Host Brandon Cardet-Hernandez speaks with Mariana Castro, the interim Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, Co-Director of the Multilingual Learning Research Center, and a curriculum designer and instructor for The Discussion Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She began her career working with students with significant disabilities, before going on to coordinate bilingual programs in Madison. After 15 years in schools, Mariana joined WIDA in 2006, where she led professional learning, standards development and evaluation initiatives. With more than 35 years in education, she brings a deep commitment to multilingual learners, teacher development, and social justice to her research and practice.
Mariana: We present ourselves as learners, and we decide what we value and what we believe is legitimate. In our schools, normal is speaking English, right? The moment that we're saying, "Yes, use all of your repertoire," and make it normal, we're saying not just it's for you to be able to express yourself because you don't know enough language, but it's because who you are is welcome as a learner in this classroom. Going beyond welcoming to saying belonging. Brandon: Hey everyone. Hola a todos. I'm Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, and you're listening to Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning. And 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 Mariana Castro to the podcast. She's the interim director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, co-director of the Multilingual Learning Research Center, and a curriculum designer and instructor for the discussion project at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She began her career working with students with significant disabilities before teaching science, ESL, and bilingual education, and later coordinating bilingual programs in Madison schools. After 15 years in schools, Mariana joined WIDA in 2006, where she led professional learning, standards development, and research and evaluation initiatives. With more than 35 years in education, she brings a deep commitment to multilingual learners, teacher development, and social justice to her research and practice. That is a very good bio, my friend. Mariana: Thank you. Thank you. Muchas gracias. Very happy to be here. Brandon: And what an incredible career spanning the sort of practice on the ground, the district leadership, the research, really sort of touching all different parts that keep the wheels in motion and really close opportunity gaps for our kids. So we're grateful for you. Brandon: I love to start off with one question though. I did your whole bio. There are certain things that never make it onto our bio. What's one thing that you're like, "This never gets told, but I really am proud of this work." I want people to know about it. Mariana: You know, I'm really proud of the work that I'm doing with some islands in South America. I've spent a few years working with science teachers in Galapagos and thinking about place-based education there, and it's work that I do around science, which I love, and in Spanish, which I love. I work with this organization, I'm an advisor to an organization that works with other islands outside of, you know, Argentina and in all throughout Latin America. That is work that is really close to my heart. I think it keeps me connected to my roots and it keeps me connected to science because I love language, but I also love too many other things. Brandon: I see you and same. Brandon: Before we dive into some sort of meatier questions I have for you about your research and the work that you've been leading, I'm curious, what brought you to education? What brought you to special education and teaching? Mariana: You know, I come from really strong people. My parents' parents were people who did not get a chance to go to college, but they have a, they had a deep belief in education. On my mom's side, both parents were orphaned when they were like 11 and 12 years old. And at that time they started working. So when they got married, they made sure all kids had college degrees. So they had a doctor, they had an engineer, and my mom was a chemist. On my dad's side is the same thing. My my grandfather was a laborer and his wife was a stay-home mom. And they had five kids and all five kids, again, got degrees. In my family, this idea that education is important is not just for your own benefit, but also for the benefit of your community. So I was very drawn to education, even though at the beginning I didn't pursue education. I actually pursued chemistry. I just fell in love with working with schools. That's how I put myself through school, and then I just couldn't leave. Brandon: I love, I'm holding this frame from your family. It's not just for your benefit, but it's for the benefit of the community. Mariana: Yeah. Brandon: I really love that. Mariana: Thank you. Brandon: I want to ask you, I want to dive in to teacher preparation. And we have listeners who are listening who are working in the classroom, who are leading schools, we're doing district level work. So really running a broad spectrum of multilingual education. But you led professional learning at WIDA for years before moving into the research side. What patterns did you see in how districts were training teachers that inspired you to focus much of your research on teacher preparation? Mariana: Yeah. You know, having been in the classroom for 15 years, I remember having to do things like, I need to go to the bathroom, but I also need to talk to this child. So I'm going to wait another hour before I do that. I have always felt this sense of urgency from teachers. They are sacrificing, sometimes their own health, they're sacrificing their summers, their evenings because they believe in what they do. And when you think about children, teachers have the biggest