Dr. Marlowe Cross: [00:00:00] Hold all of your students to high expectations. They can do this even when things are hard. They can do hard things. They might need different supports to get there, but they can do it and don’t lower your expectations just because a student is an ML [00:01:00] student.

Justin Hewett:  Hey everybody. Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m your host Justin Hewett, and I have a treat for you today. I’ve got Jonathan Auld and Dr. Marlowe Cross from the Metro Nashville Public School District. They are district EL coaches and today they join me and we talk about integrating language through content.

They presented on this at the WIDA conference this last year and had a wonderful, way to talk about it and think through it. We did a role play where they treated me as a social studies teacher that. Isn’t, so hip on integrating language into my content. And I just thought they did a wonderful job unpacking that, talking to that.

British native educator, Jonathan Auld, has over 20 years of ESL and multilingual learner experience, currently a district EL coach. He has taught in the US. And internationally, including Japan, Venezuela, South Korea, and Mexico. He regularly presents at the WIDA conference and holds his degrees from the University of Plymouth and a master’s from Nashville in elementary education and ESL.

We also have with us Dr. Marlowe Cross, who is an EL coach with over 14 years of experience in language development across grades five through 12. She specializes in high school supporting all content areas, including math and career and [00:02:00] technical education. Dr. Cross received her Bachelor’s of Arts in Secondary Education and English with an endorsement in K 12 ESL, her Master’s in Teaching and Learning in Urban Schools, and her EDD in learning and leadership in organizations, all from Vanderbilt University.

Marlo and Jonathan, we are so excited to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining us here on the ML Chat podcast. We’re gonna have some fun today. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Thank you for having us. 

Justin Hewett: Great to be here. All right, let’s, let’s hop in. I know that we learned about you from some of your presentations at the WIDA conference, and recently you just, you presented on integrating content, integrating language through content.

Let’s go back though at the beginning. How long have the two of you been working together and how did you get to know each other? 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: So I started, I think John and I actually started in metro schools in Nashville at the same time, 2011. And John became a coach, an EL coach before I did, I think by one year.[00:03:00] 

Jon Auld: 2018. Yeah. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yes. And so my first year coaching, I had a different, they had the title at the time was a mentor coach, someone to help me learn the ropes for coaching, and then my second year coaching. And since then, so the last. Five, four year. Five years. John has been my mentor coach and has been helping me just hone my coaching skills.

We meet periodically so that I can get some support in my role. 

Jon Auld: I Fantastic. I think we are both pretty creative people and really just thinking about projects, action research projects that we could do together, collaborate just to really help students and teachers. I 

Justin Hewett: love that. That is so great. How interesting that you both started with Metro National in 2011 and then here now you’re both coaches in 2018 and 2019 and move into that role.

That’s fantastic. In some districts, they might not have a, a coach like you are and some sometimes that becomes the other duties as assigned to some degree of an EL coordinator. EL [00:04:00] director. Do you mind unpacking a little bit of just. Maybe what the organization looks like in Metro Nashville and what your role is and how you work with schools, how that’s broken up.

Just to give us a little bit of background. 

Jon Auld: So I’ll try and keep this really short. So we have 85,000 students in Metro Nashville public schools, and about 20,000 of those are students who are receiving active hours of English service, which is one hour per day. And so we have a ton of schools. We actually have an office of English learners, which has about 15 or 16 district coaches, and then some schools.

Large schools, meaning they have large populations of English learners have budgeted for an in-house building based EL instructional coach. So we have, this year, we’ve had about almost equal 15 of those as well. Very diverse school district. Spanish is the big language, most spoken, but then we have Arabic, we [00:05:00] have the.

Largest diaspora, Kurdish speaking people outside of Iraq and that northern area of Iraq and Syria and Turkey. So just a really interesting place that people might not realize Nashville is. 

Justin Hewett: And Nashville is a wonderful place to be and to visit and it, and I think a lot of people don’t realize how diverse it’s.

It sounds like there’s some wonderful diversity that you have in your district and how neat to have these different pockets of different cultures and people, and so what, when you’re working, how many schools maybe are you responsible for each, and what does your kind of day to day look like? If you don’t mind unpacking that.

I. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Sure. So I am a building level building based coach. Okay. So I am only at my school every day, which is really great because we have one in three of our students here are active English learner and about half are non-English language background. And so that means basically if you teach at our school, you’re going to have an active English learner in your room.

And. Not everybody comes [00:06:00] to us with the skills to, to teach them. And so it’s really nice to not have to be sharing. If I were a district-based coach, I would have multiple schools, so I wouldn’t be able to be with those teachers daily as a resource. So it’s really a great thing that they can come to me, I can be in classrooms and build relationships with teachers just specific to this building because my building just has such a high.

Need for somebody to be here every day. 

Justin Hewett: And so what does that look like for you on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. You’re coaching teachers, maybe you’re working with them, but what does that actually mean, mark? 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Every day is a little bit different. It can range. I would say in a typical day I would be doing some form of data analysis at some point.

We have a lot of ongoing benchmark data or looking at data from the past years. Specifically thinking about our multilingual learners subgroups. I’m just trying to think through ways that we can support them. That’s a good chunk of my day. I also work directly with teachers on one-on-one coaching cycles where we’re goal setting and then going into phase two where I’m actually in their classroom [00:07:00] watching or co-teaching with them, and then debriefing that as well.

And then I also work with in collaborative planning with. Teacher teams. So this year I’ve worked very closely with math, so integrate. We have integrated math here, one, two, and three. So that’s our freshman through junior math classes and also with our World History group. That’s been a close support this year as well.

So there’s a lot of just how can I support a whole team of teachers? What are some strategies I can share with them? Planning professional development or leading professional development. Those are the typical. Day-to-day pieces and then occasionally meetings of course, and and just supporting teachers with individualized learning plans for their EL students and helping them understand who their multilingual learner students are in their class and how to best serve them.

Justin Hewett: You are so nice to unpack that for me, like you gave it all. I love it. That is fantastic. And I think it’s just so important. It’s actually, as you’re talking through that it becomes relatively easy for me to see. How you could [00:08:00] become that much more passionate over time and just understand the importance of.

