Andrea Bitner: I think that secondary learners that come in who are not literate, not just in their first language, but also in English, are some of our most at risk kids. There are a lot of times the kids dropping outta school because they aren’t feeling success in the academic setting. So really finding ways to, to change your lens, to get trained, to team up with people, to find out about that student’s literacy in their first language.

Talk to the student about what their goals are moving forward so you can tailor your programming to those needs, I think would help with their success. 

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m Mandi Morris, your host. Today’s conversation was with Andrea Bitner and what an incredible conversation it was. She is truly inspirational, and I am sure you’re gonna enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Andrea is actively teaching students in kindergarten through eighth grade, also authoring books and co-authoring books and traveling the nation to support teachers.

It is an inspirational conversation and she is just. Oozing [00:01:00] positivity all the way throughout. I was just amazed by everything that she’s doing and after 25 years in the world of education, just the a level of positivity she still has about the work that she’s doing. She also wanted us to share that she has a free newsletter that she sends out weekly.

You can register for that newsletter. Um, you can click on the link in our YouTube description and that newsletter is. Build weekly with scaffold instructional resources and other great tools that you can utilize in your classroom. I know that you’ll enjoy this conversation today. Let’s go. 

Mandi Morris: Today’s guest is Andrea Bitner, an ELL, educator, international author and speaker. 24 years in K 12 education and a master’s degree in reading K 12. Andrea has helped students from around the world thrive in US schools. Andrea authored Take Me Home, a true story of her students’ bilingual journeys and was a contributor to Rick Jitters 100 things.

All school [00:02:00] leaders should stop doing Dr. Darren Pepper’s, culture First Classrooms, and a contributor to Dr. Hans Field’s instructional support techs. Andrea now travels nationwide empowering educators to confidently teach EL students and connect with their families. Andrea, welcome to the ML Chat podcast.

Thank you for being here today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Andrea, you are a busy person. You’re in a classroom right now just to set the setting, and I’m reading through this list of books that you’ve authored, knowing it’s not even everything that you’ve authored. What are you working on right now?

I’m super excited to share that. I have a new text that’s coming out this month in October, and it’s based on another true story that I’ve experienced with students of mine, and it’s called When Niagara Falls. And it’s the true story of a young girl who learns that sometimes being the most resilient, or I should say, having the most [00:03:00] resilience, lets you learn that you need to ask for help.

Andrea Bitner: And so I’m really excited for the world to see this story. It is a little bit different than Take Me Home, for example. It is a compilation of a true story. It has illustrations, it’s geared toward middle and high school students, and to be used and taught in classrooms. In addition to that, it’s got some poetry, a section of poetry that has some perspective poetry from the people in the story, as well as some gratitude letters to teachers at the end.

So it’s really just truly a story of resilience and we’re excited for people to read it. Oh, that sounds really exciting. So you stay very busy between teaching, traveling, writing. Tell us more about what does your world look like right now? What is on your plate? What role are you in? We’d love to just dig into what does your work look like day to day?

So I am a proud English language learner teacher. I’ve been in education now coming on my 25th year. I currently work with [00:04:00] students in grades K through eight who are English language learners. I come from a district about 15 minutes south of the Philadelphia airport. We have about 31 languages represented here in our district and hundreds of students that we work with on a daily basis.

So in addition to teaching daily, once or twice a month, I get to travel the country and I get to go out and help teachers learn how to confidently reach, teach, collaborate, and struck English language learners with a lens that I think many of them. Haven’t received training in. And so for the past four years, I’ve got to do that work outside of teaching at school.

And one more thing to add to my plate, which I’m having a lot of fun with, is I’m teaching at the higher end level. I’m teaching a class of future teachers on inclusive classrooms in addition to writing this book and working with a daily weekly newsletter. Oh my goodness. Wow. That is an impressive list.

Mandi Morris: I am just amazed that you’re able to do all of those things. It sounds like you have a ton of passion about the work that you’re doing. What is it like [00:05:00] teaching future teachers? It’s so much fun. I have to tell you, the future is bright. We, I’ve got a group of about 15 to 20 teachers right now, and they come from all walks of life.

Andrea Bitner: I have people who are second career teachers in the class. I have people that are bright-eyed and bushy tailed, 18, 19 years old, just starting out. I have paraprofessionals who are becoming teachers in the class, but they are super excited and it’s really just refreshing to see. Being in my 25th year now, I’m on that veteran side of the spectrum, but just to see their ideas and the way that they want to help kids, and it’s really in my honor to get to spend time with them on the weekends, working with them to prepare.