opportunity for impact on students. They spend a lot of time with them. And their work is not simple, it's very complex. You have to develop relationships with the students, with their families, with colleagues. Sometimes you have to manage up. You have to learn the content, so you need to have this content knowledge, and you also have to have the pedagogical knowledge. How do you teach children? How do you teach youth? So to me, that's the hardest job. And sometimes the support that they give when you talk about professional development is, the resources they get sometimes do not match that complexity. So a lot of the professional development that I witnessed was really sharing knowledge, maybe developing some sort of application, but it wasn't necessarily this dynamic need. In research, when we think about what teachers have to do is they have to have this knowledge, but they also have to develop two types of expertise. One is routine expertise, and the other one is called adaptive expertise. And the routine expertise are those things that you learn that you have to do often and you create those routines for children because those are good. But in the classroom, sometimes, and I would say most of the time, what you encounter are these new situations where you've planned your whole year, and then the evening before you've planned your whole day, and then guess what? When you get there, the students are just not in the place where you expected them to be or do the things that you expected them to do because guess what? They're human beings and they have their own lives and their own experiences. So this adaptive expertise is knowing the content, knowing the pedagogical knowledge so well that in the moment, you have to make a judgment and you have to make a decision in a matter of seconds. So to prepare teachers to do that, you can either let them be teachers for 15 years or identify ways in which they can actually practice this adaptive expertise and develop that, of course, with a lot of feedback. And that's the type of professional development that I don't see enough of. There's a lot of reflection, there's a lot of these other type of things. And we don't do a good job in teacher preparation programs either. We give them the information. I always think about this idea of integrating content and language, that's one of the things I'm really interested in. And we always tell teachers they have to do it, but we don't show them how. We don't observe them doing it and then provide feedback. So this dynamic type of professional development, I feel is what that we're missing. Brandon: Uh, I am thinking about my own experience and having, you know, been on the receiving end of professional learning, both sort of scenarios, right? And really finding the value, particularly in my principal training, in that much more dynamic learning environment where it was all about being able to spin on a dime and adaptive leadership. But I remember my coach who would just, you know, the opportunities were really just about standing and delivering a message. It was like, this thing just happened, what are you going to say? And it was like in the moment practicing that type of thinking. And it strengthens a muscle. It allows you to play out scenarios. Brandon: As our schools, by the time this airs, right? They're like wrapping the year, school leaders and district leaders are thinking about professional learning. What are small things that people can do without completely throwing out their entire professional development calendar? That's, because that's the part that then feels scary, so we do nothing. What are the small moves we can make that you're like, I would love to see more of these types of situations happening in professional learning? Mariana: There are different ways to do this, and one of the things I think is you need collaboration between administrators and teachers in this way. Administrators need to identify opportunities for teachers to really develop these things called community of practice. And we talk about professional learning communities, and we talk about professional conversations, and all these different things. A community of practice in essence is a group of people who get together to learn together. In order to do that, from the teacher perspective, you have to have that vulnerability. And who else to learn from than your colleagues? So you can spend thousands and thousands of dollars bringing other people into your into your schools or you could very easily, almost free, identify opportunities for students to for teachers to visit each other, to observe each other, to provide feedback to each other. And that is not done without having strong relationships, a strong sense of community. So you will notice that a pattern for me is this idea of community. And for teachers what it means is that they become vulnerable, but they also develop this trust for each other and they're able to learn from each other. I think that would sustain teachers. There's this piece of data that I learned a long time ago about multilingual learners being taught by novice teachers most of the time. Unfortunately, I learned that maybe 20 years ago, it's still the same. We still, our teachers get burnt out. And so we need to be thinking about how we're both helping them develop the skill, but also build supports that are going to help them stay, that are going to help them continue to do the most important job in the world, in my opinion. Brandon: I'm with you and I talk about this probably every episode, but I think it's just because it's an obsession I have, which is this idea that we are in parallel process with our kids. And so you're describing the trust and the vulnerability that's necessary to make really big moves in our own practice as educators. And in some ways, that's the same exact track that we're asking young people to go on every day to build