Integrating language through content, working with all of these different teachers, and so I’m excited to unpack that and talk to that a bit. But it’s neat to see all those skills to come together. Those are some lucky kids that get to have you advocate for them in that building and working with all of those teachers.

That is really cool. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Excellent teachers in our school as well. 

Justin Hewett: Yeah, that is so cool. And John, what, how different is it when you’re a district coach Yeah. And kinda working that way? What, what are some of the similarities and differences compared to That’s great questions. I 

Jon Auld: provide another layer of support.

So the last few years I’ve really been supporting. Schools which have invested in this building based EL coach. So I work closely with them to collaborate with them on a variety of things, be it co-coaching. Professional development is definitely a big one. Oftentimes they might need someone external myself to come and do professional development, so I will do that.

I work with the. Instructional [00:09:00] leadership teams on doing walk, walk, visiting classrooms, walkthroughs, providing feedback to teachers, and then lots of district based projects, which are, for example, AI is a big one right now. So I’m involved in representing our EL department in AI and helping to make sure we have guidelines and procedures in place for rolling that out in a safe way.

If I think about the last week specifically, a great example I’ve been doing one of the, another big high school I support is really wanting to hear from students and doing some videoing to be specifically newcomer students who have been in the country less than a year, and really trying to video them in their first language about how they’re integrating into school life in order to build out some professional development for the school to help.

The cultural competency of the whole faculty. So that’s something I’ve just been doing the last week. So my job’s like very different every week, every day, and I love that novelty. 

Justin Hewett: Yeah, that sounds like a fun [00:10:00] project too, when you think about these different cultures and these students that are going through experience of experiences of coming to a new country and there is just so much new.

I love that you’re capturing that in their heritage language so they can kind of really speak freely, speak directly, and speak to it. I think that is fantastic, but that’s interesting. That’s neat that you two have very similar roles to a large degree, but there is some, some differences as well and to see the variety, John maybe of of you working with a number of different schools and the amount of resources that this school has versus that school, but yet they have the same amount of English learners.

So what do you know? How do we. What is going on here? How do we make sure that we figure this out? So with that, I would love to understand and maybe unpack just a little bit as you’re working through and making, figuring out where you’re gonna spend your time. ’cause it sounds like really you have a little bit of a luxury where you can go spend your time where you feel like is it is needed the most and where you can have the biggest impact.

Marlo, you mentioned looking at data and doing data analysis earlier. How do, how do the [00:11:00] two of you, whether it’s the same or similar or different or whatever it might be, but how do, what data are you looking at and how are you using that data to decide how you’re gonna spend your time? I. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: There’s all sorts of data.

I would say that the building block of it would just be who our students are. I start the year with that, which is making sure that all of our teachers have a list of who their active English learners are, who their transitional students who are in their years one through four of exiting the program.

What their English proficiency levels are, what that means. So I spend a good chunk of the first week of school, I run those reports for each teacher and give them that, and also tell them how they can do that on their own. But I know the first week is just a lot for teachers. So that’s something I can take off their plate and just ensure that they have that in their hands.

So that’s, and that becomes a piece of data we can go back to throughout the year. So if we’re working, like John and I work to support a teacher together in our welding class for career and technical education. 

Jon Auld: Just remember your purpose. [00:12:00] I think it’s really important to wake up in the morning and have a purpose.

And your purpose. You’re gonna make the world a better place by helping kids. They’re our future. That’s the big thing for me. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: And this teacher was doing group work for basically the first time and was like, how do I group my English language students? So it’s going back to his roster and looking at proficiency levels and aligning the groups to whatever the task is.

Like sometimes we might want. The newcomer students together so that they could be supported by the teacher. Sometimes we want them mixed in so that they’re not having to feel like they are leading a group. They can be more comfortable listening. So that’s a smaller, like a on the bite size, like for a teacher data.

We also have in our district, three times a year, we give benchmark tests in our state tested subjects. So for high school, that’s integrated math, 1, 2, 3, English One and two, biology and US History. And so those are our big tested subjects. They get a lot of attention. And so when those benchmark reports come out, [00:13:00] we are lucky that we have a district that will.

Go ahead and disaggregate that data for us so we can actually see our EL subgroup. We can see our Hispanic student subgroup, students with disability, our students who are dual identified, who are students with disability and el, and we can compare that to their non EL peers. We can compare it to never EL peers, and it’s really fun to dig into all of those different pieces and just see how they’re comparing.

Are we closing the gap between our EL students and their. Non EL or never EL peers. 

Justin Hewett: Isn’t it amazing if you give a mouse a cookie, if you give me some data, I promise you I’m gonna ask for some more. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: That’s a fun puzzle. A tricky puzzle. But it’s important ’cause not everybody, like teachers don’t always have time to dig into that deeply.

That’s right. And so a big part of something I think about is important for a coach is. Making sure we’re digging that and we can help share that, explain it, and then also get teachers input for why they think something is [00:14:00] happening, so we can make plans for that in the future, is a big piece. Then of course their English proficiency this year we’re Tennessee is switching from WIDA to an ELPA state.

Mm-hmm. So we are in a really interesting transition year where we can’t really compare WIDA scores to ELPA scores. It’s all different. So we’re in this new, it’s like a foundation year for data. We’re just starting over this year ’cause we’ll be getting those scores back May 23rd. But that’s a huge piece of our data.

Justin Hewett: But you’re not like counting down the days at all. Not, 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: it’s exciting. I’m just kidding. I 

Justin Hewett: love that, that you knew the exact date you’re 

Jon Auld: getting 

Justin Hewett: that day. 

Jon Auld: That really it’s the last day that teachers are in the building as well, so it’s like an interesting day to get data back. ’cause everybody’s leaving the building.

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yes. I’m sad that this year we don’t get it back before our senior, our seniors graduate this weekend. And usually I like to know which of our seniors have exited or met their growth goals so we can celebrate them before they. Leave our school forever and so this year I’ll have to send them, mail them home.

Justin Hewett: Yeah. You’re we’re gonna have to have an after party, like Yes. Something [00:15:00] something. John, it looked like you were gonna add something to this data conversation and kind of what data you use as you’re working to figure out where to spend your time. 

Jon Auld: Yeah. Look, I value quantitative data a lot, but I also really value qualitative data, and that’s why doing.

The video project I mentioned earlier I think is so powerful and hearing from students is one area that I’m really trying to leverage. I think their voice is the most powerful piece of data that we can get. And then secondly, I visit a lot of classrooms and I try to do that in collaboration with people like Marlo and administrators, and really to have a really deliberate purpose on what we are visiting classrooms for, to really gather quick.

Kind of insights into what’s happening in the class with a focus on our English learners. ’cause that’s my area and that’s revealing a lot of really meaningful data. And we could probably guess what those data points are, but it’s backing up a lot of our kind of guesswork. 

Justin Hewett: When you mentioned qualitative data, [00:16:00] sometimes that’s a little bit harder to measure.

It’s hard to track, per se to to some degree. What kind of qualitative data are you kinda referring to there and how do you think about that over time, rather than just maybe in that moment, obviously you’re noticing this or that, but how do you track that over time, or how do you think about some of those qualitative data pieces that you encounter?

Jon Auld: That’s a really great question, first of all, and I think it’s, I think oftentimes they go together, the qualitative and the quantitative, so I see it as just another piece of evidence that’s supporting things that we might already. Believe or think about our students. But I think what it does is it humanizes things a lot more than just the number or the percentage, right.

That oftentimes teachers and educators are just getting thrown at. And so that’s what I’m really trying to leverage those and communicate those to people so that we just come back to like human first, especially in the. Age of AI and whatnot, really [00:17:00] trying to make it human centered and then provide all of those data pieces together, which, which are providing this kind of a really valuable portrait of a student.

Dr. Marlowe Cross: And John and I, two years ago with another coach, another building level coach, we did some focus groups with students. We were really looking, two years ago, we looked. Closely at our students who are labeled as long-term ELs, which in our state is if they’re in their seventh year. And that was actually, we did it right here in this room.

We did about three different, three or four different focus groups with those students. Just to hear their perspectives about what it’s like to be in the EL program for more than seven years and what their experiences are like. And it’s so eye-opening to hear and to share with teachers, like audio recordings of their own.

Students reflecting on how they’re perceiving class and we’ve had students say that they felt like their EL class was a class for babies or just hearing that they do appreciate a [00:18:00] challenge and sometimes we’re quick to make assumptions about, yes, we do wanna have empathy for our EL students, but we also don’t want to be like, oh you poor thing, you’re having to go to school.

That’s right all day in English. Let me just not push you very hard. That’s not helpful for them, even though it’s coming from. Probably a good place and from heart, but that’s been really interesting. And then this year we did, we’ve done, at Overton, we’ve done a focus group of our students because we are on a list for the state.

We’re in the bottom 5% currently for our Hispanic students and our students with disabilities. We’ve been pulling focus groups to hear from those students and their perspectives on what it’s like in the classroom, what they find engaging, how they learn best so that we can. Use that going forward. Just like John said, like it’s nice to have those numbers, but it doesn’t tell the whole story and it doesn’t capture the student’s perspective.

Justin Hewett: This is so valuable to work, work through how you’re thinking about this, how you’re approaching it. I really appreciate you taking the time to dig down and share this out. I love the focus [00:19:00] on qualitative and quantitative data. A big part of what we’re doing at Flashlight is capturing those student recordings and their writings.

So it’s their, these students’ voice, as you mentioned, John, and their voice. What are they, how are they talking about this? What are they sharing? And it was really fun for me in a recent conversation I had with a large urban school district that had a. Pretty similar size English learner population to to what you have there.

They were talking, they have a lot of refugees in their district and through flashlight, they were having their students who are refugees share their stories about where they came from and what they’ve gone through. And to be able to capture that in a way that you can then share it with others and you can refer to it, you can give so much perspective and build so much empathy among our content area teachers that.

Don’t have as much exposure or experience maybe of serving our English learners and what kind of backgrounds our refugees are coming from, and it just completely changed the culture and dynamic within some of these buildings as these teachers got to hear the [00:20:00] stories. Their students’ stories and they were no longer just a name in a face, but they now had a story to it.

And I just love that focus on the qualitative data as well. And, but the quantitative is important too, right? It’s ’cause we need to take that while they’re speaking and we need to really understand what they need next or their writing and so on and so forth so that we can programmatically make decisions where we’re putting the right curriculums in place.

The right. Supplemental materials and so on and so forth. So I love, that’s a big focus for you. I kind of wanna make a shift a little bit here and shift gears over to talk about this, focus on integrating language through content. And I’d love for you to maybe just, maybe there’s some folks listening today that this is their first exposure to this idea.

I hope not, but there might be, and maybe they’ve heard it and said differently, but can you unpack that for me? When you say integrating language through content, what do you mean by that? And let’s talk about what you know, what do you mean by that? And then let’s talk about why it’s important to you.

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Sure. I can jump in there. [00:21:00] So in the past, I think even when I started 14 years ago, teaching, we had an ESL book, right? And it was this idea. Even the acronym has really shifted over time, but it was this view of English as a second language, and it was taught very much like how I experienced learning Spanish in high school, which I was in an English speaking school.

I did not need Spanish to. To do well in my other content areas. It was this one isolated class. I remember our textbook went chapter by chapter. It was, we’re gonna learn train station vocabulary. Now we’re learning airport vocabulary, neighborhood vocabulary, and our ESL textbook when I first started was very similar.

It was like, this is your neighborhood vocabulary. We’re gonna learn family words, mom, dad, sister, and. It’s winter time, let’s learn snow snowman, mittens, hat. Or maybe it’s not 

Justin Hewett: winter time, but you’re still studying that because we’re still learning this. Yes. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: And what that, yes, it teaches you basically that the [00:22:00] social language and the language you would need to get around in a, in an airport or around your community, but it’s not teaching academic language.

And so it’s really not helping students who are spending seven and a half hours of their day. In an academic language environment where they, if we want them, which we do, we want them to be able to graduate high school to go on to, to pursue careers. Technical college, have jobs they’re gonna be interacting with.

English speakers. We want them to also maintain their heritage language, but they need the academic language, which is not, can’t really be taught in isolation, which is how it was being approached. We’re gonna teach you grammar. This is simple tenses. Here’s how we conjugate simple tenses. Here’s how we do this as an isolated content.

And so. Integrating it would be, we can still teach simple tense, right? That we do need to teach you how to conjugate those verbs. That’s an important building block of language. But we’re gonna be reading something right now in my science class that [00:23:00] is in present tense. It’s a lab report. It’s talking about what’s happening.

I’m observing something, I’m seeing the water change. I’m gonna use present tense to describe that so that you’re getting the content. Of what’s happening in that class, but you’re also building the language pieces, the vocabulary sentence structure together. 

Jon Auld: What we were doing wasn’t working. So what Marlo kind of said, we back in 2011, 2012 here in the States, when I first moved, it was.

We were trying to ha have a language school inside formal education, and I’m like, this is the formal education of a student. We need to provide access to the content like we do for every other student, because that’s the right thing to do because this is their formal education. So I think with that kind of focus, it just brings clarity to the situation and we saw this huge gap in achievement between students who were.

Long English learners of all types, and then our native English speakers. And so I think through research and exploring and [00:24:00] starting to network, we saw that we really needed to look at how to integrate these language supports into our content to provide this access to it for all students so they could reach their potential.

And it’s not perfect, but we are, I think we’re making strides here in Nashville. Yes, 

Justin Hewett: and I love that. And I love that you just called out the fact that, look what we were doing wasn’t working. We had to make a change. Right. And so we dove in and we figured out we were teaching all this language in isolation where in reality it needs to be con taught in context, right?

If you’re really gonna understand the, all the language around experiments and whatnot, you better be doing experiments. That’s gonna be an important piece of this. And so I love that and I think that, I think we hear that and it’s pretty. Intuitive is, yeah, of, of course. But I also know a lot of teachers around the nation that are, they might be a math teacher or they might be a science teacher, and they don’t necessarily think of themselves as they’re the language teacher.

And maybe you have [00:25:00] worked with some of those types, some of those teachers. And they’re not wrong. Like the reality is you need to teach in a way that your students can access what you’re teaching. And a big part of that is through the language that we use and whatnot. But. Talk to me a little bit about how you might approach a teacher that thinks of themselves more as the math or the science, or the social studies teacher and not necessarily the language teacher.

If you don’t mind, 

Jon Auld: can I go this time? Oh yeah. I just think of an example. I’ve, a really great case that I’ve been working on this year. I stepped in to offer full support at a high school, a different high school, because their building based EL coach was on maternity leave. So. I’m stepping in, I’m offering more support.

And prior to her going out, she had said, there’s a math teacher, ninth grade math teacher who’s really struggling with her students. Her students are all newcomers. And I was like, I love a challenge. So I was like, this is great. And this was a veteran teacher. And so I started connecting with her and I visited her classroom briefly, and I saw that she was an [00:26:00] excellent content teacher.

She had the content down and through conversations and getting to know her, I said, look, my, I’m not great at math. Math is not my thing, but I understand language and I can see opportunities in your class where we could begin to allow students time to produce language. And they, and I believe that their engagement will go up if we start doing that because.

There were some kids who had their hoodies up. They were checked out, and I just saw, this is not the way we wanna keep going. And luckily because the teacher had a growth mindset, and also I think I met her where she was at, and we developed a relationship first, we were able to do three rounds of coaching cycles together.

Starting with me taking a more kind of top heavy delivery of some strategies to then doing it together to then finally she doing it herself. And I actually videoed that debrief, which was really great. [00:27:00] ’cause in the debrief she said, I see the improvement. I see it with my eyes and you can hear it and we’ve captured it on video, so we’ve, it’s just amazing to see and it’s not perfect, but there’s big progress and you can hear in my voice.

I’m really excited about that. 

Justin Hewett: I love hearing that. That is so cool. Look, what do they say? The perfect in Enemy of done or something like that? I don’t know what it is, but it’s not about being perfect. It’s about doing the work and jumping in and getting through it. And I love that what you said about meeting her where she was.

I think that shows. I think that shows people we care. Right. I think that shows people that like, like you’re important too. Like it’s not just about the kids. It is about the kids and it is about the students, but it’s also about the teacher and it’s meeting them where they are. I love the three rounds of coaching that you went through and that you took the time to go through this.

How long did this take? How long did this evolution 

Jon Auld: be that that was a couple of months. That’s that work started in January and ran all the way up through the third quarter. We have four [00:28:00] quarters, so until past spring break, so around the end of March, early April. Yep. I. 

Justin Hewett: And she’s a believer now. I like that song.

She’s great. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yes. 

Justin Hewett: That is so cool. I love hearing that. And do you mind unpacking what those three rounds of coaching were? You said you gave us the gradual release of it. Sure, 

Jon Auld: absolutely. Yeah, but I’ll try and keep it succinct. So it started with really just getting to visiting the classroom, seeing what the situation was, and she allowed me to video.

Yeah, and I shared what the purpose of the videoing was to the students because there’s quite a lot of anxiety right now, obviously. And I said, I’m here because I want to give you more opportunities or help more opportunities happen in your classroom with your teacher who’s an excellent math teacher.

And then through an initial kind of onboarding process, we crafted an instructional goal. And a student learning goal. Um, so that the teacher knew what was my pedagogical change gonna be and then what do I want students to be [00:29:00] able to do? And it was very clear it was production. ’cause the students were not producing any English whatsoever.

I. It was very much sit and absorb. 95% listening was what was happening. And so then through that we developed a strategy together that I was going to deliver. We videoed that, saw what was going on. How did she feel, collected the evidence, debriefed that tweaked. Our goal and then decided, okay, we’re gonna try a different strategy to see if that works better.

Video that again. And so video is really powerful for this teacher. And it, the great thing was we had multiple microphones capturing student output. So we could really, and with the, we could really measure how much output the students were doing and hear it as well and get those. Little bite-sized pieces of language, which were very encouraging.

And so then that moved into a final cycle where I was like, okay, do you feel comfortable delivering this con, this strategy [00:30:00] now? And she was like, yeah, I’m ready. And so that was just awesome to hear. And again, more video. And then we could compare and contrast the data points that we had from the microphone, from all the different microphones to the beginning and really see the change in.

The engagement of the students and that that’s where we ended. Really. 

Justin Hewett: That is so powerful. And I’m so proud of that math teacher. How great is that? What a wonderful evolution and kudos to her. I think that’s another example of qualitative data versus quantitative data. Right? Right. And to be able, you know, really take the time to sit and look and what does this actually look like as far as how much are students participating?

How many of them have hoods over their head and they are not there. And I think that’s a really important piece of this. Marlo, I know for you, you’ve taught. In middle school and done a lot of work in there and, and now you’re coaching it at the high school specifically. As you think about integrating language through content and helping teachers [00:31:00] teach this, what are some of the other strategies that you’ve used to help either A, get teachers on board, or maybe they’re already onboard, they just don’t know what to do.

Can you walk through that? 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yes. So I would say one thing that, that I’m thinking of a lot is in learning. Through coaching often, and for anybody in here that doesn’t have a coach at their school, like if you are an EL teacher and you’re asked to support, sometimes like a quick feeling that we can get if we hear about a teacher not providing supports or not giving the sink or swim.

Method to their whole class. It can be quick on us because we’re so passionate about language and we can have this expert blind spot, we can be quick to realize or to think and assume wrongly. I think that people have a will gap that they don’t, they’re not willing to help their students. They’re, they don’t wanna help them, but it’s really, a lot of times it’s a mask and it’s really that there’s just a skill gap.

They, they don’t know how. And so I approach a lot of times if I’m working with. Especially like [00:32:00] math teachers or these, like for us, with our career and technical education teachers, a lot of them are coming directly from working in the industry and don’t have. Degrees in education. And so even just basic pedagogy might not, they might not have the skills yet.

And so I have to frame when I work with these tea with teachers like this sometimes is that it’s not that they’re not wanting to help their students. This is like John said, like this is a challenge. It’s hard to integrate content and language. It’s hard to serve a class that has native English speakers and newcomers in it.

That’s not an easy task, and just remembering that. We’re here to help them support with some skills. And so just determining through coaching, like John said, like visiting their class and seeing what might some skill gaps be, where’s a bite size like one right next thing they can do that’s gonna help their students?

That is not going to overwhelm the teacher and make them feel like I don’t have time to do that. But what’s something that is important for them? [00:33:00] In their context that they need right there. A lot of times there’s a divide between a math brain and an English linguistic brain, and so math teachers are like, I don’t know the language.

And our EL teachers are like, math is not, I’m not doing math, but just helping them realize that every class, every context has academic language, has its own phrases that you’re using like in a lab report that looks really different. It’s a very different type of writing, talking about science. Feels very different and there’s linguistic pieces, and it might not be that I’m trying to get a teacher to be able to pick apart all the linguistic elements on their own, but I can support them side by side and say, oh, you know what?

In your math, you’re actually comparing and contrasting these two types of functions. And compare and contrast is, there’s phrases that we would all use across all content areas. We need to be making sure that our students know how to say. A quadratic [00:34:00] function is similar to a linear function because, or they are different because, and how to put those comparison contrast sentences together along with the vocabulary of linear quadratic expression, how things are different in math.

Like a table, students might be thinking of a physical table that they eat lunch at. And then now in math we have. A table and then in everyday language you might hear somebody say, I wanna table that for later. Mm-hmm. And just helping them because they may not come to their lesson thinking of those things so we can help just shed light on the ways that English is.

Could be confusing and anticipating where students need that help. So we can bring that and make sure like you have language objectives. It’s a big thing making sure that teachers are planning for the language that students will need to be successful with today’s lesson. 

Justin Hewett: Yep. Yep. A table is where we go eat numbers.

So yes, you, it looked like you were gonna add something to that, John. 

Jon Auld: Well, I was just thinking the United States is [00:35:00] interesting ’cause we have such a diverse country of cultures and languages, yet it’s a monolingual. Yeah, country and uh, my kind of focus, I try and just leverage those assets when I’m meeting and working with people that you have kids in your class who are polyglots, speak multiple languages.

They are sharp, they have a lot to give. We just need to tap into what they can give. And I think through that we will be able to have just great people in all professions. I really do believe that. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yes, 

Justin Hewett: very asset assets based approach and thinking. I love that. We actually almost named my, my company flashlight.

We almost named it asset based learning. We were like, let’s go all in on this. Then it was like, what if we did something that wasn’t assets based? Everyone would call us out on it. I have two things I want to ask you about and then I, and then we have a kind of a list of questions we’d love to go through with you.

Just more rapid fire, but is it. Do you find that it’s easier? I know that you [00:36:00] both are tending to do more coaching, it seems, at the middle and high school levels. Is that right? Yeah. Is it easier for elementary teachers to see the need, see the value of integrating language into content and teaching language for content?

Jon Auld: So what that makes me think, first of all, I got my masters in elementary education here, and so I have that background in what that means. And I’ve worked in some elementary schools, so I’ve seen, and I’ve supported them in my seven years of coaching. I. So I’ve seen what it looks like in elementary schools.

I think there’s a couple of things here. One thing I wanna speak to is I think content knowledge. The way our secondary teachers are trained, they’re very content specific, whereas our elementary teachers seem to have a better grasp of integrating language through their training. And sometimes there’s a lack of that knowledge at the secondary level.

So that was something that jumped out to me. Marlo, what were you, you were gonna say something as well? 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Um, a difference also that, that made me think of is in the high school [00:37:00] we have so many, our state standards are really intense and there’s, as far as being just numerous, for example, our US history.

Group those standards. They have 97 standards to teach in a school year. And yes, some of these can be combined together, but it is massive. And so a lot of our teachers in biology is the same. There’s a pressure at the high school level to get through. There’s this pacing pressure of, yeah, the district expects me to be on pace with this curriculum at this time, at this week in the year.

And so I don’t, I hear a lot from our high school teachers, even more so than middle school. I. There’s this time constraint where they’re saying, I don’t have time to be a language teacher because I need to teach 97 content standards. And that’s one of the mindsets that I have to work with is thinking through.

And that’s why integrating is so has become something I’m very passionate about is you can’t teach your content in isolation, like language is inherently. Embedded in [00:38:00] it and just helping teachers understand how they work together, how language is a vehicle to learn the content. And your content is also a vehicle for learning the language, but really unpacking that for teachers and making sure like it, if you’re just pacing through the this content, you’re also not preparing your students like they will not understand like how to comprehend.

When they get to, for example, a state test if we’re not working with the language and preparing our students for that. 

Justin Hewett: So Well said. How many days are there in the school year? 

Jon Auld: 240 some, I don’t know. Something like that. I have no 

Justin Hewett: idea. 10 months. I was just trying to think to myself, how many actual school days are there?

And you gotta get through those 97 standards. I was just trying to think of that. Social studies that US History teacher. Yes, and all the tests that our students and testing, teaching assessments. 

Jon Auld: When I first moved here, again, I was absolutely shocked how much instructional time was being lost for my English learners.

I just couldn’t believe it. It almost felt like the second semester. [00:39:00] Was just being tested. And so I’ve been really thankful here that this year with elpa, the ELPA test, that one of my schools took a risk and said, we’re gonna try and knock this out in one day. ’cause they could. And they did it. And I was like, this is great.

You’re giving kids back instruction, which is really what I believe they need, because what school should be doing. Mm-hmm. 

Justin Hewett: Yeah. And yeah, and it’s interesting, especially some of that more summative based assessment, right? If we can figure out ways to do formative assessment. Interim assessment in a way that informs our next move, like by all means, right?

But let’s do it in a way that maybe doesn’t take. Seven days or something like that. Let’s knock it out in 15 minutes so we can get moving and have it inform our instruction. Okay. I have something I would love to do. It might feel a little uncomfortable, but we’re gonna do it anyways ’cause the listeners all want this.

So good. Yes, I want to role play that. I am that social studies teacher and I have 97 standards that I have [00:40:00] to get through and I don’t really see myself as a language teacher per se, and I would love to hear the conversation that you are gonna have with me. To help me see things the way that might be more beneficial for our multilingual learners.

And let’s be honest, it’d be more beneficial for every student in that classroom. Let’s just be clear about that. But do you mind tag team duo like work together? 

Jon Auld: I can do this. We can do it. 

Justin Hewett: Okay. All right. I’m ready for you. You’re in my classroom. The kids just walked out. It’s my prep period. Let’s go. 

Jon Auld: The first thing I’d want to ask you is tell me about your students.

What do you know about them? 

Justin Hewett: I know that they have to get through 97 standards before the end of the school year, and they don’t necessarily all want to be in my classroom, but I do my best to connect with as many of them as I can. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: What is your end of, what do you want your students to walk away from this lesson under?

Understanding and do like a lesson that I 

Justin Hewett: taught today. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yeah. What [00:41:00] was, what is it that you wanted students to do by the end of it, and what enduring understandings do you want them to have? 

Justin Hewett: I’d love for them to understand the, the long-term impact of the Getty’s Boo address and would love to that, for them to really under I.

Understand the meaning of it in the history of our country and also understand how it applies even to them. 

Jon Auld: So I’d be like, wow, the Gettysburg address, that’s a beast. And I would want to say maybe, could we look at this together and really unpack in more detail what you want students to do and what kind of.

Language pieces of the Gettysburg Address are really essential to the standard that you are, you’re gonna be teaching. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say too, is looking through, it’s hard to role play this one. No, that’s 

Justin Hewett: okay. Talk through it. That’s the same thing. You might not know exactly what you wanted, 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: but thinking through like a task that students are doing with that primary source and whatever that task is, there’s embedded language that’s going to pop out to us.

Right? Are they comparing this speech to one of. To another [00:42:00] President’s speech, to another speech by Abraham Lincoln. Are they analyzing his word choice for something that would probably be more English language arts, but they might be comparing it. They might be thinking about the impact that speech had on the American people and why that was important, whatever that is.

We’re gonna hear a function. I think we’re gonna hear either an argument that students have to make. Or they’re gonna have to explain something or they’re gonna have to, I like 

Jon Auld: what you’re saying ’cause I’d want to be, I’m hearing explain. I’d be like, okay, this sounds like a great opportunity for some speaking.

How, what can we do? What supports do we need to put into the class to hear students talk about the Gettysburg address? Uh, and I’d be, I’m always shooting for, let’s see if we can have three deliberate interactions where kids are gonna talk about the Gettysburg Address, then let’s do it. ’cause they can do it.

We know they can do it. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yeah. And it, it’s also thinking on the input side, right there. Reading the Gettysburg address. Uh, if you had a class with newcomers [00:43:00] in it, I would not advocate for the newcomers reading the entire Gettysburg address because that’s not gonna be productive. That’s like putting me in a class of Russian and giving me like Romeo and Juliet and saying, here, good luck.

Um, even if you read that aloud to me, I’m not going to come away learning any Russian words. Right. Or understanding it. And so I was just thinking through. That, that it’s letting teachers know it’s okay. We tend to stay away from the word modify, but we do talk about how can we make, 

Jon Auld: keep the integrity of the text, but just find really specific pieces which are really heavy with the content that we really need to dive into.

Yes. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Or pop culture that the beginning of that address is going to be. They’re gonna hear that throughout their lives. So I would definitely include the first. The first few sentences for sure, and then whatever that task is, we wanna make sure that we’re pulling or zeroing in on that part of the text, not the whole text.

That’s okay, you can let go. We’re gonna zero in and do close reads of these sections so that they can pull the [00:44:00] evidence that they need for the task, and then making sure that we have sentence stems aligned with. That language output. Yes. 

Justin Hewett: I love it. So this is great. This is helpful. I’m starting to see why I should do this or how maybe I could do this.

John, you said you, I need three, like conversation. A lot of times when I give the kids time to talk, they all just, they just talk and talk and we’re not, they’re not being productive. 

Jon Auld: Yeah, right. 

Justin Hewett: It is just not productive time. I don’t like, do you have any other strategies that you’d like to share with me?

Well, I have 

Jon Auld: my go-to, my go-to is the QSA strategy. It’s my favorite and it’s a very easy strategy to to implement. It doesn’t take much planning, so teachers always love that. It’s a really quick strategy. The queue stands for a question. You provide an open-ended question, so it could be what is the purpose of the Gettysburg Address?

I. Then you’re gonna provide a sentence stem for students to answer the question so that they feel comfortable, they can at least get going. So it might be the purpose of the Gettysburg address [00:45:00] is, and then you’re gonna ask them to follow a signal when they’re ready to share. So that could be okay. Stand up when you’re ready to share.

And then the next S of the acronym Q-S-S-S-A is they’re gonna share out with someone. And you can, that’s where you can be deliberate about how you’re gonna do that. Some instructional grouping you might say, share with someone who has the same type of sneakers as you, or for what, any other deliberate grouping.

And then the final piece is the assessment is the A. So that’s like a little formative checkpoint. You could ask a couple of kids to share out. You could stretch them and say, share out what your partner said. So they were having that active listening piece. Or it could be a writing piece. Write on a sticky note, what you put down, and then stick it on the door as you’re leaving the class.

That’s my favorite. It takes about seven to 10 minutes. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yep. It can be done in any content area. Any day. You can also improvise it really fast. Like it’s not something you have to have done beforehand. You can be like, Hey, I think we need a spot here to, for kids to talk Q [00:46:00] triples a. Yeah. It’s by the lovely Carol Salva.

That’s right. I didn’t come up with that due diligence. Carol Salva. 

Justin Hewett: Yep. Let’s go. That is so fantastic and so applicable and I can take that. Okay. I’m in. I’m on board. I’m starting tomorrow. What do you what more Marlo, what do you think? I was gonna 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: say also with talking another thing with, ’cause I hear this so often, like teachers are a little bit reluctant to.

Have their students talk because they might start talking about whatever. And a couple things with that. One is you might try having a B roles like student A, student B with those sentence stems, especially if it’s a new procedure in your class. If you are three months into the school year and you’ve never done talking before and all of a sudden you’re saying, turn to a shoulder partner and say this, they look at each other, say what?

And so it was just saying, Hey, student A is the one closest to the door. Student B is the other one, and here are sentence stem student A. Asks the question, reads the question, student B responds. And then student A says, I agree or disagree because, and just providing [00:47:00] that will help students get talking.

And then Al also just remembering that. Just be realistic. Is every student in your 30 student class going to talk and be on task and say exactly what you want them to say perfectly? No. Probably never like that. And that’s okay. But did you get more students talking than you would have if you just ping ponged that question out to the class and you had one student respond?

Because that student is getting the practice of saying this word out loud, which is gonna help commit it to long-term memory, and everybody else is just listening more. So it’s okay if 70% of your class was on task and talked. It’s better than 2%, 3% we go. 

Justin Hewett: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This really resonates with me and I know it will with our team, with our listeners as well.

They are gonna get a lot out of. Are taking the time to do this. Thank you for being willing to role play that with me. And I, I think for, we have a lot of coaches that are listening as well, that are thinking to themselves, what are some different strategies and whatnot that I [00:48:00] can hand out and share and how do I approach them?

And I think understanding kind of the timeframe that you’re working with it, working in, and then also how to approach it and meet them where they are. Like, I think these are really important concepts that our listeners are gonna be able to take away. From listening to this and being a part of this conversation, I have a couple of just quick questions.

I’d like to bounce at you and get some feedback. A lot of times these are some of the places where new resources come out that people are looking for. They’re looking for that next book or that next podcast or whatever it might be. So we’ll kinda, we’ll, I’ll ping you both on this, if that’s okay on each one of these.

So the first question as a part of our lightning round is, what is one piece of advice you would give. To an ML teacher, and you can take that however you want. Maybe it’s a first year ML teacher. Maybe it’s a first year coach. Let’s go that direction if you’d like. Feel free to take it wherever you are, where, wherever you’d like.

What piece of advice would you give? 

Jon Auld: Just remember your purpose. I think it’s really important to wake up in the morning, have a purpose, and your purpose. You’re gonna make the world a better place by helping [00:49:00] kids. They’re our future. That’s the big thing for me. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: I think for me, it’s hold all of your students to high expectations.

They can. Do this. Even when things are hard, they can do hard things. They might need different supports to get there, but they can do it. And don’t lower your expectations just because a student is an ML student. 

Justin Hewett: Oh, such beautiful advice, both of you. Thank you for sharing this. What is one practice you see when you’re in buildings or in a classroom or whatever it might be?

What is one practice that you would like to see implemented more often? 

Jon Auld: I think providing deliberate speaking opportunities at, especially at the secondary level, like elementary seem to be doing just fine. But when the kids get to middle school and high school, the engagement and the production, I’m not seeing as much.

So really thinking about intentional opportunities for speaking. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: I was going to say the same thing. I think I would love to see teachers doing some self-reflection on either inviting a coach or a colleague into their room [00:50:00] or audio recording their classroom and trying to. Shift the amount of teacher talk to student talk, and even if the goal is 50 50, just doing some reflection, seeing how much they talk versus their students.

And then again, is it the same for students getting speaking practice every day and we’re just assuming that the other students are getting it? Or are we. Trying to involve and get every student to participate. Are there opportunities for everyone to try? 

Justin Hewett: I love that and I love that you both said it. And that’s the one thing for us at Flashlight is we love being able to have students share their voices and we record it and then we can go back and listen to it and they can share it with the parent.

They can listen to it at different times and intervals and look at the growth and whatnot. But it’s interesting. One of the pieces that, that we’ve heard that really surprise us is how often teachers would listen to. Their students and go, oh my gosh, I did not know that he knew this, or I didn’t know he had that kinda language, or whatever it might be.

And it’s just one of those [00:51:00] things that if we give our students opportunities to use their language and use their voice, they will surprise us and they will show us what they know and what they can do. And anyways. I love that you both shared that. Thank you so much. Is there a particular author or speaker who has influenced you the most?

Ego, ego tested. I would 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: say there’s a few. I think Carol Salva is fantastic. She has a book. Boosting Achievement is, and it’s a small book. It does not take a ton of time to look through, but it is where the QSA strategy, yeah, comes from. And I also, this is recent for me. I actually have it right here, but Sarah Otto, this is the language lens for content classrooms.

And there’s a lot of just good tips on how to write a language objective and. Some mindset shifts for content teachers. If you’re a content teacher wondering, how do I think through language? This is a good step-by-step guide of how to do that. And it’s also not very long. I think it is less than a hundred pages, so very bite-sized.

