summer. It was, I was the first of my family to return to Poland after a pretty traumatic experience. And so it was amazing. I was so proud of how resilient the Polish people and cultures were to rebuild everything. And they have such a strong economy and culture and tourism, and so, yeah, I'm really proud to be of Polish descent. Brandon: A real commitment to remembering the war and the impact in a way that I think folks across the globe can learn from. So, I'm glad that you're here too. I'm glad you got that trip. All right, but we've got some stuff to dive into. So we're thinking about this season, a quick season that we're doing to support educators that's really focused on sort of like back to school. What's happening? What are district leaders thinking about? How are you taking lessons learned from years before and bringing that into practice today? Last year, I would argue, and the last few years particularly, have been really complex times in the multilingual space, and so our directors are dealing with a lot of transition, a lot of noise, but really trying to drive good work. So I'm excited to talk to you about what you're up to. Brandon: Last year when you came into the role, when you arrived, what did you find and where did you start? For folks who are also starting their year in new positions, how did you tackle this? Ryan: So, we are the largest high school district in Illinois. We're over 12,000 students, over 2,000 identified English learners. We have over 90 home languages spoken. So probably somewhere between 50, 60% of our students are also multilingual. When I came in last year, I really found an organization of professionals very much caring and committed to serving our students. And that said, the previous five years, we had experienced about 30% increases in identified English learners every each year. So it was very much an emerging need of professional learning and organizational innovation to serve this emerging demographic. And so while we had a very passionate group of humans and professionals wanting to make this change, they were also just very excited to have myself and also just in general a focus on professional learning and organizational change to better serve all our students, including our ML students. Ryan: So I was really privileged last year at the beginning of the year. I got the job in March or something like that and they and my supervisor was like, "Ryan, I need you to lead a professional development to all the administrators, department chairs, in your first week or two." I was like, "Great." So I led them all in training on ACCESS, on the WIDA ELD standards, on language supportive instructions, on system elevation and other systems for data tracking. And so, coming back this year, we're trying to sustain that momentum. Brandon: It's so amazing and what a special experience you get to have as a leader too, when you have a team of people who are hungry for that professional learning. You know, where they're like, they recognize that there are these opportunities for them to deepen skills, particularly around supports for multilingual learners across content areas, and then you have this like willing audience to join you in that work. Did it take some sort of moving of hearts and minds or did you just walk in and folks were like ready for this? Ryan: Well, I think of capacity through the, it's called the ASK construct: attitude, skills, and knowledge. And so, I do do, I did at the beginning of last year and I repeated it this year, engage through what I call a qualitative needs assessment. So talking to as many stakeholders as possible in terms of what's going well with our programs, what's not doing so well. And then trying to diagnose if it's an attitude, skills, or knowledge. I also think of like the organizational, a complex organizational change framework where you can sort of feel the emotions that people are feeling and then notice if it's like we're missing resources, we're missing vision, we're missing a road map. So yeah, but truthfully, I found just a lot of people that care about kids. Ryan: And in education, there's also every year new initiatives, right? The seesaw of initiatives. And so trying to also ensure that ML approaches, instructional and organizational, weren't an afterthought, weren't just an initiative, but embedded in just like all the normal stuff we're already doing. I think people have really been receptive to that because adult learners want what's best for students, but we also want what works efficiently, what works effectively, and what works productively. Brandon: Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that hunger is real as we're growing in our career. I think a lot of districts, particularly large, larger urban districts saw this increase in multilingual learners and the professional learning just didn't keep pace with the growing population. And so what might have even been an issue before just in terms of pedagogical strategies to really close gaps but also accelerate language development became much more complicated as the scale didn't match the resources. Ryan: I'm not always aware of the national trends, but in Illinois for the last several years, whereas previously English learners tended to be concentrated in urban areas, they've really been disproportionately becoming a larger percentage of populations in suburban, rural areas. And we're not only talking about just immigrants now, we're talking about our experienced language learners, those who have been in the country maybe their whole life and are multilingual and still have that EL label that we need to continue to serve them. Brandon: You spent your first year getting all 16 departments engaged in multilingual professional development. I love this. I think this is, I've had conversations with other educators, this is the work that moves the needle. It's also the hardest to find time