Kate Morin: [00:00:00] Our hope is that every student, a hundred percent of multilingual learners. Have access to the curriculum, but beyond access, they’re receiving content based explicit English language development in their classes. And that’s how we leverage the WIDA ELD standards, and that takes quite a bit of collaboration and trust relationship.

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m Mandi Morris here with my co-host Andrew, and today we had an incredible conversation with Kate. She is a natural born leader. 

Andrew Brandt: It’s, it’s fun to see the different vibe from different guests and how they lead and the work they’re doing, but definitely felt that from Kate that more than, more than just coming up with a new shiny approach and methodology to roll out.

She’s aware of her team. She’s aware of taking things slow so you can create. A strong implementation that is stable for the system and over time you can build up that momentum. And I just love that [00:01:00] calm, methodical energy mixed with just that passion for the work. 

Mandi Morris: Absolutely. She’s been in her same school district from the beginning teaching there, growing in her school district.

And the strategy that she’s bringing to the work that she’s doing, the priority on relationship. I just, I love this conversation with Kate Morgan today, and I think that you guys will also really enjoy it. Let’s go. Kate Morgan is the director of multilingual education for Mount Vernon School District, where she leads ELD service for more than 1,900 multilingual learners.

Her work centers on educational equity. A functional approach to language teaching and learning, and high quality instruction. Kay is known for her collaborative leadership and for building research-based systems that break down silos and support multilingual learners across the district. She holds a background in language and literacy from Western Washington University and a graduate degree in educational leadership and policy from Boston College.

Kay, welcome to the ML Chat [00:02:00] podcast. 

Kate Morin: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. 

Mandi Morris: Kate, tell us a little bit about your role. What is your work like right now? What is your student population like? Tell us what your week is like in your school district. How are you supporting your teachers and students? 

Kate Morin: Know one week looks the same.

Education is an exciting place to be always, and especially right now. My role really sits at the intersection of teaching and learning more broadly, and then of course programs for multilingual learners. In a given week, I’m collaborating across our teaching, learning, and leadership. Department with our Director of Student Services and Prevention.

I’m collaborating with our teaching learning and leadership directors for secondary and elementary on things like curriculum and data use and all of those pieces. But I’m also working directly with ML specialists or multilingual specialists in the building, the practitioners who are actually providing the [00:03:00] services to multilingual learners.

And so I do a fair amount of coaching, consulting, and collaborating with principals just to implement our multilingual programs in, in, within our vision. 

Mandi Morris: So it sounds like your school district is about that size, that people wear multiple hats. 

Kate Morin: Yes. Yeah. We are a mid-size district. We serve, as you said.

Around 1,900 multilingual learners. And we are not so small that we wear too many hats, but yeah, not big enough that we have a director for everything. Yeah, 

Mandi Morris: and some of that can bring a lot of benefit because it sounds like you’re doing a lot of interdepartmental work meeting across departments. Could you talk a little bit more about what.

The benefit is of how your systems are set up, that you’re working directly to support ML practitioners and students, but it sounds like you’re connecting with a lot of other teaching and learning departments throughout the week. 

Kate Morin: Yeah, absolutely. [00:04:00] There’s great benefit. One of the things that our team really prioritizes is just interdependency and collaboration.

And I think the benefit of that is that there are multiple lenses on any given project or initiative, right? I often bring to the space the multilingual lens, right? So as we’re talking about, let’s say, disproportionality, for example, from a racialized lens, we also can layer on the multilingual lens as well to work towards improvement in over-representation.

Andrew Brandt: So Kate, I am really curious. You are doing a lot of great things right now. You’ve also got this district that’s this in a lot of ways. Like you said, it’s a balance of not being so small that you’re wearing a ton of hats, but also not being so large that you have a department for everything. I’m curious your thought, but I know in my experience and working with school districts that it, it feels like a little bit of a sweet spot where you got a team to do the work, but you’re small enough that you can be agile.

Is that does, I’m just curious if that’s what you’re feeling and is that, how [00:05:00] does that affect the work you’re doing right now 

Kate Morin: in a district this size? Relationships are really important, right? They’re important everywhere in education, but I have the benefit of working with 11 principals in my district, and so that just is a really.