trust and vulnerability so they can take the risk that's necessary, the vulnerable risk that's necessary to deepen learning and knowledge. Particularly. Mariana: Yeah, the moment we forget to be learners, we're not as efficient teachers as we should be. Brandon: I'm with you. Your research focuses on integrating language development into core teaching practices rather than treating it as an add-on. Can you give some concrete examples of what that integration looks like in teacher planning or instruction? And maybe help us understand too, why is that add-on something we should be moving away from? Mariana: Let me start by just talking a little bit about core teaching practices and what what I mean by that. There's this robust field of education research about teaching practices and they're this kind of group of habits of teachers that they develop over time. So they cut across all content areas and they which means that all teachers should develop them, and they also develop over time, which means that if you're a novice teacher, you acquire them, but over time you just get better at it. So they're relevant to all teachers. And the examples that I give are, for example, setting norms for your classroom is one type, leading small group discussions, eliciting student learning, eliciting student thinking, sometimes interpreting that thinking. Why? Because sometimes we talk about these big ideas about centering students in our instruction, but it is like, if I want to do that, I need to know what a student knows. And if I want to bring that, I need to be able to access that. You can imagine that's already hard because as a teacher, I need to be quiet and instead of, you know, we have this this excitement of explaining how the world works, but instead we need to to build that constructivistic perspective so we we we step back and we ask questions and we engage in the ideas. Many teachers don't feel comfortable doing this with multilingual learners because they don't have enough language. But what that means is that their ideas never get centered. And we could say that we're doing these all these things to center them, but if we're not engaging with their ideas, we're not just saying not centering those, but we're also saying your ideas are not important, because I'm not going to engage with them. Even when an idea is not necessarily what we would consider correct, and I'm doing air quotes, but it is of extreme importance that we, especially in science, but also in math, in in in literacy, to identify what is that the students are thinking. So you can imagine that if I'm asking the questions and I'm trying to find out what students are thinking, and then later I talk about language, then I already missed that opportunity. So that's why they can't be an add-on. It means they have to be dynamic. and in the moment, I as a teacher have to be thinking, oh, the student understood my question, they answered, I need to ask a follow up question. Or the student didn't understand my question, how am I going to modify my language in the moment to make sure the question itself is accessible? And then I have to think about the student, how are they going to make what they want to share with me accessible with me? So I need to be able to both plan for those conversations, but also in the moment be able to shift. That's going back to that idea of adaptive expertise. But in thinking about how we integrate both, it has to be with I always say like, they're teacher, our teachers are doing triple the work, not twice the work, because they're engaging with ideas that they would do with all students. But for multilingual learners, you need to make sure the content is accessible as well as the input. And how am I also helping them develop the language they need in the moment when it's also natural and an authentic opportunity for them to do it. Again, if I wait to introduce the language, sometimes we used to say that as teachers, we need to pre-teach the vocabulary, and the problem is that there was no cognitive knowledge to hook that language to, so kids would forget it, right? But if you do it afterwards, then again, now the cognitive hook is not there anymore because they may have forgotten it. So our opportunity is when all of this thinking and all of these concepts are being formed or are being shaped for the student. So that's why we have to do it at the same time. Please let me know if I get too theoretical. Brandon: I think the opposite and it speaks to your experience having had sort of boots on the ground in schools and in districts, because I think you're you're doing a really wonderful job of bridging the sort of research into reality. I was having a conversation with Margot Gotlib recently and we were talking about this, and you know, I made the confession, I was a teacher who pre, you know, we did the Word Bank before the unit started and I was taught that was my training. Like, this is going to be the most effective way and a kind way, because it's always coming from a good place. Like a kind way of setting up students for success. You're going to tell them the words that are tricky. But it wasn't sticky. And that naming of language moves as we go and being really intentional about how language exists in the the way we're talking and what we're reading and what we're asking students to do with each other. That intentionality is where it gets really sticky. Mariana: It get I love that you use the word sticky. I, when I work with pre-service teachers, I talk to them about knowledge as a web, right? So if we have, but first of all, we have limited time with students. Sometimes if you're teaching high school, it's one hour, 50 minutes. If you're working with younger kids, you know, you still have the blocks. But what happens is that in that amount of time, what you want to do is create that stickiness, create that, and you do that by connecting ideas. And