for, as we know. As you're going into year two, what's the message to staff as they come back? What should every teacher in the building be thinking about for their ML students on day one or in your case, week two? Ryan: So I'm part of the curriculum and instruction department. Partnering with the curriculum and instruction office, I was really excited to build within their curriculum committee processes the importance of quality tier one instruction, as well as specifically language-supportive instructional approaches that involve SWIRL: so speaking, writing, interacting, reading, listening, all four language domains. And then we know that language is social, so interaction. And then I would, we like to double that I as both interaction and intentional because learning happens through intention. Ryan: I say that because we've elevated the ideas of SWIRL and high-quality instruction that our district now has a District 211 high-quality instructional framework that very much aligns and includes multilingual learner considerations in it. And so rather than me trying to create a new initiative year two, I'm really trying to sustain the SWIRL, the idea of SWIRL, which, yes, we could, I have a master's in bilingual education and a master's in education and we could talk about translanguaging, but SWIRL is something everyone understands. And we also have a mascot, Swirl the Squirrel, which is cute and fun, and people like stuff like that. We print it on things. People understand the idea of intentionally planning for speaking, writing, reading, listening, no matter if they have their ESL endorsement, if they've taken the courses on it. That that whole concept is very well understood. And it's also understood that SWIRL is not just good for our language learners. This is just quality Tier 1 instruction. Brandon: Amen. Ryan: And so, I previously was a director from pre-K to eighth district, but at the high school, we have all these departments that are preparing students for diverse college and career readiness pathways. And that's really what about education is about. It's about setting up human beings to be on the trajectory to accomplish their college and career goals. And so some of the departments like applied technology, family and consumer science are so super important, although the core content classes are also so super important. All of them are serving college and career readiness factors and all of them are serving language acquisition. So what was very important in order for this not to just be siloed work is that every department got the same professional learning on ACCESS. The all of the department chairs and I think pretty much most teachers in the organization took the practice test, the WIDA ELD standards, and then Elevation, which is the, many districts use it, and it's a great place to store and look at language development data, but also there's 108 strategies on there that are just good high-impact instructional strategies that you'll see in other books like the Hattie Fisher Frey books or Hanixfeld's books again, or the Gottlieb's books. These are just good instructional strategies. As one of the metrics to see how consistent this aligned PD went out is I looked at the use log in May of Elevation and we had 1,099 users and 1,095 people logged in at least one time, which now thinking about this year, knowing that we have that base where we have people know how to access the tool, the resource, now how do we get people logging in two times, three times, five times to now have a system in place for professional learning, instructional planning that they already know how to get into. But now how do we embed it into more instruction? Brandon: One, incredible. Two, so comprehensive. And I'm with you and you know, we are aligned. Like good ML pedagogy is really just great Tier 1 instruction for everyone. We design for our most complicated learners and we end up having a system where all boats rise. And you get it and a lot of ML directors get it. But Ryan, you did something somewhat extraordinary. Like within a year, you were able to move the district to a real prioritization of this type of learning. For other folks who are trying to move their organization, like how did you build the case? How did you get people on the bus? Like tell me a little bit about that journey. Ryan: Well, again, I do think that we are an organization very much noticing our demographics were changing and knowing that we needed to innovate some of our processes. Because again, we're full of it, this is an organization full of people that really care about the students. And so I really had the gift of walking into a situation where, and our motto is, the superintendent will say, united in purpose, powered by passion. We have a lot of passionate professionals here. Coming into the organization, I make the joke often times that my preferred pronouns are we, our, and us because it's more important than one person ever leading it. Ryan: While I led that professional learning at the beginning of the year to all the administrators and the chairs, I then shared them the expectation as well as all the resources for how they were going to lead it in all of their buildings. I then assembled what I call my, what I call our Multilingual Instructional Leadership Team, which is composed of associate principals who design all building-level professional learning, our multilingual department chairs who are the building experts on multilingual everything, our technology chairs who also double dip as coaches, and our instructional coaches. So through this committee of our multilingual instructional leadership team, we essentially collectively made it our duty to ensure consistent professional learning throughout the entire organization. And you know, we, we essentially created all the resources. We created the PD that needed to be delivered. Certainly people revised it, but