Mandi Morris: Wow. What an incredible opportunity and experience for both the students in your class to be able to work with a veteran teacher, work with someone who is also an author and has had all of these incredible life experiences related to education. I’m sure they’re benefiting a ton from that experience with you.

So take us back in time. [00:06:00] What brought you into education? So I started deciding, I think that I wanted to be a teacher back when I was. Probably a junior in high school. Some people go into education. It’s later in life, like I mentioned earlier, or a second career. But I think that I always knew I wanted to be a teacher pretty early on.

Andrea Bitner: But what really inspired me to become a teacher was two teachers that I had, who I found to be just a phenomenal environment to be in, to be around, to learn from in school. And they were Valerie Schulman and Jim Donnelly. And Val Schulman was the first person that ever gave me the confidence to think I could teach too.

She told me at the time, you’re a great writer, but you seem to relate to your peers and your teachers. You have a passion for the topic, you know you should teach. And I thought, oh, that’s great. And then Jim Donnelly was the most exciting teacher I ever had. He literally used to jump on desks and run around the room, and he was just really engaging and motivating.

And my entire class used to skip Jim to [00:07:00] study for his test. Because we were just so dedicated to doing well for Mr. Donnelly because he always performed so well for us, if that makes sense. And so they were two teachers. I think that really pushed me to think that I could do that. But I do wanna add that I didn’t start out as an English language learner teacher.

I started out as a high school English teacher, and I was bright-eyed and bushy tailed outta Westchester University. And I had come off a really moderate, I would say, to Easy Teach student teaching experience. And I was hired over the weekend when I graduated and I went to a local school where I had the toughest kids in the building.

They were freshmen who hated school, and it couldn’t figure out for weeks that I would go home crying and thinking, why don’t they like school? I’m trying so hard. My student teaching was so easy, right? And so what I realized pretty quickly is that they were students who hated school because they were freshmen who didn’t know how to read.

It motivated me enough to go back to school and become a reading specialist because I felt unequipped. I thought, I know how to be an [00:08:00] ELA teacher. I know how to teach them all the great novels, but what happens when they don’t know how to read them? They can’t decode them. And so I spent time with those kids and I kept teaching and I became a reading specialist.

And then I went on to teach middle school students in Title one reading programs and elementary students and Title one reading programs. And that’s when I started to get English language learners in my groups. And then I felt that same feeling again. I’m feeling unequipped. I’m not sure how to work with English language learners in a successful way.

And so fast forward, I went back to school, had all my training done in the EL world, and really I would say coming up on 19 of my 25 years I’ve been in the support world. I’ve been working as an English language learner teacher, title one reading specialist, sometimes a little bit of both. Wow. That’s what a, an interesting journey, and it sounds like you really followed your passion throughout your career and it sounds like you’re a curious person that loves to learn as well.

Mandi Morris: I’d love for you to go back for a moment to the experience of. Teaching freshmen and [00:09:00] realizing that you have freshmen who don’t know how to read, and that sparked something in you to go back and further your own learning and own education. Now, at this point in your career, how do you see that? How do you see the work of students in secondary English learners in particular who don’t know how to read and how do you see that work being.

What’s being done right now in the field of education to support those students? I think that if I could tell my younger self something when I first started out, yes, it did spark an interest to me, and yes, I wanted to go back to school to teach them how to do it. But what I would tell that teacher now is make sure you know how to team up because you cannot solve.

Andrea Bitner: All of the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs of a student and their family by yourself. So I would say know in your building, where are those supports? Who are your reading specialists in the building? Who are your math specialists? [00:10:00] Who are your counselors? Are there opportunities virtually or in person to support those students?

Can you ask for additional training? The virtual world has opened up so many opportunities now for educators to go and get what were Orton-Gillingham trained, for example, so that I feel prepared for any student at any grade level that walks into my building to what I call the lens, to use the lens of a reading specialist and be able to teach those students a life skill because they need to know how to read.

And I think that. You can’t have success alone. No one in this education world has success alone. So try to really start to collaborate with all of the people in your building so that student can feel success. And I think that secondary learners that come in who are not literate, not just in their first language, but also in English, are some of our most at-risk kids.