that's why rather than teaching vocabulary, identifying what is it that students know, what is it that the students think, and being able to connect it, that's where your stickiness comes. And you want to make as many connections. I tell people it's like a spider web, right? The more lines it has across, the the more stickiness there will be. If you only have a single line, that spider web will not be as strong. So if we only have a few minutes to start, rather than saying, okay, here are the 10 words and write the 10 words in a sentence and and doing all these different things, identifying and and as kids are talking about their experiences and they're noticing, when do you see this dew on the grass? What does that mean? Where is it coming from? That's when you can maybe introduce some of the language that they will need. Brandon: In its context. Mariana: And it's in its context. And the more that they do meaningful activities within that context, the more they will just learn the language because they have, you're giving them opportunities, authentic opportunities to use that language. Brandon: And leveraging the language skills that they have to deepen language skills. And that is the most critical part. It's why, you know, it's so much of the work that I do now is is deeply embedded in the world of scaffolding. And it's like that's what a great scaffold does. It's like, I'm gonna use what you know and then support your learning into the stuff you don't. Yeah. Mariana: Yeah, I think a lot of the language pieces kind of moving across continua. You know, like for those of, those people who love linguistics, there's systemic functional linguistics, right? And we always rush to to teach and to have kids engage in reading and writing, which is great. But we forget that the base of all of this is going to be that oracy development. So how do we introduce language and then make sure that we move across the continuum. One thing that I see sometimes some teachers do is they introduce, they have a little talk and then they say, okay, now go write it. But the movement across the continuum has to be scaffolded. So that's why I love that you you brought up the idea of scaffolding. Without that, it's just like if you hadn't done it because yes, students need to connect it, but we need to show them how it's connected. We need to show them kind of the tricks of of how you go from oral language to written language. And again, that's one of the things that sometimes because we don't have time and because it takes time, we don't do it. And and I would say that you might spend a lot of time, but it's is is time well used and it's it's what they say, it's going slow to go faster, because then kids really understand those connections. Brandon: And you build the confidence too. Anyone who's ever learned another language knows that everyone has their own part that like is tough for them. You know, it's like whether it's the speaking part or that moment of like the receptive skill of like, I'm listening and trying to make meaning or the writing part. But when they all start working together, you start building the confidence around the language. You feel the courage to say something totally wrong, to use the wrong preposition, to have the wrong tenses, to misgender something because it's just not making sense in the moment. But that's, that's the confidence builder that creates what we were talking about, the community, the vulnerability. Mariana: And you know, when I say that teachers have the biggest impact on kids, I really mean that. I mean, it's well in the literature, but in the 80s, there was this person who was studying classrooms and they saw that there were students, she identified students, and again, I'm going to do air quotes, as high status students and students with low status. And the students with high status were those students that everybody knew that or expected them to have the right answer, and the students knew it themselves. So every time if you are a new teacher and you ask a question, those are the kids who are going to raise their hand and right away have the answer. And guess what? Because they have high status, if they get it wrong, it's okay. They will still keep trying. And then we have students with low status who not just they don't believe they have the answer, but because they don't speak or because sometimes they make mistakes, sometimes the rest of the class also thinks they're not going to have the right answer. And the only way to really like disrupt this status differential is the teacher. I as a teacher have status to be able to share with others. So when I'm asking a student to to to share their idea, and then my answer is not just, "Okay, who's next?" or it's not like, "Oh, that's wrong," or it's, or even if it's like, "Oh, good." And I go on. That I'm missing the opportunity to to share some of that status. If instead I ask like, "Hey, that's a great idea. Tell me more about it. Why did you think that way?" Like now I'm making it public to all students that this idea merits my time, merits discussing with everybody else, making it public. Brandon: I love that move. You're making me want to go back into a classroom and practice it. You're right, right? And listen, any parent knows this too, if you have kids and you do it with your own, that I want to reinforce that behavior. I'm going to celebrate it in the moment. But it's really interesting to hold as an educator, you're not just reinforcing the behavior, you're shifting the social dynamics in the classroom by celebrating, forget even the celebrating because that feels like you're giving it a sticker. It's like by holding curiosity around what a student's saying and allowing that engagement to be part of the the sort of call and respond of the the Q&A of the lesson. Yeah. Mariana: Mm-hmm. Brandon: I love that. I want to talk to you about teacher prep for days, but I have a long list of questions, so I'm going to move into something else I know that you're thinking a lot about. And that's AI in the classroom, the sort of promise and the risk. And this is work I'm deeply obsessed with, that you know, crosses both things I love, scaffolding and how we're using technology to meet our kids and do right by them. You've researched how AI can support translanguaging. And so, for the folks who are with us who know translanguaging but haven't thought about AI's role in it, how do you see AI supporting translanguaging while also holding the sort of over-translation that can also occur? So of, how do you make sense of that and break it down for folks who may also not be as familiar with the conceptual framework here? Mariana: Yeah. So I want to say that AI is a type of technology, right? So like all technology, it's a tool that we hold. The the most important thing about a tool is the human component. So whether it's AI or any other technology, they talk about AI and a human partnership. We cannot necessarily give AI to a student and leave them alone. Actually, people who are serious about about AI research know that our large language models are not ready for that. What we're doing right now is training them to identify that, and that's where the research is. So that's the the first thing. The second thing is that if we are using AI as a Google or as a translator or those are kind of like the the very first step and we're not, I always think about all the natural resources that we're using for AI. So I'm like, to to be able to make sure we're responsible, we need to think about what are the best times and the best ways to use AI. And I think about AI, for example, in the the training of teachers, right? AI is never going to, or at least I hope it never substitutes the teacher because of that adaptive expertise and the most important piece, which I think is the relationship, that thing that I talked about of assigning competence to student ideas, AI might not be able to do it because they cannot necessarily have that same status in the classroom. But as a teacher, I could use AI, and this is a work that I'm doing with Dr. Shamya Karumbaya and Dr. Diego Roman, and it's just very exciting, where we might use AI to gather the ideas of students. So you can imagine that you have a classroom, you have this really cool science experiment and students are at their tables with a small group talking about it. At that moment, even if your students, all of them speak English, you're not going to be able to be in every single table. So you don't know what ideas there are. So if you want to do this move of assigning competence to people people's ideas, it's going to be really hard. It becomes even harder when students are speaking in a different language or when students are speaking across languages. So they might be translanguaging. So AI has the potential of capturing those ideas and bringing them to the teacher. The teacher still needs to develop the adaptive expertise of using those ideas and bringing them to the to the full classroom and and synthesizing that. But it's a a way to make sure that everybody's participating in the class and everybody's ideas are coming to the teacher. Again, it's an example of a partnership, right? You have the AI who's doing his job, but you have the teacher who has the expertise and is doing the orchestrating and is deciding how they use the knowledge about the students' thinking that they just capture. So that is one example of the use of AI that I feel, okay, it goes beyond just having to translate what what the student is doing. Another example is we're using mixed reality simulations. This idea again that when we prepare our teachers or when we have new teachers, we say, let's practice what you just learned. Go to the classroom, in front of students, be vulnerable, make mistakes, I will, you know, give you feedback. And often, when we do that, even in the best circumstances, maybe the particular thing that they're trying to practice did not happen because students did something else. Or maybe it happened but the teacher missed it. Or maybe it happened but the person who was observing missed it. Or maybe it happened and that's the perfect time for you to give feedback, but you cannot tell everybody, "Everybody, stop. Okay, this is what you should have done. Okay kids, let's go back to five minutes before and do exactly what you just did," right? So the the what many teachers do is the, many teacher educators do is they create these simulations where people pretend to be a teacher and students and other people pretend to be students. And and that gives you more of that, you know, dynamic opportunity. It also gives opportunities for the people who are being students to think about the student's positionality. And so we try to use that and then we're using now mixed reality simulations where you're going in and are interacting with avatars. You know it's not real, but a lot, every single person who has gone into the simulator, which is by the way, kind of like this, a Zoom meeting where I have five student avatars and I interact with them. I'm able to to ask questions and what people have said is like, ooh, it still feels a little, you know, I'm nervous. I get a little anxious about asking the questions. But if you have a coach right there, you can stop the simulation and you can ask questions or you can say, okay, timeout, I need to ask questions. I work with teacher educator Dr. Mark Olson and what he does is he has three future teachers who take turns practicing and they give each other feedback. So now it's not just them thinking about what they're doing, but thinking about what other people are doing. And it's just activating different schema in in your brain and opportunities to to practice different things. Sometimes it's easier to see something when it's in a third