our associate principals, our building leadership team ensured that we had organizational structure like our PLCs, our PLTs, our institute days in which the time, the place to ensure everyone's getting the right thing. And then there was all the informal partnerships along the way because an additional layer of support is we, so I was a bilingual educator. I taught fourth grade bilingual, also Spanish Language Arts at the middle school level, and it's tough being a bilingual teacher. Horizontal articulation with your English-only, monolingual colleagues, to sometimes operate, be operating in a silo. So I know what this is like. So additionally, with this team, as well as the instructional coaches, we developed a multilingual symposium. That symposium had one day that was just for administrators and chairs. So what do you need to do as a leading a department to support your bilingual and sheltered teachers? And then we had two days that were just differentiated for our multilingual, or for our bilingual and sheltered content, math, science, social studies teachers about how do you scaffold language? How do you translanguage? What sort of language allocations should be occurring in your class? How do we leverage ChatGPT to have students do speaking tasks in English and then get feedback in Spanish or whatever language? And then how do we adapt our curriculum, not our critical learning standards, but how do we deliver lessons differently? And that occurred through curriculum writing releases, and so our bilingual and content shelter teachers, just like our ESL teachers are, or multilingual teachers, are so important for language acquisition, but again, high school is also about college and career readiness. So we need to get these, so I'm so happy that in addition to a general focus on 16 departments, we were able to specialize differentiated support for our bilingual sheltered teachers. Brandon: It you make it sound easy, but I know that it was hard work. What I'm taking away as I'm listening to you is there was a recognition of who is in the district now and a sort of re-prioritization around like where do we need to spend time given who's there? I think a lot of districts could do that work to look a little bit closer and be like, who's actually, who are we actually serving? Not who did we serve 10 years ago, but who are we serving today? And does our PD align to that community? Brandon: One. Two, it sounds like you did some real coalition building, right? Like thinking across the entire system, who needs to be there and getting them to see the priority. And then the last thing I really heard that I took away that I hope our listeners do too, is this idea that like, you built the infrastructure so that it was turn-key. And so enough of the system, the systems for learning had been built so that people felt like they weren't just walking into something that sometimes happens in districts, having worked in one, that can feel a bit chaotic while we're like building the plane and flying it. It sounds like you had a lot of infrastructure ready to go, so it built that trust along the way. Does that feel right? Ryan: Yes, it's important to come with a plan, but I do think what's also important, and I read like a book on this recently, but identifying those rock stars in the organization, building partnerships with the people that are either extremely strong at this or extremely passionate about it, figuring out a way to align things. I often think of transforming organizational culture by Anthony Muhammad. I'm misquoting the title. But in an organization, and this I would think is any organization, there's traditionalists, there's tweeners, there's survivalists, and then there's believers. So find those believers, form the coalition. Don't always just bring in outside people to help you. Form your coalitions, build the capacity internally. When you and you the believers build the systems, the tweeners and the survivalists will just do it. You know, they're fine. Some of them are surviving just because they had maybe a new baby at home or they're new to the profession. Some of the tweeners are just kind of can be, go either way. The traditional, there's always in any organization, some people who are more reluctant for the change. But if you as the believers build the infrastructure, if you build it, they will come, right? It's like the Field of Dreams idea that if you build it and you build it and the collective efficacy, the more we have everybody doing the same thing, people appreciate that. Brandon: And shout out to Dr. Anthony Muhammad. Time for Change: Four Essential Skills for Transformational School and District Leaders was like biblical to me, a very important text, but I'm with you. It's, it's whether you call them rock stars or champions or whatever you want, but like really seeing and knowing the workforce you have and leveraging the leadership that already exists and you're not doing it alone. Brandon: All right, I have like one really granular question that I am curious about because I have a feeling there is like a suspicious listener, we've all been that person, who's listening and it's like, great, Ryan Zak did it in his community, he's getting everyone on the bus to professional learning, they have more PD for MLs than we've had in my district in a decade, and at the same time, like what are you going to tell the chemistry teacher or the PE teacher who's never thought about language instruction or rarely thinks about language instruction, what that shift looks like in practice? So as we think across content areas, and I'll, you know, anecdotally had a moment recently with a math teacher who was using Medley and said to me, "You know, I've never had ESL support in my math class and I've been teaching for 22 years." And I was like, I see you. And so it was really, he was showing me signs of like, this is the first time I'm really