Manageable number to have. I meet with principals monthly, right around their multilingual learner. Progress toward a vision, and there’s a lot of opportunity, like you said, to move the work forward through those relationships that maybe in a larger district aren’t necessarily as accessible. It’s a really exciting time and place to be working right now because we are making some big moves.

Andrew Brandt: Man, I love how you’re making it a priority and carving out space to meet with each principal. ’cause that creates a lot of valuable awareness. And of course that connection and building that relationship to make sure our language learners are still top of mind for our principals who are obviously a key part of the instruction that you spent your entire [00:06:00] educational career in Mount Vernon.

Kate Morin: I have. 

Andrew Brandt: Okay. Which is also a great asset to have been in the system from the very beginning. I’d love to go back and see where did you start? What was, what’s been your journey? 

Kate Morin: Yeah, I started in Mount Vernon School District as a student teacher in the 20 15, 20 16 school year. And I remember I, my university that I attended is about 30 minutes north of here.

And I remember thinking, oh boy, I’m gonna have a 30 minute commute right to my student teaching site, which was not exciting as an undergraduate. And really, I. Couldn’t have been luckier. I was placed as a student teacher. I was. Hired right out of college as a first year teacher at the same school where I interned and spent seven years there, both as a third grade teacher and then as a multilingual specialist.

So before I entered this role, I really [00:07:00] had an opportunity to play around with what this work can look like at a building level before moving into a leadership position here at the district office. 

Andrew Brandt: No. Absolutely. And I also noticed you spent several years, actually within a year starting, weren’t you, the district equity lead?

Kate Morin: I was. We almost around the time that I got hired, launched a equity initiative we called it. And so I had the opportunity to be a teacher leader for equity as we rolled that out. 

Andrew Brandt: So it feels like your passion for the work that you’re doing now has been there from the beginning. Now did you, when you start off as a teacher, were you.

Focused on, I want to, I wanna help serve language learners. Or is it something that, that kind of a, a love that came along the way? 

Kate Morin: That’s a good question. When I came out of undergrad, I was passionate as a mild way of putting it. I was ready to revolutionize education and I didn’t really understand what that meant as a 23-year-old looking out.[00:08:00] 

24 8 year olds looking back at me, and as I came to know what it means to be an educator and to work in schools. And then as I became more embedded here within the Mount Vernon community, really my social justice lens or my equity lens started to take shape around multilingual learners and around equity and access for culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

Mandi Morris: I love Andrew mentioned it earlier, but I do just love when I hear about people like start their career in a place and they’ve stuck in that place. And you mentioned relationships earlier. It’s so powerful. And like you’ve been in those classrooms, those kids, in those families, and then to move into the leadership lane, you just have so much built.

Knowledge around the place where you are built relationships across the district and with families as well. I’d love if you could speak a little bit about, you mentioned your passion for social justice [00:09:00] within education or equity within education. How has that impacted your community? Thinking about families and students that you serve, what does that work look like for you?

Kate Morin: Families and communities are a. Big priority here in Mount Vernon. We are a majority minority district. About 60% of our population is Latino, which tends to be a pretty community centered group of folks. In general. Right? And there are many opportunities across the year to celebrate students’, cultures and assets.

We have an amazing mariachi band here who’s played nationally for my work in particular. The way that I think about it is how we inform families of what’s behind the scenes of multilingual programming, what they should be expecting of the system for their children, and then how they work in partnership with us to hold us accountable to our [00:10:00] goals into theirs.

Mandi Morris: Yeah. Tell us more detail about that. I think that’s a really interesting approach. Families feeling informed about what our services and what they offer. I know in my experience in being an ELD specialist or working at district level, we’d have families that would refuse services. Often families hadn’t had the opportunity or been yet presented with the information of what these services provide and should provide.

And even if you do refuse services, your student still has to take, your child still has to take the state language assessment. So it’s not like getting them out of that test. So talk a little bit more. I think people would be interested to know like, how are you going about in. Forming families. This is what the program should offer for you so that you can advocate for yourself.