space. So there are many different opportunities to use AI in ways that are beyond, I don't want to be redundant, but beyond just the translation. So that's what I'm excited about AI and I'm excited to have teachers and engage in. Brandon: I love that. I am with you. I was thinking about something you said a bit earlier too about the the ability through AI for young people to do translanguaging in a way that feels really natural to them, and that also the teacher then has access to the full depth or a version of the depth of the thought. And I think the same is true peer-to-peer. What happens if I can, I speak Spanglish. I like to, like it's my favorite conversations when we're going to like bounce a little bit and add color in both languages. And what, and that's where I do some of the best, my best work. Like what happens if you, that's the way translanguaging works for you and you get to do that with a peer who may not have the same language skills that you have. It becomes an asset to the conversation. Mariana: Yeah, and if I can build on that, in some cases it might be that they don't have the language yet. And in other cases it might be that that's just the way in which I like to present myself. You know, we present ourselves as learners and we also decide what we value and what we believe is legitimate in the classroom. And we say what is normal, right? In our schools, normal is being monolingual is is speaking English, right? So much that if if someone arrives and they say, hey, I speak five languages, what is the first thing we we we do? We say, "Oh, you speak five languages? Which, wait a second, there might be something wrong with you. Let's test you." right? So there's this normalizing idea that being monolingual is the the status and and not being and being bilingual or multilingual is not. So we've, sometimes I'll have teachers, I also work with dual language programs and sometimes they say, well, around fourth, fifth grade, our students don't want to speak the partner language anymore. And it's connected to this idea of what they're seeing as legitimate. What are, what is the language in which we're they're getting tested, right? This idea of language separation and that only the language that is pure name language, again I'm doing another air quotes, right? That's what counts for learning. So the moment that we're saying, "Yes, use all of your repertoire," and and and make it normal, we're saying not just it's for you to be able to express yourself or your ideas because you don't know enough language, but it's because who you are is welcome as a learner in this classroom. And your language varieties, your the way you communicate is also language for learning. It's not just language for the community. You know, it's not about bringing community and family assets, but making sure that they're assets in the school and that we share them and go back. Going beyond welcoming to saying belonging, right? There's a difference. If I have to to modify things so that people feel welcome, well, that doesn't mean that then they they belong to this place. I'm just doing, doing it as a favor rather than saying, what does my classroom look like if I want my students to belong? How will they feel most comfortable learning and using language? Brandon: I see you so deeply right now. You are speaking my language. It's what I talk about all the time. Yes, it is moving to a place where your whole self belongs. And that is for many of us, a big part of that is language. Brandon: I'm curious for you staying with AI for a little bit. You know, you have found that teachers see potential in AI for real-time language support. That makes me happy. That is what I'm focused on every day. But are, there are cautious and rightly so about bias and overreliance. Can you help me what you're finding a little bit more concrete? What should teachers be looking out for? What should be on folks' radar on the ground, particularly as folks are building their AI policy for the next academic year, etc? Mariana: Yeah. Well, I think that people need to be thinking about what does responsible use of AI mean and then, well, developing what I would call AI literacy. Right, there's such thing as AI literacy, thinking about how do I recognize AI? I don't know if you you remember, well, you're very young, but when the internet started, it was like really, people were really worried that people were going to read things and they were going to believe that everything was truth. We are kind of in the same place and what we want to develop are critical skills. Now, AI is a different beast because it's advancing so fast, right? Getting myself as a teacher comfortable. I we work with a school, with a teacher in a suburban district and also in rural schools, but the suburban district teacher said, "You know, AI is here. It's already here. So we can pretend that it's out there and that we're not letting it come into our classrooms, or we just jump into the pool and we're in the middle of it, we get comfortable with it and we understand it better." So I think the first step, if I'm a teacher and I'm a little worried, I need to myself become more comfortable with it so that I can know what I'm talking about. And there's so many uses of AI. It's, we usually use quantitative data to talk about students' progress just because it would be so hard to read through all of my notes of all my students. Well, guess what? Now we have AI. We can bulk all that information and identify and and learn more about what students can do in ways that don't only privilege quantitative data. So I could use it for data management, right? I could also do it, you know, I can use it for translation, but I have to be careful as to when, why, how do I move through it? What is the purpose, right? If my purpose is to to learn something in the moment, I can use it. But if the student is using it all the time, then they're they're not just relying on it, which is what I hear a lot of teachers say, but they're also socially isolating themselves from other students. So to me, that's more important than than the than the language, you know? Because eventually in the long term, the language will be learned through the relationships they form. So finding opportunities where students have to have a productive struggle with language are just as important. So measuring that. And then thinking about how do I help my students not be scared of it, but but think critically about it and and then use it in in ways that are productive. And like I said before, I think teachers need a good time, a good enough opportunity to learn it. So if I were an administrator, I would be thinking, how am I going to help my students my teachers feel more comfortable before we even create policies around it. Like we can create guidelines, and then with the teachers, once they understand it better, jointly create those guidelines. Because yeah, it's here, like yesterday, so we need to be Brandon: I'm always, I'm fascinated by this and listen, I do this in other parts of my life, so this is me finger wagging but also knowing that I hold hold the same behavior. I think it's human. But I've watched often times, you know, with AI, educators who I know and I love who have really strong opinions, and then I'm like, okay, which what are you using? What are you doing? They're like, oh no, I don't even touch it. And I think, you know, it's the fear of the unknown. And we have that, listen, parallel process with our kids. I've had many a student who were like, "Oh no, I can't do it before they've tried." And I think you you nailed it. It is about really spending time exploring it, understanding with it, allowing the interactions to help you form opinions about the use case, not just the sort of boliche of what you know, AI is or isn't, you know? Like really allowing that to be part of the the way that you're understanding it. And I was also really struck by something else you said, and thinking about that move from, I don't know, the Dewey Decimal system to searching the web for content and information. We have learned some valuable lessons. Did it increase access to research and books and text and content for many kids? Absolutely. We had kids who were going to schools without libraries. So this really changed things. And at the same time, did it widen opportunity gaps? Yes. And the same will be true with AI unless we're really intentional, right? Unless we're like, okay, where are the opportunities to deepen learning and where are the the big holes, the potholes that I can step in that are going to actually lower rigor, reduce cognitive demand, excel opportunity for kids who are closer to spheres of success and reduce opportunity for my students who have had a different journey. Mariana: Thank you for mentioning the the divide between the the haves and have nots, right? Because even with computers and with a lot of the technology, it's usually like those divides get get bigger. So if I'm a teacher and I'm concerned about my students' wellbeing and success, it behooves me to engage in in in learning myself and not like perpetuating this fearmonger about this. Now, I'm not saying that you should not go, I mean, you should go in with some, you know, concern, with caution, Brandon: Healthy skepticism. Mariana: Yeah, and and a good critical lens, right? I always think about teaching is not a neutral activity, right? It's sociopolitical. If you read critical pedagogy, I mean from Paulo Freire, what they all say is that in order for for us to to be good educators, we really need to understand the reality, the sociopolitical reality of students. And so technology is just another part of it. So yeah, there's Lilia Bartolome is one of my favorite people in the world. And I really, she talks about this idea about a about ideological clarity. Susana Johnson built on that to talk about pedagogical clarity. And this idea of clarity is like, how do we align our beliefs, our values to the practices that we have? So whether it's AI, whether it's language, whether it's translanguaging, all of these ideas come and if I'm a teacher, I'm just seeing this new language and all these things come. And I can either just go ahead and try them all, or I can be a little more critical and say, how do these work and how do they work for my students? For in order to do that, I need to know who my students are, understand the communities where I work, and understand their talents. And and then I can start doing the match and saying like, yep, I'm taking this. No, I'm going to wait on that. So, I don't think there's a one answer for all teachers because all teachers are different and the students that they serve are different. And guess what? Every year you get new students. So you get to try it all again. So developing that critical consciousness, developing that pedagogical clarity, that alignment is is, I think it's, one of the most important things in becoming and continuing to become a teacher throughout our careers. Brandon: You're bringing me so much joy and I and I love the way that you, the tenderness in which you talk about educators and think about their work and their practice. I'm going back to what I was holding at the beginning of our conversation was this like curiosity that is the sort of the magical part of teacher development. Like if we create space for that versus the like, this is how you get it done. Like really exploring how do I get it done. The same is true here, right? It's like, how do I, how how can I use it and what is the sort of practice I want to build into it? I I also was thinking about, you know, it's like what are the the broader goals? You know, as I've been building AI tools for multilingual learners, I am like laser focused on language development and what I want the skills, and