thinking about language moves and I love it because I felt really guilty that I wasn't able to serve the kids in front of me, but it's not part of my practice thinking about language moves. How do you bring on those educators whose content areas may have been under-resourced in language supports? Ryan: I think all teachers to some extent are teaching language and often times they're not aware of how they are teaching language. So for example, I've been in science classrooms where they have a science, science vocabulary across the classroom, mitosis, photosynthesis. And so as I'm in the classroom, I like to do notice and wondering protocols. So I notice things, I wonder, and then I discuss instructional ideas. So in debriefs with some science teachers on this, I've looked at their word walls essentially, they wouldn't have called it that, but it's a word wall, and I've had the discussion with them, what about the possibility of putting some of those words in other languages? Additionally, science words are basically all cognates to almost all European languages and then do have some linguistic similarities with other languages at all. How do we engage students in a discussion of looking at words, identifying cognates, a prefix, cognate words with root words, but prefixes, suffixes. How do we even just identify a prefix or a suffix? And then that once you identify the word like "pre" or something, that's something that's going to be leverageable in any of the academic areas. Or I at a business department class, not thinking about language essentially, but they were asking their students to make business proposals to sell a product. That's absolutely a speaking task. That could be evaluated with the WIDA ELD framework. That is something we could build a super prompt with ChatGPT or even use student-to-student assessment to evaluate what sort of discourse they're using, what language they're using. Or I've engaged the math department on, often times we have to have students solve linear equations, then create graphing them. What does it look like, what does it sound like when students have to explain that? What sort of words do they use? Could we generate like a bank of words for them to use? What sort of frames might they need to, and again, because, you know, we talked to each of these departments and we're often like students, and we're not even just talking about our ML students, but students don't always know how to explain their thinking. So looking at the activities they're doing and just helping to highlight things that are they're already doing and amplifying them or innovating them a little bit. Rather than always telling them to do something new, figure out the things that they're doing close to correct and build up those competencies, right? It's the same thing we do with students. You start with what they can do and then build from the can-dos. Brandon: I'm stealing this. You know, we, I often say like so many people like, all teachers are language teachers, right? Like, we know this. But I want to hold, Ryan, all teachers are teaching language sometimes without even noticing it. And so there's such a power in being like, actually, you haven't been getting that professional learning, but I can help signal for you the things you're naturally doing that are developing language, and then help you double click and like go deeper and make it more meaningful or more explicit or more routine even. Ryan: Yes, I think that in the United States, I don't think language instruction was ever been very elevated. So like myself being educated in the United States, I never learned about grammar. I didn't, I didn't learn about grammar until I learned Spanish. And so I think that because of that, a lot of our teachers don't necessarily have the, yet the metalinguistic awareness, but they, it's, they are teaching language. They just, language is still just a underdeveloped concept in general in my experience in most schools. Brandon: Yeah, I agree with you and I think that's true as we go one step further into vocabulary as well. And this is true for again, good for all students. It's like, we can get a kid to reading proficiency and then we watch in districts across the country that decline come right back to where we started. And part of that is like, well, where do words exist and the teaching of words as a way of deepening comprehension and language complexity. Like how does that make its way in? Ryan: And it's important, right? Again, going back to the intentional of SWIRL, that let's look at a text and determine the six to ten most important words to pre-teach or teach. And because you can't teach them all, but find the ones that are leverageable, you know will appear other times in the curriculum or in other, and explicitly teach those words. Brandon: Yeah, I think that's really, it's important. I'm happy that you said that. All right. You increased the number of bilingual and sheltered content classes in math, in science, in social studies, and world languages. What for you was driving that expansion and how did you decide as a leader where to go first? You couldn't do everything at once. Ryan: I'd like to say that we collectively the district, and this is even before me, have expanded our bilingual and sheltered content instruction. It's really just related to, first off, high-quality research-based instructional approaches to language acquisition, but also college and career readiness, that we need our students learning English in order to be scientists. We need our students to be learning English in order to be mathematicians. We need, so we need our students to learn English in order to be social scientists. So all of these are just, and then we also need our students to learn English in order to graduate on time and to have college and career pathways. So it's been very important to us as a district to provide language-based content