If you, if your child is not receiving this service, this is a way for you to have a voice and help us be accountable and do better. 

Kate Morin: Yeah, absolutely. There are a few different approaches that we take to this. So. One is a for everyone approach, [00:11:00] right? So we host informational nights leading up to lead a testing so that families have familiarity with what the test looks like, how long their child will be spending on the test, and then we also speak to families about their rights presently.

But how those rights came to be, I’m a big believer in. Families need to know and understand that the court cases, that frame these services came from family advocacy, and so I want families to be able to see themselves in those court cases and know that, that they have that power as well. Additionally. I can think of a time where a family did refuse services or want to refuse services, and really we have one-on-one conversations with those families to explain.

There’s a lot of fear around my child will be pulled out of the classroom. They’ll feel like an other, they’ll miss other learning, and we really prioritize. That doesn’t happen in our district. Your student is being served in the [00:12:00] classroom 

Andrew Brandt: and I love listening to this and what I’m hearing a little bit is.

Kate coming out of outta college, 23 years old, just I’m gonna transform education. And along the way, your journey has crafted you into this perspective now that is really focused on just really making education accessible for all of your students. Is there a certain story or aha moment that’s like really transformed how you view your role?

Kate Morin: In terms of a, an aha moment or kind of what shaped this path for me, I remember being a third grade as I shared and doing everything I could to make my materials culturally relevant, make them interesting for students. I did a lot of. Projects where students brought in their own lived experience. And still, I wasn’t seeing the kinds of gains in literacy in math that I was hoping to or that was commensurate with the effort I was putting in and that [00:13:00] the kids were putting in and the families.

And so that really led me on a pursuit of what is the thing that’s going to move the needle for these students? 

Andrew Brandt: I love that. It feels a little similar to my journey with parenting, where coming in I had a lot of theories and no kids, and then I had four little girls and now I’ve got no theories and I’m just doing everyday best I can.

And at the same time, there’s a certain depth and understanding that comes with just doing the work and, and feeling the impact you can have and the impact that you, you can have, and that you really have to be able to make it a partnership with. Both who you’re teaching and then you mentioned earlier the families you’re teaching with.

And even though we go in with this idea of, man, I’m gonna raise these awesome, perfect, amazing kids, and you coming in saying, I’m gonna transform education and it’s gonna be amazing, and you get in the work and you realize it’s good to have that drive and that hunger, but it’s a collaborative team effort.

And ultimately, despite the fact that we wanna be able to control the outcome, it’s our students and our [00:14:00] families that have to also come to the table and that we’re collaborating with them. A lot of the joy in teaching comes from the fact that we can’t control everything that we’re, it’s a collaboration.

Help them find their footing and their uniqueness. And their strength. And I does, I, I might be projecting a little bit of my own experience. That’s a little bit of what I feel in what you’re talking about both now and earlier about your collaboration with families. It’s gone from a hunger to change education to really a love of that relationship with the community you’re serving.

I think that’s beautiful. 

Mandi Morris: In education, there’s a huge shift that happened a long time ago. It’s not about the person in the front of the room that holds all of the answers anymore. And I think as that shift has happened in education over the last decades, there’s that shift happening in parenting. So I think there is Andrew a lot of parallel between that.

It’s like that nature versus nurture, and then you have these humans in your life and you’re like. I don’t hold all the answers, so like I don’t, I’m, I, like you said, [00:15:00] I’m doing the best I can and I think when listening to you say that, Andrew, it made me think too about just the vulnerability of being a teacher in front of a room.

And you said it earlier, Kate, I’m standing there, I think you said 23 with. All of these eight year old’s faces looking back at you and you are supposed to know what to do and how to do it. And there’s so much pressure on teachers, and especially when you’re a young teacher for a second, third year, you feel this obligation.

Like you have to fix all the things and you have to know all the things. And that’s probably the difference, Andrew, before having your first year, fourth, and by the time you’re on your fourth, they’re like. We’re gonna do our best and we’re gonna love this kid, and like it’s gonna be okay. I feel like that’s what happens as a teacher, right?

You grow in your career. It’s like I’m doing my best. I’m here with love and compassion and care. I’m showing up every day. And then, yeah. It is a really vulnerable job to be there and to accept that you are not gonna always have the answer for everything. You’re not always gonna be able to fix everything.

Kate Morin: Absolutely. I appreciate you sharing that. One of the things [00:16:00] that comes up for me is just what you were speaking to that pressure, and once we realize that we aren’t the person who holds all of the answers and we can’t do all of the things, I think when we get comfortable in that space, that opens us up for collaboration with others, right?

We can’t do this work alone. And so whether that’s collaboration with families, whether that’s collaboration with our colleagues, that really. It’s truly the center of my work here, how we are transforming things for ELD multilingual learners. 

Mandi Morris: So, Kay, at wida, you did a presentation about the ELD standards, and I’d love to dig into that, but I’m curious about it from a couple of different perspectives.

One, just like the application. Right. What does that look like when you’re training teachers around the ELD standards and what your intended outcomes are? Right? Like, how are you hoping it’s going to impact instruction? But I also would love to carry the thread through of where we’ve been just now in [00:17:00] thinking about the relationship piece.

Because you just said you realize as a teacher, you have to rely on those relationships and in order for the teachers that you’re working with to trust you that, okay, I’m gonna do the thing I’m gonna like. Really lean into the standards and I’m gonna unpack them and I’m gonna apply them in my classroom.

There is a certain level of trust there that I comes with relationship. I love for you to talk about both sides of that and what that journey has been like for you. 

Kate Morin: Thank you. So one of the things that we did three years ago here in the district is we said, no more pullout programming for multilingual learners and.

We knew that there, that would leave the system in a lurch a little bit, right? Where that was common practice for many years and without that, and necessarily something to replace it right away, there was a lot of anxiety around how are multilingual learners going to be [00:18:00] served Now that we’re not pulling them out for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, you’re not necessarily working on the things that that we were used to doing for multilingual learners.

Mandi Morris: And 

Kate Morin: I say that because it in that lurch or that lapse, there was a need to spend a lot of time building trust between me and principals, right? As they figured out what this was going to look like. But also practitioner to practitioner, the multilingual specialists in the building and the teachers. Um, and I think we’re in a good place now, three years later.

And that really is what our ELD work is reliant on. So you asked about impact. Our hope is that every student, a hundred percent of multilingual learners have access to the curriculum. But beyond access, they’re receiving content based. Explicit English language development in their classes. And that’s how we leverage the WIDA ELD standards.

And that takes [00:19:00] quite a bit of collaboration and trust relationship. 

Mandi Morris: So let’s go into the nitty gritty here for a minute, because you made a big transition and that transition can be very uncomfortable, and I’m understanding you correctly, that transition was across K 12. Correct. Okay. So you have a lot of different models across a K 12 system, and I think this is where having a mid-size school district really benefits you because you can make some of these big changes when you’re working with 11 principals and not like 45.

Right. But go into the details here for a minute because I am imagining that. It impacted your FTE. I’m imagining it looks different in K five than it does in six 12, and I would love for you just to talk for a minute about this is how we’re doing this in elementary school. This is the shift in how we’re we are absorbing that shift, and then maybe at that secondary lens as well.

Kate Morin: Yeah, absolutely. So how it looks today, and I, I sh I say today, I qualify it that way because it took a while to, to [00:20:00] get to this point, but in a hundred percent of our elementary schools, which is six, right? A manageable number, teachers are released from their classrooms for an hour and a half, four times a year.

And those align with our units of study, our literacy units of study, and. For those 90 minutes, they sit down as a grade level team, side by side with the multilingual specialists and oftentimes other support staff. So we’ll have our reading specialists, our math specialists, our instructional coach, lots of support so that teachers know that they’re not doing this work alone and they spend time looking at the WIDA standards, looking at their final project or assessment, looking at the rubrics and matching.

What is the language feature that students are going to need to use in order to be able to do this task and embedding that right into the final assessment? They then take that and backwards plan for the whole unit so they know exactly when and where they’re going to teach those [00:21:00] language features.