There are a lot of times the kids dropping outta school because they aren’t feeling success in the academic setting. So really finding [00:11:00] ways to, to change your lens, to get trained, to team up with people, to find out about that student’s literacy in their first language. Talk to the student about what their goals are moving forward so you can tailor your programming to those needs, I think would help with their success.

Mandi Morris: And what I’ve observed as well is that. Not only are those students at such high risk of dropping out of school, feeling unsuccessful in school, the teachers responsible for those students also often feel at a loss and feel frustrated, overwhelmed, ill-equipped to do the job at hand, but especially content teachers in secondary, you know, you’ll.

Here, I know my content. I know how to be a, an English teacher. I know how to be a science teacher. I don’t know how to teach literacy. I don’t know how to teach phonics to a 10th grader. When teachers are confronted with the hard facts, the hard reality of having students who need to learn how to read in high school, [00:12:00] where would you recommend that teacher go first to get help?

Andrea Bitner: I think that there are many accommodations you can put in place because we’ve all had students who have come in at secondary levels who are not, not literate in their first language or in English, right, when a lot of them have had interrupted education or trauma that has happened to them. And I think that you have to start to think of, okay, in the terms of reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Where are these students’ strengths and how can I play on them right now? Because long term they’re going to grow, their skills are going to grow. The accommodations you put in place are not what I say, like the end all, be all. They’re what they need right now to be successful. So for example, could I offer them the audio option?

Could I allow them to have the book in front of them and run the captions in a YouTube video along the bottom? Could I get them access to a reading specialist in the building to get them enrolled in support services? Could I provide visual supports and [00:13:00] at times translatable options that are read to them in audio in both languages so they could access the information that could go on and on.

But you wanna start with meeting with your English language learner teacher and finding out where are the students’ strengths, reading, writing, listening, and speaking. What can I expect them to be able to do? Where can I play into planning for my lessons to access those strengths in order to see them learn?

And your EL teacher, I always say, holds the key often to all of that information because they have the reports, they have the background, they have the school they’ve came to prior. They can let you know if they have foundational skills and what they might be so that teachers don’t feel so lost and so defeated.

I can’t tell you how many times. I’ve talked to teachers around the country where they’ll say, Andrea, I don’t even know who my English learners are in the building, let alone what their literacy skills are. That’s a challenge. So really being intentional about finding your EL teacher or if you’re an administrator, [00:14:00] listening, being intentional about creating time for your EL teachers in the beginning of the year to meet with your content area teachers, I think will really help them feel better equipped.

Mandi Morris: Collaboration is so important, building those relationships. I also, something that you just said earlier about the supports the scaffolds students get, they’re not there forever. It takes a lot of intentionality as a teacher to know when to insert what scaffolds and then when to remove those scaffolds.

And I like that concept as well of. Some as teachers, we feel this pressure, especially at the secondary level that I have so little time with this student and I have to do so much. But giving yourself grace to say, these are the scaffolds the student needs right now to access this material. These don’t have to be the same scaffolds forever.

They won’t look the same in six. As they do right now. They might not even look the same in three weeks as those scaffolds do right now, but giving yourself the grace to [00:15:00] play with scaffolds, to experiment with scaffolds, see what works, see what engages the student, and accept that those are going to change as the student progresses on their own language journey, on their own content and vocabulary journey.

Andrea Bitner: I think so. And I think it’s also important to talk to the students. At, at especially at the secondary level. How are these scaffolds working for you? What am I doing that’s supportive to you? What do you think might be helpful to you in the future? I have had a front row seat at many of my secondary students, content area, classroom subjects, where I was a collaborative teacher teaching alongside every single day.

I got to see how our accommodations are working. By the way, I also got to see what pieces of the lesson the student might need them to be implemented in. And it’s not every second, every day, the entire lesson. So you, that’s why I always go back to where are their strengths. Where are there areas of need and where can I plug scaffolds in that will decrease over [00:16:00] time to support them?

Mandi Morris: Andrea, right now you are supporting English learners in a K through eight setting. That is a big caseload. You are having to develop supports for so many different grade levels, I’m guessing all proficiency levels. Tell us a little bit about how, what does your schedule look like? How are you managing to support students in so many different spaces?

So like many EL teachers around the country, I travel. And so I literally jump groups every 30 minutes. I could be from with kindergartners, and then a half an hour later on with eighth graders, and then a half an hour later on with second graders. And then I’m back to seventh graders. And every year the schedule changes depending on when are the appropriate times to support the students throughout the day.