instruction so our students are graduating on time and can be on pathways to pursue whatever college or career pathway is best for them. Education is not only about rapid acquisition of English, education is about empowering human beings to enter our workforce, and even if it's delayed because of college. And so, yes, as much as possible, we're trying to serve our students through content-based learning. In addition to just being college and career ready, it's the most interesting, right? It's the most interesting. Like, in science class where they're doing a lab on water density or whatever they do in science, what a great way to be learning English at the same time through hands-on experiences, simulations, experimentation, the natural interaction that occurs in lab groups. And so, yes, as a district, we very, we very much believe in bilingual sheltered content classes, and I, I fully support that. And what we do is we student select their courses in the spring, and we then build sections based on the type of classes that our students want. So if, so if quite, so if we have a large number of bilingual or sheltered students that are trying to get into an earth science class, we then build that bilingual or sheltered earth science class, or geometry class, or algebra two class, or U.S. history. So we do all this to comply, you know, with Illinois school code, bilingual education, but we also do this to best serve our students. Brandon: And it looks like you're letting demand lead program development, which is so smart. Ryan: Yeah, it's a, all Illinois school code or administrative code is when schools didn't, when there were court cases in which schools didn't honor the wishes of their students and families. We're in the business of complying with the law and honoring the wishes of our students and families to maximize their education. Brandon: Amen. I will say this, just in terms of total non sequitur, but maybe connected, to your science reference earlier, I am a big fan of Oki Lee, who I assume that you know about. She goes deep into science learning as language learning, leaning into what you were just speaking of, like what a really incredible place to do language development. And so she talks about this deep. But Illinois is interesting and I'm sure there's other places in the country that that do this. I'm just very aware of it in your state where your districts are separated by grade bands. So like, you know, I was a school leader in New York City, we were a pre-K or 3K to 12 system, our kids were coming all throughout. But you're kind of managing something really unique around feeder districts bringing in your high school students. Regardless of the way other systems are set up, there's something really intentional about what you've been up to that I think would be really interesting to share with our listeners. You're building relationships with those feeder districts to do some of that work before a young person arrives. This could be true if you have feeder districts, this could be true if you're in a single district K-12 and you have feeder schools, right? Talk to me a little bit about that strategy and a little bit about the sort of collaboration that you've been thinking about and trying to develop across the community. Ryan: Yeah, so we have two significant feeder districts and then a variety of other smaller districts, or not smaller, but less students matriculate to our school. And since I started, we, I organized with their bilingual director/assistant, and then the other assistant superintendent of language, monthly meetings in which we talked about, we talked about everything related to articulation between eighth grade and freshman year to reduce barriers, make it smoother, have students placed in the right class, have instructional alignment, family engagement alignment. In the last year, we created two new multilingual family engagement people, positions. One speaks Spanish, the other one Ukrainian and Russian. So previously I was a director of pre-K to eight, in which every year we would try to create the opportunities for our first grade teachers to talk to our second grade teachers, our second grade teachers to talk to our third grade teachers, our fourth grade, fifth grade, you know, so on and so forth. To create that across two organizations is a lot trickier because each of the organizations has their structures in place, there's plans. So what we're trying to do are collectively across these districts is both short-term and long-term build more structures for articulation and alignment from eighth grade to freshman year and beyond. And so something I'm excited is that we've been partnering with them to enhance our freshman ML placement/recommendation process, because we strongly believe collectively that students are much more than just their ACCESS scores. So we, while ACCESS scores determines full-time TBE and not, we strongly believe that additional placement considerations need to include their IAR scores, grades, teacher recommendation, how many years they are in the US, an IEP versus a non-IEP, what previous EL program models in place, as well as family and student input. So we can to the greatest extent build an articulation from eighth grade to freshman year that's well understood by both districts and also just smooth for our students. Brandon: I love that. And I think you're talking about just the way you were using elevation data to ground much of the learning and the way that educators across the district are thinking about the whole picture of a young person. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't just say like, you're doing that before the data even hits your system. Like you're thinking about that before, you know, the transfer has even occurred. Ryan: Through the collaboration with them, I could get that data ahead of time too, you know? So and expedite some of these processes and ensure that we get the exact data that we want. You know, like we, as I described, also we have new family coordinators. We're always aware at school and building leaders of a few families that may benefit from additional, a little additional support for registration, for, and so we are able through this articulation also to have a list of families that would like someone to reach out to them, give them a helping hand, schedule a meeting with them. And so, yes, we're just trying as much as possible to make it a smooth transition. In order for that to happen, we have to be partnered with these, our feeder districts or I like to call them foundation districts. Brandon: I like this, foundation districts. I have a million more questions to ask you and I'm like keep looking to the right of my screen and seeing that I am slowly running out of time. I want to talk to you about the work you've been doing around the Seal of Biliteracy and extending those options for our kids. I want to talk to you more about the strategies you have this year for professional learning, but I can't. But what I will ask you, as my final question, just launching into this year, the year's going to end faster than we realize. All of a sudden we're in December and then we're in March and then we're like, what has happened? If you look back at the year once it's over, what are some things that you're hoping you've been able to achieve? And I'm honoring two parts of your leadership that I'm seeing. Like your commitment to building the right infrastructure and your commitment to leading learning. All of that is in service of student results. What do you hope to see happen this year? Ryan: So our demographics continue to be shifting additionally because of immigration trends have changed significantly, non-political statement, just true, demographics of our language learners are changing, sometimes higher on the language proficiency levels. So I want to make sure that we by the end of the year have an even more efficient and effective system for student placement and our classes. And I want to by the end of the year ensure that all teachers understand how multilingual learners fit within the District 211 Tier 1 high-quality instructional framework. I want to by the end of the year for staff to openly talk about in their PLTs and at the end of the year reflecting how they're using some of those high-quality instructional strategies that they can find on elevation or in many other places that involve SWIRL. Ryan: I would say improved, continual improvement of student scheduling and placement and staffing systems, alignment of ML considerations with high-quality instruction, and those instructional practices in place. Brandon: I think small goals, that's all you have this year. That's it, and it's uh, yes. Ryan: But I'm really happy to work with everybody here. And I also would be remiss to the importance of this work of developing a professional learning network. So, I have 10 to 15 other bilingual directors around and we're texting each other constantly, always ready to be on a Zoom or a phone call, happy to help. It's so important. Nobody's figured it all out. So it's important to build a network of people to learn together, to share ideas. And so I want to say that I'm just very grateful for my other bilingual directors across the state whom I text with every day. Brandon: I love you for naming that because even our connection is from another person who we both respect and trust who was like, I think the two of you should meet and talk. It's part of this community that I love the most, which is like, I think, you know, most of us are just pretty obsessed with multilingualism and the process of learning. We also all want to see kids win and so there's like a fierce urgency to the work. But you might be my first guest who's really named that gratitude around the broader ML director community and just leaning on each other to assess, you know, best practices and get new ideas and share resources. Isolation is the killer of innovation. So I love, I love that. Ryan: Yeah. Un pueblo unido, jamás será vencido. So, together we, it takes a village, right? Brandon: Amen. Amen. All right, before I let you go, since you are leading multilingual learning, but really leading a professional learning across your district that we know is going to continue to net results for kids. I always ask this question, like we're in parallel process with the folks that we serve. We are also always learning. Who is someone that you are learning from or something you are learning about right now? Ryan: Well, I am obsessed with audiobooks. I'm a big reader too. I was an English major. So I, I'm always reading fiction. I think fiction's important for empathy and understanding and worldviews and stuff. But I'm also a huge fan of people like Malcolm Gladwell, of Daniel Pink. I do think it's so important. Right now I'm reading, it's an older work, but Jim Collins, uh, From Good to Great. I think it's just very important for me to be learned, I recently read Atomic Habits. All these sort of books to think about organizational change. I just got Margo Gottlieb's new book, which is Academic Languaging: Engaging Multilingual Students in Content Area Learning. So still trying to keep fresh on the practical instructional approaches, but I also think it's super important that we, that educators don't isolate themselves in only educational industry learning, but learn from all industries about what's effective. Brandon: Yeah, it's breaking that isolation, thinking about leadership much more broadly. How do we move people in service of of the bigger goal? Well, Ryan, it has been great to have you on. Brandon: Thank you for this conversation. Ryan: Thank you so much, Brandon. It was a pleasure. Brandon: And thank you everyone for listening to this episode of Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning.