Valentina Gonzalez: Remembering that their first language shouldn’t be ignored in our classrooms. That it is a valuable asset and it’s part of who they are, and we want to embrace them for their whole self. 

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m Mandi Morris, your host. Today we have Valentina Gonzalez, an educator and author, a coach, and she speaks directly to how teachers can open access to learning for their students. And in her book a. Bestselling Coran Publishing book. She co-authored with Fry and Fisher.

She really goes in depth about how educators that are new to English learners, new to English learners in their classroom, whether you are an ELD specialist or a core content teacher, how you can start this journey. She breaks it down into the why. How and the what. So I highly recommend her book and this podcast today [00:01:00] to learn more from Valentina.

Let’s go. 

Valentina Gonzalez is a doctoral student, author and educator with over 25 years of experience in various roles, including classroom teacher, district facilitator, professional development specialist, and consultant. Her childhood experience as an immigrant and language learner fuels her desire to advocate for multilingual students and support teachers with the best research-based teaching method.

Valentina is dedicated to promoting literacy, celebrating culture, and nurturing language development as she travels the nation working alongside educators. Valentina, we are so thrilled to have you on the ML Chat podcast today. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much, Mandi. I’m excited to be with you.

Valentina, we just want to get to know you. You are an author, you travel the nation, coaching and supporting teachers. Tell us a little bit about the work that you’re doing right now. It’s [00:02:00] really exciting work and I’m honored to be able to get to do this work. I’m, right now, I’m doing a lot of work, going to school districts and working with.

S. L specialists, bilingual teachers, general education, mainstream teachers, and supporting them with professional development and coaching. Aligned with how to teach students who are learning a second language learning English, learning an additional language, but in general, just. Teaching strategies that develop language.

And for me, that means all students because all kids are really developing language. I can’t wait to get into your book and I wanna do that in a little bit. Um, and it’s hard not to dive in right now because I feel like that was a little teaser. But before we go there, ’cause I, I know we’ll end up spinning a while there, I would love to just go back, tell us about your journey.

[00:03:00] Where did you find your passion for ML education? Um, what brought you into the field of education? Tell us a little bit about what that process, that journey has looked like for you. Yeah, you mentioned that I was an immigrant and being an immigrant myself, my family immigrated here from the former Yugoslavia when I was just a kid, and so I learned English as a second language when I started school, and that journey in itself helped me as an educator to empathize with students who are English learners themselves.

But when I became a teacher, I didn’t know I was going to narrow my focus and join the ESL and bilingual field. I really thought I was gonna be a reading language arts teacher all of my career. I found my niche in ESL because I loved teaching language and I loved working with [00:04:00] families across the nation.

And one day I had a co-teacher in my classroom and she, she tapped me on the shoulder and said, have you ever thought of being an ESL teacher? Have you ever wanted to join our team? And I was like, no. I’m fine here. I really like teaching, reading language arts, and I’ve been doing this for several years and I’m happy with it, but she planted that little bug and it grew, and then I interviewed for the position.

And I think that just when your colleagues see something in you and they see. Something you didn’t know existed. It’s a, it’s really a beautiful thing. And ever since that experience, I’ve always tried to remember when we see something in someone else, when we recognize a strength in our colleagues, let them know.

Share that with them, because sometimes we don’t know how, how unique or special we [00:05:00] are until someone points it out. And that’s true for our students also. I think my colleague doing that for me changed the course of my career. That moment changed everything for me. That’s such a beautiful moment in life, and I think that as teachers, as educators, we have a lot of students that were responsible for, and then often the students grow up and they become their own people, and we don’t know.

We don’t know what that moment of advocating or that moment of honoring or. Seeing a student, how that really impacted, made a difference in their lives, and what a good reminder that even as adults, we have those moments where a colleague, a friend, a family member sees something in us that we don’t see.

And yeah, it’s just, it’s powerful. So you go into the world of ML education and you’re in the classroom, there’s a leap that must happen right from there to where you are now being an author and traveling. What did [00:06:00] that part of your journey look like? So I taught as an ESL teacher for a number of years.

I worked in classrooms, co-taught with other teachers, worked in small groups with newcomers, and I loved doing all of that. I enjoyed it so much. I think that working in other classrooms and co-teaching was probably the best professional development. Ever had and ever will have because learning from other teachers, my colleagues, working with them alongside them, learning together in in the same space, with the same kids was so powerful and I recommend that to.

Every teacher. Even now when I do go to schools and coach teachers, one of the best ways that we do this is through, through campus learning walks and we open our doors and we go into classrooms together and we watch each other. And in a safe [00:07:00] space, we learn hand in hand how to. Sharpen our tools, sharpen our craft.

But I worked as a co-teacher, as an ESL co-teacher for a number of years, and then there was an opening at the central office in my district. And I went to that, to that role as a, as an ESL specialist, where now I was coaching the ESL teachers in my district. To do the job that I was doing on the campus, and I believe that as an ESL teacher, we are leaders on the campus.

We are leaders because our campus teachers are looking at us as specialists, as language specialists. They come to us with questions about language development and how to support our multilingual learners. And so that in itself. [00:08:00] Creates a position of leadership and it is a huge responsibility. And because of that, I had to really dig into the books and dig into the research and go to more professional development and learn more.

I will tell you that just because I was an English learner myself didn’t mean that I knew exactly how to teach. English learners in my classroom. Again, I could empathize with them and maybe understand what they were going through, but it took a lot of studying and learning and I’m still studying and learning that never ends, and that’s how I went from being an ESL co-teacher and then moving into the administrative building and doing professional development at the administrative office.

And then it went into doing more professional development. For other schools and districts around the nation, and now I’m doing that full [00:09:00] time. Wow. So it sounds like when you moved into that district level, um, you really needed to fill your bucket so that you were able to pour out into those around you, um, through a lot of learning and a lot of research.

Um, what an incredible way to make connections with other professionals to broaden yourself outside of. School district, which then led to opportunities for you to do coaching and training in other school districts. Um, and then how did you move from that training that you were doing into being an author?

Um, and not only an author, but co-writing, co-authoring a book with Fisher and Fry. Like what, how did you land there? That was so exciting. Yes. Oh, as I was going to professional development myself and filling my own bucket, I was journaling. And through this journaling process, I was practicing my writing skills, and because I wanted to [00:10:00] share my journaling, I decided to put that on a blog.

I started my own blog, and one day I tweeted. Blog out and it got some attention on Twitter. I began to grow a community of people who were interested in the strategies that I was sharing and. As I was sharing these strategies, I often like to draw about them as well. Visualize them and create mental images of them and graphically design them.

And that became incorporated in the blog as well. So I was. Experiencing research-based strategies. I was writing about them, and then also graphically designing them and sharing them with other people because sharing is caring and this was all. For the greater good of our students who are [00:11:00] learning English and our teachers, who were teaching students who were multilingual.

And so I wanted to give this freely and I began to grow a community of professionals who were doing the same thing. And my writing was just continuing to develop. Like I mentioned earlier, I believe that we’re all language learners, no matter if we’re. Multilingual or monolingual. We continue to develop language as we practice it and as we read and write, and that’s what was happening for me.

I continued to write on my blog and I. As I shared it, I was connecting with other authors. So when did you start your blog? Like the, when was that? Like I started my blog and I’m tweeting about it and I’m starting to get attention. What was the timeline like? I think I started my blog in 2016. I wanna say it was 2016 and [00:12:00] it.

Began to grow some attention in 2017 and became more and more popular. I was very consistent with writing in it in the beginning. I’m a little bit less consistent now just because I’m busy with other projects, but Larry for Lazo was one of my mentors as I began to write, and he told me try to write at least.

Four times on your blog and share it out four times a month in the beginning, and, and I tried to be consistent with that, even if it wasn’t a long piece. I was writing and sharing and connections with other authors really helped me to grow my audience. And one day on social media, Doug Fisher reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested in writing with him and Nancy.

That’s how the book Welcome [00:13:00] to Teach. Welcome to Teaching Multilingual Learners was Born. Wow. What an incredible journey. And I love that you’re just really calling out the consistency and the focus. Commitment. Writing for blog posts a month is a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. We have a blog here at the, at our company, flashlight Learning has a blog, and getting one out a month can feel like a lot of work.

Hats off to you for that, and it looks like it’s really brought such incredible connections for you. The book that you published is, yes, you named it. Welcome to Teaching Multilingual Learners. This book is so visual. That was one of the first things that struck me about this book when I received it. It’s very.

It feels very comprehensible. It feels, I love that. It’s welcome to teaching. It definitely feels like the 1 0 1, right? This is what you need to know to get started. And the visuals, the graphics, all of that, make it feel like, okay, [00:14:00] I’m not, I’m not overwhelmed by a very thick text heavy book. I’ve got something that I can jump in.

And I was wondering, you broke the book into three sections. The why, the how, and the what. And I’m wondering what was the thinking behind breaking the book down in that way? This was an idea that we wanted to use from Simon Sinex Golden Circle that embraces starting with our purpose. And I really wholeheartedly believe in this, and I was so happy that Doug and Nancy also embraced this theory because I.

As an educator, I know that my purpose for teaching and teaching multilingual learners is rooted in my own story and my own love for language and my love for learning as well. And if we center what we do around our purpose, then what we do and how we do [00:15:00] it is going to be. Amplified and it’s going to be so much more incredible than if we don’t know our purpose and if we don’t understand our purpose and we can’t.

Articulated. And so we started with why multilingualism is important and why it is such a powerful force in education and in the lives of our students and families. And then we went to the how and last is the what? The lesson design and the nitty gritty of what it looks like in our everyday instruction.

At what point in your career did you realize that graphic organizers were so powerful for language learners and not really only for language learners? ’cause you use a lot of graphics for educators to be able to process the learning that you’re sharing with them. When did you [00:16:00] make that connection? As an educator and also as a coach of adults, I used to use graphic organizers and just drawing and illustrating.

With for myself and for my students, but I don’t think I realized the power until very late in my career as a. Educator. I’m still an educator. I’m just a teacher educator now, but I don’t think I realized the power of allowing students to use visuals themselves until very late in my career. I think early in my career I saw drawing as a very menial task, something that we do in our free time or that young students do, but the actual power of.

Drawing for visualizing and thinking and synthesizing. Didn’t. I didn’t know that was powerful until much later in my career. I wonder too, [00:17:00] Valentina, if you have any thoughts about, I feel like there’s been a transition in education in the last handful of years where there has been a lot more focus on graphic organizers, whereas earlier in my teaching career, I don’t feel like that was something that people were talking about for secondary students especially.

I wonder if you’ve also noticed that shift, if you have any thoughts about it. Absolutely. I know that graphic organizers we’ve been using for a number of years, Venn diagrams and T charts and things like in that nature, we’ve known that the brain loves graphic organization categorizing information, but actually.

Asking students to visualize and make mental images and create icons or draw, especially in secondary, that is not very common. It is becoming more known and people are realizing that it’s not just for young students, and it’s not just for kids [00:18:00] who are learning a new language or at early levels of proficiency, but that it’s actually a powerful thing for our brain to stop and think.

What does this actually mean? How can I visualize it and put it on paper? So I think that it’s becoming more known and used in secondary. I love that. I love that shift, and I think as an educator, whenever you’re trying something new, it can be a little bit. Unnerving Valentino. When you’re traveling the country and you’re coaching teachers, you’re using your book, you’re using your life experience.

What questions are you hearing most from teachers? What feels like it’s really popping to the surface right now? Some questions that I hear are really like, they stand out and make my ears perk up and others make my heart pound. So I’m gonna give you one of each. I often hear teachers very concerned about how, why do they need to use language [00:19:00] acquisition strategies if they only have one or two multilingual learners in their classroom?

And my answer to that is that. All students are learning language and that because all students are learning language acquisition strategies benefit every child and creating a language rich classroom is going to be interactive and useful for all of our students. So that’s just, that’s one thing that often comes to the surface and really perks up my ears and just, I want.

Every teacher to understand that every child is gonna benefit from increasing and amplifying language in the classroom. And what about questions that make your heart pound? Is that one that has your ears up or your heart pounding? It just both actually. It really does both, but, so the other day I was working with secondary teachers and it was a time when they [00:20:00] were debriefing a strategy and I heard.

This really, it, it made my heart go pitter-patter. I loved hearing this. The teacher said he was amazed at how the strategy that we did helped him realize that the lessons that we design can either help the child understand. What we’re teaching or completely block them from learning whatsoever. And it’s eye-opening for us to realize as educators, how much power we have in educating students.

And I think everyone in his group took a pause when he said that because that’s really powerful. It, it just demonstrates the impact we have as educators. The lessons we create can change everything for a child. [00:21:00] We can either let them in, open the doors and give them access, or we close the doors and they completely are shut out.

I love the idea. You hear the analogy of teachers can be gatekeepers. So how are we opening a gate? How are we opening access for students in our classroom versus how are we keeping that gate closed and not allowing access? And what I’ve observed often is that teachers don’t necessarily see or realize the ways that they’re holding a gate closed.

And it’s not intentional, it’s not purposeful. It might come from the thinking of, I’ve always done it this way, I’ve done this lesson for eight years and my. Students always have loved it without recognizing, but how has your student population shifted in the last eight years? How has it changed? How has your responsibility, how are students, all students learning [00:22:00] differently now than they might have been learning pre pandemic or before every single kid had a cell phone and all of the things that have changed, so I, I love that.

In your professional learning, your opportunity with teachers, you’re creating a space for reflection that really is so powerful, what that educator said, and it’s like a light bulb moment. He had the opportunity through learning, through reflection, and was also in a space where he was safe to be vulnerable, and to be honest, I wonder from all of the professional learning that you do.

We know just like when you were at district level, you were holding professional learning for your teachers within your school district, what advice could you give to other coaches across the country, whether they’re doing professional learning locally in their own districts? More broadly, how do you create that environment where adults can be vulnerable, can have moments of reflection in learning something new or even challenging a [00:23:00] core belief, or challenging a way that I’ve always done it this way?

I think that’s a really good question, and it’s so important for us as educators to feel safe, to ask questions and to bring up concerns and. I believe that the best way for us to do that is to create the environment where teachers feel that they’re not gonna be ridiculed for, for making a mistake or doing it a different way, and that’s it.

It’s difficult to create that space because as educators, we often close our doors and just teach in our classrooms, but that’s not. The best way for us to learn. We learn from each other and with each other. So I’ve seen schools where teachers buddy up and they have a PAL system. They are able to choose a colleague that they feel safe enough [00:24:00] to allow into their classroom and discuss.

Teaching together, watch each other and coach one another. And I think that’s low stress type of co-teaching and coaching. When a mentor, someone who’s been teaching a little longer or has some experience that you don’t have, is able to give advice. But it has to be voluntary also, and I think that’s a key factor in feeling safe.

When I get to choose the time I get to choose my partner and opening up those doors to the classroom, opening up the communication pathways, it can’t be force that has me thinking about co-teaching in general and. I’ve worked in school districts and have personally worked in co-teaching environments that were wildly successful, absolutely phenomenal, and the exact [00:25:00] opposite, where it was just like, it is more of a burden to have this co-teacher in my room than not.

I think something you said there is just so key and worth underlining that when teachers have. They have choice. Their voice is heard in that process versus when things feel very top down, like you will co-teach and this will be your partner and they will be pushing in during this time and you will do X, Y, and Z.

How do you think district admin should think about? Encouraging supporting co-teaching in their school district. Opportunities for teachers to collaborate and connect because we know, of course, that admin have said, I’ve offered it as a volunteer. Nobody’s taken me up for two years. So how might admin encourage teachers to take that risk maybe in a school district that’s been resistant?

I’ve noticed that many schools that are doing this well [00:26:00] have leaders that model it well. So you know when you have leaders that. Co-lead. They do well modeling how to, I, they’re not gonna co-teach in front of their teachers, but they co-lead staff development and meetings. They do things together, they.

They are vulnerable in front of their teachers, then that kind of trickles down to the rest of the staff. But in schools where they have instructional coaches that can come in, or ESL teachers that go in and model lessons and work alongside teachers, a lot of times these relationships are fostered through trust and through the.

Belief that we are here to help all students and trust is created when we know that no one is going to talk about the other person’s [00:27:00] teaching in a negative way. But if that’s broken, then. People are not going to want to share a classroom with one another. If we know that you are gonna leave my room and say that I did something that I wasn’t a good teacher, or that my room is messy, then you’re not gonna wanna co-teach again.

So we have to build people up and have small wins together. It can be something as small as, can I come in and read a book? To your class, can we, can I try this lesson out with a small group in your room? Small wins, and then celebrate those? Go back and celebrate one thing that you saw, your partner, the person you were with doing well.

Those moments where we share publicly what someone [00:28:00] else did makes people feel good and others will want to share in that celebration too. I love something you pointed out earlier about the vulnerability piece and being able to try something new in your classroom and trust. That the person who’s in their co-teaching or observing or coaching isn’t going to leave and say, wow, they really blew that.

I think that’s really powerful and is a culture that is. Purposeful. It’s a culture that from the top down, there’s an expectation set of we support one another. We don’t gossip about one another. We don’t tear each other down. We understand that we assume best intentions. Everyone is here doing their best.

I love. Thinking about teaching an environment like that where I could trust a colleague to come in and to observe me and to give feedback, and we’re learning and we’re growing together [00:29:00] versus, I don’t know what I’m doing. You have all of the answers. It’s really a. Such a purposeful culture. So thank you for illuminating that.

I think it’s really beautiful and it starts wheels turning around. How does admin create that? Starting from the top down? Yeah, exactly. And it doesn’t happen overnight, that’s for sure. But if we can just find a little way in and then keep opening that door, that’s the way it’s gonna continue to grow.

Valentino. When school districts think about how to spend their professional learning funds, they have to make choices about internal coaching versus external coaching. And we know from research that the continuous coaching model has a lot of power where we can go. I’m sure you and I have been to many conferences, people listening to this have been to conferences, and it’s like this barrage of information over three days where you sit in all these sessions and they’re great, and then you [00:30:00] walk away, you’re like.

What am I supposed to do on Monday? And that’s where when you get that embedded continuous coaching model, that can be so powerful because it’s happening throughout the school year. It’s happening in your classroom, it’s happening during your PLC. I wonder how you think of those different ways of learning.

How they each bring value and how school districts might be really purposeful about braiding. There is a lot of learning that can happen from bringing someone from the outside in because they bring a new perspective. They don’t have maybe all the baggage with your, that might come with your school district, but then what does it look like to do that?

And then the next step of the continuous learning model. I’ve been on both ends of it. I’ve done professional development in my school district and I do it now outside as a consultant. So I understand all of the ins and outs of that, and I, I fully believe in [00:31:00] ongoing, embedded professional development. I think it’s so important and it’s necessary and.

There is an important and valuable piece of the puzzle of bringing an expert in from the outside as well, because we don’t always have that person that has a specialty in, whether it’s ML education or special education or whatever it is that our campus needs, and we have to focus in on what does our school need, what are we looking for?

What is it that all of our. Teachers might need some support in campus-wide, bringing in a specialist to give some deep knowledge on that to, to provide a lot of focused instruction on that, whether it is ongoing, which is preferred. And I do a lot of work like that where we have a, a. Multi-year [00:32:00] plan for professional development.

We may have a book study or we develop a multi-year plan based on the campus needs. That’s probably the most ideal way to bring in a consultant. There are some schools that just want a one day presentation, which I agree with you, Mandi. It’s not. The best thing because what happens, like you said, we do professional development and it is, it’s exciting for me.

It’s exciting and I know as an educator, not a lot of PDs are very exciting, and I never want my participants to be bored. I want them to be engaged. I want it to be fun. I want them to learn. I want my session to be like what their classroom should be like. I want fun, exciting movement, engagement, participation, all of it because [00:33:00] it has to mirror what the classroom should be like, and no classroom should be boring and no student should be left out.

And that’s my, that’s how I run my show. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have you, you have PD that. You’re not gonna get that. You’re just, it’s not gonna be that way. But at the end of the day, will participants remember everything? Are they gonna remember it? Not really. And especially if it’s only one, a one day thing.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a good way of thinking about. How we support teachers, what that continuous learning model can look like. When you think about building out your training, if you were to give, you, were starting to give some advice right around like, when I do my professional learning, I want it to look like if there’s a coach listening right now, what advice would you give to a coach that’s like.

Their task with all of the professional [00:34:00] learning for their school districts. It can be pretty overwhelming to be tasked with that. What advice would you give for that person? Where would they start? What’s a first step that you would recommend? If they’re tasked with professional learning for their district, first step would be to look at their students, who they have and what their students are coming to the campus with.

Look at the assets first. What are students already? What are their strengths? And then what are the needs? What does the campus really need to grow in? What are students struggling with? And then look at the teachers as well. So we have to look at the people. Look at the people’s strengths and the areas of growth, students and teachers, and then develop a systematic plan for really targeting those strengths and those areas of growth.

It also depends on how much time is gonna be allocated [00:35:00] for professional development and how much. Money is available for that. Those are gonna be huge factors in creating a good plan for creating success for, for the campus. So I wanna go back to your book. We went there for a minute and then we started talking a lot about professional development.

This has been such a fun conversation, but let’s go back to your book. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about who is this book for? If maybe there’s a teacher and they’re like, okay, I wanna know, is this for me or a coach that’s listening and wondering it, would this be a good book for my ELD specialist, or is this a book for my ELA teacher?

Talk a little bit about the audience. That you were thinking about when you wrote this? When we wrote this book, we planned it for teachers who are new to the field of education, brand new teachers or teachers who are [00:36:00] maybe not new to the field of education, but new to teaching multilingual learners. So perhaps you’ve been teaching for five or six or 10 years, but you really haven’t had a lot of experience with teaching kids who are learning an additional language.

Or maybe you need a refresher in a. The strategies and what we are focusing on in multilingual education. So this is a book for a variety of audiences, and I think this is such a fun book to do as a book study. We really enjoyed doing it here at Flashlight, and I also think this would be a really fun book for PLCs.

I wonder what have you heard in being out in the field and talking to people that have. Gone through your book and how are they using it, and do you have recommendations? If there’s someone listening today that’s thinking, oh, I wanna do a book study with my colleagues, or I wanna [00:37:00] integrate this into A PLC, what advice would you give?

We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback. It’s actually one of Corwin’s bestselling books, so it was quickly a bestselling book, and we’re very proud of that. We wanted it to be a fun book to pick up and turn the pages of. We wanted it to be something that as you. Are digging into, you’re gonna wanna turn the next page, so we’re happy to hear that’s the feedback we’re getting and as I’m talking to educators who are using the book, I am hearing that many are using it as a PLC book study.

And I’m seeing on social media that many, many ML departments are using it for professional development. So that’s been refreshing. I’m also seeing it used with content teachers, which I really love because our students who [00:38:00] are learning another language are. In content area classrooms the majority of the day, and so even though I work mostly with teachers who are in ESL or bilingual, my goal is to work with all teachers because all teachers teach.