Mandi Morris: Yeah, and just calling out here, you said 90 minutes each quarter. So like what you just, I’m like visualizing as you’re talking that work and all the people that are in the room and how structured that time has to be productive because it takes one sidebar conversation about. Such and such student and the class was disrupted and now you’re like in this totally different.

So you have a lot of structure around those 90 minutes, and I am imagining that there are some really key takeaways of when we’re done with this meeting because all of that backwards planning and embedding that work and into day-to-day instructions, definitely not happening in the 90 minutes. So I’m wondering like, okay, you’ve got the 90 minutes, you come up with this summative, you’ve aligned the.

The functions of language and then what? Teachers go back to their spaces and they start doing all that backwards planning alone or with an ELD specialist. 

Kate Morin: Yeah. Great question. Really importantly, our goal for that 90 minutes is that [00:22:00] it feels so useful for teachers. We don’t want it to feel like a hoop.

They’re jumping through. And so in order to make that happen, like you said, that work has to carry on. Right. And so it does happen with the ELD specialists oftentimes in, we don’t call them PLCs, but in their PLC ALIKE group or through weekly meetings during their planning time. 

Andrew Brandt: Earlier you mentioned.

That you made this move and it left the system in a lurch. I don’t know what it was about that word, but it immediately brought to mind the Dr. Seuss image of a car, like balancing on a spire that then has like above the car balancing plates and things. As I thought about that as you’re talking, I thought about how fitting that, that comparison, I think is.

Because it is a challenging shift, Mandy, that’s something we’re seeing across the country is so many districts making this jump. Some with more success than others. It sounds like that Kate, you found an approach that you feel like is working Maybe before, even before that, I’d love to [00:23:00] know what was the pain?

What was the need or the problem you saw with how you were doing services? 

Kate Morin: Oh, so many. One, we have more multilingual learners than we could possibly serve in 30 minutes in small groups all day, every day. If we were running 30 minutes every second of the day, we still would not be able to serve the number of multilingual learners.

That we have that way. So that was really the first and the most prevalent pain point and something that specialists were wrestling with across their buildings. The second is we know that’s detached from what students are learning in their classrooms. Even if you’re collaborating tightly, it’s happening in a different space.

It’s delivered in a different way. And so it was a really. Fractured experience for students who need maybe the most consistency across their day. 

Andrew Brandt: Yeah, no, I, I love that because part of that balancing act in my mind of this Dr. Seuss image is balancing both core instruction and language instruction, which is very hard to do.

[00:24:00] Do you feel, as you’ve implemented this model, do you feel like it’s doing what you wanted to do? And then maybe, I guess the follow up question is, what comes next? What’s your focus right now around that? 

Kate Morin: We are in an interesting place where some of our buildings, we have some early adopters, right, where we’ve been talking about this work, chewing on this work for a while now, and our early adopters are three years into doing it fully, right?

And then we have some schools who were maybe a little bit slower to come to this work. Right? And that’s okay. And so just in. We’re at different places, right? So in buildings where this is just getting started, we’re actually in the phase of let’s build some relationships. Let’s get you into the classroom.

Let’s build that trust that another adult can share this space. And it’s not evaluative, it’s not extra work, right? And then other schools where it’s flying, where it’s happening closer to a more ideal state, we are seeing. That explicit ELD happening in collaboration or at the same time as the core literacy [00:25:00] instruction?

In terms of what’s next, I think it’s refining. I’ve thrown a lot of new at our ML specialists and at our schools over the last three years, and they’ve risen to the challenge, and so instead of continuing to add new, it’s about let’s practice this, get really good at it, and let’s go deeper. 

Andrew Brandt: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

I love that. 

Mandi Morris: I appreciate Kate how strategic, it sounds like you’re being about the work and patient, so you’re understanding like, yeah, we’re three years in and it is smooth in some places and other places are. Still figuring some stuff out. And it’s not that often that you hear leads in a school district say, we’re actually not adding something new.

We’re gonna refine. And I think that’s so powerful and it’s actually harder to do in a lot of ways than just adding something new. ’cause new can be shiny and fun for a minute, but you’re taking something that you’ve. Built with a lot of intentionality and then [00:26:00] supporting it, and I’m sure you’ve got some really awesome teacher leads at this point that are supporting new teachers that are coming in.

Uh, yeah, it just, it sounds like you’ve got a really strategic and strong system. I’d love to just loop back and hear about at this secondary level, what does that inclusive ELD look like? Because scheduling, of course, it’s secondary, gets. So tricky. And I’m curious, are you focused on a specific content area and it that it feels like FTE is always a real challenge with an integrated ELD approach at the secondary level.

So how have you addressed that as well? 

Kate Morin: That’s a great question. Secondary is a trickier beast than elementary in some ways. One of them is, as you said, the FTE. One of the things that we’ve worked really hard in our district to achieve is a one to 100 ratio of multilingual specialists to multilingual learners, which might sound like a lot of, that’s a large ratio, and for our district.

Better [00:27:00] than we’ve ever been, and that allows the work to sustain in terms of content area, in terms of. Content area focus. We started with ELA and math, so we have a multilingual specialist at secondary assigned to either the ELA team or the math team, and they attend their PLC structure. They’re in their classrooms, they’re at the trainings, all of those things.

They are a member of the ELA team. The other move that we made is not attaching. Secondary multilingual specialist to any one section. So a multilingual specialist, for example, is not. Listed as a co-teacher on third period, 10th grade, ELA. They are free to rotate through teachers, by unit, by student need where the data tells them so that they’re not necessarily attached and locked in the same way.

Really the inspiration for that was what elementary specialists are able to do. They’re not [00:28:00] attached in the same way. They have a little bit more fluidity. 

Mandi Morris: That is a really interesting approach for secondary, it feels like most of the time you have more of that very tight. Co-teaching experience, which as you’re talking through, it doesn’t always make sense because our population is fluid throughout the school year as well.

So you might have a lot of students that need, you could have 3, 4, 5 move in C site for life students in October, and where that teacher needs to be at a secondary level is gonna look completely different than what it did at in August. September when all of those schedules were being made. I think that is such a neat approach.

And I wonder from the accountability perspective, so like for admin perspective, how do you know, how are you measuring that your ELD specialists are being effective at the secondary level or elementary school level? What are the measures? I think other admin would be really curious by what you’ve accomplished here, but also wondering like, how do we know that it’s working?

Kate Morin: Really good [00:29:00] question, and I will name that it’s more challenging at secondary than at elementary. We’ve had just a lot more structure built around our elementary system than around our secondary, so that just continues to be work for us. However, across our K 12 system, my expectation and I actually took the role of evaluator for all of the mls.

Specialists. So I have, and again, the benefit of a mid-size district, right? I have the capacity to evaluate all. I think we have 19 of them, and so part of that’s part of the accountability piece, but my expectation of them is that they’re regularly progress monitoring a focus group of students. So they might be working with a hundred, sometimes 300 students right across.

Classrooms, but I would, I asked them to narrow in on a focus group of students aligned to their school improvement plan goal. And every school has a school improvement plan goal around multilingual learners. So they align their progress monitoring with [00:30:00] that goal in mind. 20, 25, 30 students, and then regularly across a quarter, they are tracking, writing data, writing output, using the proficiency level descriptors.

From wida. 

Mandi Morris: That is incredible. I, you have, again, you’re so strategic about how you’re going about the work and you have this really noticeable blend of heart and head in the work that you’re doing here at Flashlight, we do have five Hs, like head, heart, hand, humility, and happiness, and I love it. It’s like part of our like core values as a company.

And just listening to you talk, it’s as educators, there’s so many of us who are like, we’re in it for the heart and the passion. It sounds like that’s where you started your career, right? All this passion, but in order to do the work, it has to be focused. You have to have priorities, you need a strategic plan, you need accountability.

Things have to be measured to know that they’re effective or not. Um, and you’ve really leaned into accomplishing your goals with having a [00:31:00] strategic plan in place. And I imagine that also. Providing a space where teachers feel trust because they understand what’s expected of them and they understand what it means to be successful because you’ve made that clear for them.

Andrew Brandt: Yeah. In a similar vein, it’s hard to have that discipline and that composure to go slow. I think a lot of times we think that the hardest part is choosing of leading an organization is choosing what to do, but I think the hardest part is often saying no and choosing what not to do, and I just, I’m really impressed with your.

Just composure as you’re leading the district and taking on like integrated ELD, that’s hard and seem to be doing it really effectively and methodically. I’m curious, are there any books or authors that are like, stand out for you? They’re like, this has been transformative for me. 

Kate Morin: We have done a number of.

Not necessarily book studies, but deep dives into some of the texts that are pretty common around collaboration, integrated ELD, for example, the Hossfeld [00:32:00] texts. I would also say the WIDA framework itself and the WIDA Administrator supplement have been really key for us in just. Visualizing giving shape to what this could look like.

Yeah. So those are a couple of of things that we lean into deeply. 

Andrew Brandt: Oh, that’s great. Yeah, there’s, and obviously there’s a lot of great work out there, and I think a little bit, what I hear is just go to the resources out there. It’s coming together as a team and going through it together, and so you can be on the same page.

Mandi Morris: Kate, you said that looking forward it. More of what you’re doing, right. If you were sitting here a year from now, or two years from now and looking back, what does that look like for you? What are some goals that you have for your discharge with this really big transformative work that you’re doing?

Kate Morin: That’s a great question. I. When I think about doing, getting deeper, going deeper, a couple of different things. One, just developing more fluency [00:33:00] around this practice, both for our multilingual specialists who I should mention, are not trained as facilitators and coaches. They are walking into this work, learning how to do it as well.

And so just that fluency and confidence with that work. And then I will say too, like evidence of language learning across the school, right? I’m thinking of one building where there are anchor charts and poster. It’s just so evident that the explicit ELD is taking place. Another area that we have to go next is how we better serve our duly identified students, our students who are in special education and multilingual learners.

That’s just an area where we need to dig in and put our best thinking around how we best serve those students. 

Mandi Morris: What observations have you had right now? What kind of popped that to the surface for you? 

Kate Morin: Sure. I think it beco, it continues to be a question that we wrestle with both from like a logistics perspective, right?

If those students are being pulled [00:34:00] out for their IEP minutes, for example, then how does the multilingual. Specialist support that student, and I think there are some answers to that question. We just need to figure out how we’re going to approach it. The other is from our data are it’s very clear that our students who are duly identified are not being as, as well served as they could be.

And so that just is a screaming point for us that we need to pay attention to. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, absolutely. I think that need is felt across the country and a lot of school districts are in different places on how they’re addressing that and how they’re meeting that need. So based on our conversation here today, I have no doubt that you’re gonna work with your team and rely on those relationships and find a path forward for equity for those students in your school district.

Kate, you’ve talked a lot today about relationships and. How you’re doing this work. We know it’s, you’re not doing this work alone. You, you’ve got a team that you’re working with. Tell us some about what’s making it possible. Like [00:35:00] how are you actually accomplishing such a big shift in your school district?

Kate Morin: Yeah. I have the luxury of working with some of the best people on the planet. I will fight anyone who says otherwise, but my. ELD teachers are so committed, so passionate. They have stuck with me when it was hard when they were in the lurch and trusted that we were gonna come out on the other side. And they’re seeing the efforts, the fruits of their labor show.

And so I am eternally grateful for the team of teachers that I work with. Who, who carry this workout make the vision real. 

Mandi Morris: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I’m sure that they love working with you and having that team collaboration, nothing tops that it makes going to work every day a joy and it’s just makes the work a place of joy when you can do it with people that you care about that really are sharing your passion.

That makes me so happy for your students because all of [00:36:00] that. A relationship that you’re talking about and the appreciation and gratitude you’re saying for your teachers. The students feel that they see that and they benefit from it. So I’m excited for your students in your school district and this has been such an awesome conversation.

Kate, we really appreciate you being here with us today. 

Kate Morin: Thank you for having me.