the skills for young people to build as their proficiency level grows. Like what are the scaffolds that get removed. But I'm also very, you know, at the same time, yes, and I'm also deeply concerned about belonging. How do I make sure you have all the stuff you need to feel like this is, you are part of this community. And I'm deeply concerned with disrupting learned helplessness, like this the process that happens for so many of us when language is the barrier that we sort of wait for help versus I think what you were talking about, that empowered student who's like, I belong here. I have the social capital to ask questions, to get my get my needs met immediately. How can AI help disrupt that feeling too? And I'm holding all of that. Yeah. Mariana: Well, and you hold it all, right? Because there's no one path. And kids need to be autonomous and kids need to like that scaffold is important and then sometimes you need flexibility. So that's what I was talking when I talk about adaptive expertise. We have such a complex job, right? And really what leads us are the students. Any sort of tools that we can provide teachers to get ideas, to get inspired, to make this really complex tough job easier is invaluable. Brandon: I agree. Brandon: You've been in the field for 30 years. You know, honestly, what's your assessment of where technology has actually moved the needle for multilingual learners versus where it's been a distraction or a shiny object. And we're, I think people are thinking a lot about that in relationship to education technology. I think for all students, people rarely design just for our kids, but where has it been helpful and where has it, where has it hurt? Mariana: You know, I think it's similar to the conversation that we've had. Technology is a tool. We cannot necessarily blame technology. Right? When we got computers, you know, when we got calculators, think back or when we got the the the printing press, it's funny, sometimes I I love to read like what people used to think, like, oh, now people are going to be reading and wasting time reading, right? So it's in how we we help because you can also spend a lot of time reading, you know, stuff that is not useful. But it's like how do we use that technology to to really engage us in critical thinking, in developing that that critical stance. So I would like to take that question and and think about where have we not leveraged technology appropriately. The times where we haven't is being when we're scared, when we are not taking risks, and when we are not, maybe we're just taking a little sliver of everything that technology can can provide us, right? When when you first learn to use computers and you learn word processing, okay, that becomes it. But if you just use it as a word processor and you don't use Excel spreadsheets and you don't use Google forms, it's like you're not doing enough of it, right? And and no matter how much information you find in the internet, you still need to critically think about it and how you're going to use it and which ones are you going to use and which ones are you going to leave behind. So I think at every time, it's really been us who have, when we haven't been able to to use technology appropriate, and then we it's easier to blame it on technology. Brandon: I did not think this is what you were going to say and I I am thrilled that you said it. I agree with you. I'm always holding that, you know, a great use case for technology in schools is if it brings people closer together. And so like if this reduces something here, a workload so that I can focus on dialogue with my kids here. If this increases my ability to get a sentence stem so that I can turn and talk to my peer and engage in that immediate conversation. Does this, if does it allow me to write faster versus handwriting? Does that video support me as an adaptive tool, right? Mariana: Yeah. Brandon: Does it bring me closer to belonging? Does it bring me closer to, I'm going to use your word, to bring you closer to community. Mariana: And it's on us, right? It's it's like we really need to plan for it. So we can't let it happen, you know, we can't just stand still and say, "Okay, something is going to happen or kids are going to start using it." We need to really engage with it. and engage with students, think critically about what is it that I want to give the the autonomy of students to so that they can use AI so they can use technology, and what do I still need to hold? Like those relationships you talked about. Yeah. Brandon: Before I let you go, because we are in parallel process with our educators, what's something or someone you're learning from right now? Mariana: Oh my goodness. You know, I am spending a lot of time learning from my kids these days. I very lucky, I'm the proud mother of three children and they've put me in my place sometimes and sometimes they expand my horizons and I just love learning from them. My youngest one is telling me about sailing and my oldest one is telling me about social justice and my middle child is teaching me about technology. So I'm very lucky. I have three amazing teachers that I'm learning a lot from. Brandon: It sounds like, I'm really holding this, you have built a strong community for learning. Mariana: Yes, I have. Brandon: Mariana, it's been great to have you on. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch? Mariana: Well, they can find me at the University of Wisconsin. They can they should come, especially during the summer, but they can also email me if they feel comfortable with doing that. And my my name is my email: mariana.castro and at Wisc, which is for Wisconsin, .edu. Brandon: Amazing. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode of Leading Multilingual Learning and thanks Mariana for the great conversation. We will see you next time on Leading Multilingual Learning, powered by Medley Learning.