Multilingual learners. So I hope this book gets in the hands of our general education teachers. Most of all, I could really see it being a powerful resource for, I’m thinking about the PLC where the ELD specialist is either doing push-in or co-teaching in the ninth grade ELA class. This would be such.

Cool opportunity and a great resource. Even if you are many years into your teaching profession, I think there are still a lot of things that you can take away from here. Practical strategies for. English learners for all students. As you’ve pointed out, all students are language learners. Like you’ve [00:39:00] said.

I think that this is really, sometimes an ELD specialist needs a bridge. Like, how can I get in with the content teacher? How can I start that conversation? How can I create a point of common language or common understanding between us? And I think that this book would be a really fun way to be able to do that in A PLC.

So I’m not surprised to hear that you have both ELD specialists. And core content teachers enjoying this book, it really is a lot of fun to read. It’s, I would say a very easy read as well. It just feels so approachable. So this wouldn’t be like walking into A PLC and saying, Hey, will y’all please do a book study with me?

And it’s everyone’s, how many hours a week do I need to spend reading? This doesn’t feel like a homework assignment that you don’t wanna do. So this is really a wonderful read. And Valentina, I wonder, could you, in our last minutes here, if you could leave us with. Some. When you think about your professional learning that you give, can you leave [00:40:00] us with some, like what are some high leverage piece of pieces of advice or application that you are talking about in your professional learning right now that you feel like people’s ears are perking?

They’re like, tell me more about that Valentina. One thing I just wanna say is that our students who are learning English, they need to learn English. We know that they do, but they shouldn’t have to lose their first language at the expense of learning English. So valuing their first language is gonna be a very important part of their language journey.

Remembering that their first language. Shouldn’t be ignored in our classrooms, that it is a valuable asset and it’s part of who they are, and we want to embrace them for their whole self. And that’s something that, that it’s just gonna make a big difference in their social, emotional, and [00:41:00] self-identity as we work with them.

Yeah. That’s beautiful. Thank you so much. Valentina. Who are some authors or speakers, people whose blogs you love right now or are following on social media? Where would you recommend people to go if they want to do some bucket filling like you did when you moved to district level? Who would you send them to or where would you send them?

Oh my gosh, I have so many people I could share with you. I already mentioned Larry Fzo. He’s. One of my favorite educators, he just retired from education, but he’s still doing lots of educational things. So definitely Larry Fzo, Doug Fisher, and Nancy Fre Frey, definitely educators that I’ve been learning from for decades.

Carol Salva is another one that I’ve, she’s a colleague and friend of mine that I’ve learned from. For decades. Carly Spina is another great one that she just wrote a book and she’s amazing [00:42:00] too. Emily Francis, so many wonderful educators to Hoon, who also has a podcast and does so many wonderful things.

He, he wrote a book recently on long-term multilingual learners. I could continue listing so many and I don’t wanna leave out any one special, but they’re all so wonderful. If you go to advocating for multilingual learners Facebook group, you will see all of them there posting lots of great stuff. And I share a lot on that Facebook group too.

That’s awesome. Thank you so much. This has been such a fantastic conversation with you today, Valentina. We are so. Honored and excited that you spent this time with us. It’s been great to learn from you and I just really appreciate that you have been here and shared so much great advice with us. Are there any conferences you’ll be at this year that people might be able to find you?

I will be, [00:43:00] uh, at Dakota tesol and I’ll be at the Colorado TESOL in the fall in November. Uh, I’ll be at a few other conferences. I can’t think of them right now, but those are the next two that I’ll be at coming up in October and November. Wonderful. I think you’re, it sounds like your schedule is so busy that you’re like, I know.

Two months in advance. Don’t ask me past that. I’m trying to live day by day. Fair enough. Well then there’s an extra amount of gratitude that you made this time to be with us on the ML chat. Thank you so much, 

Valentina.