Oh, 

Justin Hewett: great resources. Thank you so much for [00:52:00] sharing those. What about you, John? 

Jon Auld: Yeah, I’ve got the one, and you probably know what I’m gonna say is Dr. Diane Ner. She’s, she works for support Ed. She’s the founder of Support Ed based out of Pennsylvania, I think. But her book, unlocking Multilingual Learners Potential is a great guidebook with lots and lots of strategies embedded within really easily digestible, lots of checklists, very practical for teachers to help.

With integrating. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yes. Which, and, uh, breaking down the wall, right? 

Jon Auld: She’s written a Yeah. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Is it’s a conglomerate of a lot of people. Dr. Dan Stafe is one of the authors, but there’s about Don’t call Excel. Yeah. 

Justin Hewett: There’s about eight 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: authors maybe on it. 

Justin Hewett: I have that one. Yep. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And then if 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: you’re working with long-term or students labeled as long term English learners, it is Tan.

Jon Auld: Oh. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Tan hun. And it is the experience, oh gosh. For experienced something for experienced, multilingual learners, which I also love that mindset shift of instead of long-term ELs [00:53:00] experienced, multilingual learners. 

Justin Hewett: There we 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: go. That’s also a great. Book for that subgroup. 

Justin Hewett: You know what, we had Ton on the podcast not too long ago, and it was just, it was fantastic.

We had a delightful conversation with him. He’s amazing. And, and also with his co-author on that was Beth Skelton. Yes. He’s been on, she’s been on the ML Chat podcast as well. Awesome. Although they’re both friends of ours and we’ve been grateful for them. I love that you brought up their books and, but these are great resources.

Thank you so much for sharing those. And I think a lot of people will find great value in those in diving into ’em. Kay, last question. Here before we wrap up. I don’t want it to come to an end. You two are so delightful. This has been such a fun conversation. Tell us about your light bulb moment or your experience around language development that changed your approach as an educator.

Jon Auld: It’s easy for me. I mentioned, or I think you mentioned, I lived in. Taught in Japan. Right. People think of Tokyo Osaka. I was actually dropped. I was on the Japanese exchange teaching program called the JET Program, [00:54:00] and I was placed in a very rural, isolated part of Koku Island. And the nearest native speaker to me was 45 minutes away native English speaker.

Wow. So I, I had full immersion Japanese and I had to rely on. My gestures and just nonverbal communication. And for me, that set me on a, this trajectory. And I feel like still, I re reminded of what, what it’s like. Obviously I had a lot in place. I was educated, I was an adult and that was really challenging for me.

But I still did it and I started to learn Japanese and, and so I feel like that set me on the trajectory for understanding my, the students who I ended up teaching in public schools here. 

Justin Hewett: To really be integrated and immersed in another culture, in another language. You can’t help, but I. Develop an affinity for it and to love it and appreciate it, and it’s helps you start to realize the wonderful cultures that exist in the world.

And it’s not just yours and it’s not just the Japanese culture. It’s all over the place. [00:55:00] And there’s, there’s bad things about all cultures, frankly, but there’s also a lot of beautiful in most every culture I’ve encountered. I love you sharing that. I actually wish we would’ve gone into more of your international experience.

I wanna hear about that. Maybe that’ll be over a dinner someplace. Marla, what about you? What was a turning point for you, if you don’t mind? 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: This is actually recent for me. It’s the one that popped into my head. But I think one of the things that, like sometimes I’ll hear teachers say, I don’t know why we’re teaching them the word.

I don’t know. Lemme try to pull a word out of the hat. Oh gosh. Like lilipu. Why would I start with that word instead of teaching them the word small? And there’s this kind of assumption that we have to teach language in this stair step. Like I need to teach the tier one everyday vocab first before I can teach them the tier two word before the tier three.

Or that we need the kind of easier social language first. And. I used to maybe think that way as a teacher and probably tried to make sure that I was like speaking that way in my instructional delivery, which I still think is okay to do that. But I think that I probably held onto that [00:56:00] belief of I need to start there before they can learn these other things.

And actually having a child who’s learning language as she grows when she was probably two and a half. In the bath. She loves a good bath bomb to dissolve little bath FIEs. And she was very, she’s still learning a lot of language and she was asking me, she was like, what’s it doing? She what Doing, what Doing.

Watching the bath bomb. Fizz and get smaller. And my fir, I started to say, oh, it’s melting, because I thought she’ll understand melting even though that’s not really what’s happening. And then I had to really, I stopped myself like it was coming outta my mouth and I said, it’s dissolving. And now my child says.

She says dissolving, which is very cute, but she like, she’s four now. She just turned four. But I love it, like she’ll just tell people and she can apply it to other things that she sees dissolving and she’s, is it dissolving? Yeah. Like her ice. And I’m like, we don’t, like, I didn’t need to bring this down to a word.

She already knew. She’s learning the language. Why not start with an academic word that she’s going to [00:57:00] hear? It’s not doing a disservice to her. It’s, wow, you know what this is? She also can tell me that the coffee is percolating. And it’s just really fun. But I do think about this when I hear teachers saying like, why are we teaching them this word?

And that’s a word they’re gonna see academically. Yeah. You don’t have to Now it’s really important to also say, here’s another, like, you might have the word like scorching. I don’t wanna not tell a student that means hot, but it doesn’t mean I have to keep the word scorching away from them so they can do this.

That fortified 

Jon Auld: input leads to fortified output. There we go. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Yeah. 

Justin Hewett: Oh

man, I love this. You two are a great duo. Wonderful conversation. Like this is so fantastic. We’re gonna have to do another round of this, but thank you so much for taking the time to come and join us on the ML Chat podcast and talk through I.

Integrating language through content, but all of these other pieces as well that, that are so helpful. Marlo and John, I just wanna say thank you for the work that you’re doing. really impacting a lot of students, a lot of educators, and I’m glad that your message gets to go out to all of our listeners of the ML Chat [00:58:00] podcast.

But thank you for being with us today.

Jon Auld: Thank you. Thank you. We’ve enjoyed it. It’s been great. 

Dr. Marlowe Cross: Thank you so much. It’s been really fun.