Andrea Bitner: And I’m in two different buildings every day. So we build in travel time as well. Yes, it is. I lovingly call it in some senses, island living because you are on your own, right, and you’re traveling from place to place, grade level to grade level, proficiency level to [00:17:00] proficiency level, and that’s important to mention too.

Within my seventh graders, I have two different groups because I have students that are intermediate and I have students who are newcomers. And so I do think that it’s important to be organized. I think that it’s important to have great relationships with the teams that you’re working with. I think it’s important to always keep a pulse on how the classroom environments are in terms of not just for the kids, but the teachers too.

As I walk into every room throughout the day, whether I’m pushing in to support students or I’m flex grouping within the room, or we’re taking, going out to a different room, how the teacher doing that day, because you can get that read when you walk into a room. And so I think that in addition to organization, it’s important to have a curriculum that is.

Able to be differentiated, able to support the different needs of different students in different grade levels and able to be at what their proficiency levels are in terms of curriculum needs. So for example, we use Vista Higher Learning [00:18:00] and it’s all digital based, which is great as well as a traveling teacher.

So I’ve got my laptop with me all day. I’ve got probably eight different tabs up, right? But we’ve got projectable boards in the small group settings I’m in, and I’m constantly switching all day long to those different things. Wow. What is something that you are really excited about right now in your instruction or something that you’re doing with students that you just feel like this is fun.

Mandi Morris: It’s bringing joy. Students are enjoying it. I’m enjoying it. We would love to hear some about what’s something that you just, you know, you wanna share. That’s just been fun. You know what? I’m having a lot of fun this year infusing more, I think, engagement activities into my lessons than ever. And I do wanna give a shout out to Jonathan Heimer.

Andrea Bitner: He’s an educator based here on the East coast who wrote a great book called School of Engagement, and in that book, our 40 go to use Tomorrow practical activities that you could infuse engagement into any lesson. And so I’ve just been [00:19:00] having a great time. Like for example, yesterday I was with my middle schoolers and we were doing this back to back with whiteboards, and we were talking about hominems and flipping around and giving each other the different words and flipping back.

And they were laughing and I was laughing. And it’s just great to see that joy doesn’t just come from technology, if that makes sense. But we live in a fast paced, on demand kind of world, and a lot of kids are looking for those dopamine hits and that technology base all day. But using a text like that for me this year, as, as you mentioned earlier, I love learning, but when I signed up to be a teacher, I didn’t sit in that interview chair and say, I’m never going to change.

I’m never gonna learn anything new, and I’m not willing to try. I sat in that interview chair and said, I’m excited about the journey I have ahead and I’m willing to go with the one thing that’s constant in education, which is change. And so with that in mind, I wanted to keep learning about engagement activities and strategies and things.

And what I like about that is that those strategies can be used with any grade level. Oh, that’s so [00:20:00] fun. I love that. It sounds like. It such an engaging experience that you had with your students, and that’s where the real learning happens, right? Like when you reflect back on your high school teacher that you remember so fondly, he was fun.

Mandi Morris: You had a relationship with him, you wanted to work hard because you appreciated him and you wanted to do well in his class. You wanted to show up because he was showing up, and I love to hear from you. That feels so full circle that you are. Even traveling around from building to building, supporting K through eight, you are still finding creative ways to get engaged, get your students up out of their seats, moving, experimenting with language.

It’s just really, honestly very inspirational. 25 years in and you’ve got a tough schedule that you are just having a lot of fun with your students and I’m sure that they adore you. Oh, I appreciate that. We are having a lot of fun. And the one thing I think I’ve learned in education. Is that kids don’t really care about how much you [00:21:00] know until they know how much you care.

Andrea Bitner: And if you don’t have relationships with students, kids don’t work for people they don’t like. And I think that’s in any setting in the adult world or in the kid world. But it’s important, like you’re saying, for those reasons to establish that. That’s such a good call out. I wonder, when we think about relationship with students, we think about relationship with families, what advice could you give to teachers that might feel maybe feeling tired, maybe feeling burned out, maybe feeling, I’ve got this pacing guide and my district is just on me, that I have to stick with this pacing guide.

Mandi Morris: I don’t know how to find the joy in this job right now where I am feeling really stressed about external factors that I have no control over. What would you say to those teachers? What advice could you give them? I think that a lot of times you have to go back to remember why you got into this profession in the first place.

Andrea Bitner: Like I mentioned earlier, the one thing that’s constant in education is change. And the longer you are in [00:22:00] this field of work, the more you see change occur. But sometimes it’s really just the same thing, being called something different and, but you also have to embrace the idea that you should always be a learner.

Yes, those pacing guides will be there and we have it in our district and the curriculum and the stress and the burnout. But learn to lean on the people in your building that you know you enjoy working with. Try to find those small moments of joy with kids because you know you are the reason that they come to school.

I always try to remind myself of kids had a choice to show up in my classroom. Would they show up? I always try to make myself think of my lessons that way. I think of my day that way. I can’t control the pacing guides, I can’t control the upper administration’s decisions. I’ve read. Let them This year that by Mel Robbins.

That has been very helpful. My district, we actually did a PL study, uh, see study on it with our teachers over the summer. That’s been very helpful to let go of the things right that you can’t control. But what you can control is the thermometer in your classroom. What you [00:23:00] can control is the environment you create for kids, and if you remind yourself why you got into this profession that kids are depending on you to show up and to lean on the people around you, I think that might help you sustain it a little longer.

Mandi Morris: I love that your school district did a book study with that book. That is so fun. And what an incredible opportunity for teachers to be able to. Yeah, come together and collaborate and support. And something else that you said was finding the people in your building that you want to connect with. That’s a piece I honestly miss a ton about being in a school building.

Are my friends at work working remote now? Everything is on a Zoom screen, and I miss that passing in the hallway and connecting and grabbing a coffee every once in a while when you shared a planning period with your friend. And you have to lean into those relationships because it does. Brighten your day and how cool to do that book for a book study with your colleagues.

I think that’s a really powerful opportunity. [00:24:00] It really was, because a lot of times as teachers, we spend so much time learning about our students and learning about strategies, right? And learning about curriculums and like you were mentioning, pacing guides and how to improve our craft and, but a lot of times, like we learned and let them, it’s really great to take a step back and examine yourself.

Andrea Bitner: And examine how you respond to things and what’s helpful to you to move forward in your path and how to let others do what they’re going to do and not feel like you need a sense of control with it. Right? And so it really let us reflect on ourselves for a summer, which ultimately helps us be better teachers.

Mandi Morris: A hundred percent. You can’t fill up and hold up others if you are empty, and teachers often are so focused on. Taking care of everyone around them, all of the students feeling the burden of meeting the needs of students and families and a district and their colleagues, and the curriculum that [00:25:00] teachers, I think aren’t really as a career path.

It attracts a lot of people that we’re really good at giving of ourselves, but not always very good at taking care of ourselves and filling up our own bucket. I think that’s just such incredible advice. Andrea, and we could talk about this all day. You have to get back to your teaching responsibilities.

You’re, you’re in the building right now. Is there anything you could leave us with, you already shared going back in your career, advice you’d give yourself as a younger teacher? I wonder. You also shared a great book with us that other people that’ll let them, that people could go and read to, to do some reflection on taking care of yourself.

I’m wondering what else is on your mind right now in the world of education in the next couple of minutes that we have together, what are you feeling really positive about when you think forward in education in the upcoming years? I think what I’m really feeling positive about is that, especially in the English language learner world.

Andrea Bitner: There is a sense of urgency [00:26:00] and there is a sense of determination from EL teachers all around the country to help support content area teachers in collaboration with how to increase competence in reaching teaching, collaborating, communicating with families, engaging students so that they can have more success, and the English language learner population is exploding across this country.

Schools are reaching out for help, and I think that’s promising because there are probably about a dozen great people around the country that I know that are doing this work, but there are thousands of English language learner teachers lined up right behind them who are in their buildings day to day.

In the trenches. Supporting kids, supporting teachers, supporting families, and I only see our programming, our curriculums, and these amazing young, bilingual kids coming out of buildings who can communicate in multiple modalities around [00:27:00] the world as the product of it. And so I’m just really positive about the fact that I get to be a part of this community.

I get to not only be in my school every day, but what I say is get outside of my bubble. Go see other places and support teachers in the same fashion, and continue to do that in lots of ways. What a wonderful way to end our conversation today. Andrea, this has been such a pleasure to talk with you today.

Mandi Morris: I feel so positive and energized. I’m excited for our listeners to be able to leave this podcast today feeling the same. Thank you for joining us on the ML Chat podcast.