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Adriana Cernucan: [00:00:00] Language objectives go hand in hand with a content objective, and the language is not. Learned in, uh, isolation. And we have to blend this tool for our students to be successful. And this is across all content areas. So we are ensuring that every lesson includes clear, measurable language objectives alongside content walls where we create opportunities for students to develop their academic language. We fully engaging with. The subject matter.
Mandi Morris: Hi. Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m your cohost, Mandy Morris. Today I had an incredible conversation with Leslie and Adriana from Manassas City Public Schools. Whoa. Have you ever tried to figure out how to get language through content and science or a different content area?
This is a conversation for you. They are doing incredible work. They started small. It’s [00:01:00] organically growing and it is a really inspirational conversation about them providing grace for each other in this work and their partnership, and also providing grace for their teachers to figure out something new and kind of complicated and hard.
I love this conversation with Leslie and Adriana, and I know that you all too. Thanks for being here today. Let’s go. Adriana Lucin is the seventh through 12th SL specialist for Manassas City Public Schools. She’s currently a doctoral candidate at George Mason University, specializing in multicultural multilingual education with degrees in educational leadership from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a Master’s of Literacy from George Mason University, originally from Romania.
Adriana is an experience educator who has taught multilingual learners across K 12 as an SL specialist. Adriana supports teachers working with multilingual learners. And is particularly committed to the success of long-term English learners. Leslie Jones is the K 12 science coordinator from NASA City Public Schools.[00:02:00]
She’s been an educator for 25 years, serving 18 years as a science teacher, and now seven years as a science coordinator. She also teaches college level anatomy and physiology. Leslie has a master’s in biology from Virginia Tech and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from Capella University.
She’s passionate about sharing her love for science and supporting the learning journey for all students, especially multilingual learners in her district. Leslie and Adriana, we are so excited to have you on the ML Chat podcast today. Welcome. Thank you so much. We’re excited
Leslie Jones: to
Mandi Morris: be
Adriana Cernucan: here.
Mandi Morris: Thank you
Adriana Cernucan: for having us.
Mandi Morris: So this is a really unique conversation because we have a science coordinator with us today. In addition to Adriana being an EL specialist. We love talking about language through content, and cannot wait to learn from you today and hear about what y’all are doing, how you’re collaborating and working together.
Could you guys tell us, Adriana, maybe tell us a little bit about what [00:03:00] is your county, your school district, like who are the students that you’re serving? Just tell us a little bit about what that looks like for you and your work.
Adriana Cernucan: We are a small district in Northern Virginia, and we serve students across five elementary schools to intermediate schools, one middle school and one high school.
We have about 7,500 students, and a lot of this number 3026 are English learners. That’s about 41%. 41% of our student population receive direct language services. However, 5,360 students are considered multilingual learners, so that’s almost 70% of our student population are coming from diverse linguistic background, and that is what shapes our work when we are thinking about supporting our students and planning for our students with the having a mind [00:04:00] inclusivity and empowering learning environments.
Mandi Morris: Adriana with a school district that’s so diverse, like in such a diverse part of the country, that’s something that’s really unique about Northern Virginia area. What does your population of students look like that you’re serving?
Adriana Cernucan: The majority of our multilingual learners come from Spanish speaking countries, so about 90 or more than 90% of our students are Spanish speaking students.
Also we have, as you said, a diverse linguistic background. We have Arabic. We do pharmacy and other languages in our district.
Mandi Morris: Wow, that’s so neat. So we’ve gotta dive in. Adriana, you’re here with your colleague, Leslie. I am just so excited to hear about where did your partnership together begin, and how did y’all end up presenting at WIDA this past school year together?
Adriana Cernucan: So our partnership started two years ago when I came to the district. He was here, the [00:05:00] science coordinator, and when I joined the team, we started to work together and we realized actually this year that our partnership and the way we are working together, it is a model for how the content and the language specialists should come together to remove barriers for our multilingual learners.
Soon as we started, we together on. Developing language objectives for our science, for the science units and lesson plans. And we were thinking about integrating writing in content areas, specifically in science. And this is how we joined the, with our workshop, writing with multilingual learners in content areas at the secondary level.
Mandi Morris: Oh, I love this. So you come to the school district, Leslie, you’d already been at the school district, right? So Leslie, what’s happening for you where you’re like, [00:06:00] let’s do this. This is big work, and we know from talking to teachers and directors that sometimes the work just feels so big that they don’t know where to start.
They don’t feel like they have the bandwidth, their capacity. Tell us, Leslie, from your perspective, where you were like, I’m all in. Let’s go.
Leslie Jones: Yeah, so one of the things about Manassas City that I really appreciate here, when you think about all the Northern Virginia schools, Fairfax, Loudoun, prince William, they’re so big.
We’re a small district, which really allows Adriana and I to work directly with teachers. So we are in classrooms and in CLTs with teachers all the time. And so when we started working with. Really closely with our secondary teachers, it was, we realized really quick that they needed support and planning for scaffold and differentiation within their classrooms for all of the different learners that they have.
And so that’s really where. Adriana and I started [00:07:00] brainstorming and really working collaboratively with the teachers to say, what do you need? What do you need from us? How can we help? And that was really the jumping off point, was doing very small things like the language objectives, and then it led to bigger things from there.
Wow. So
Mandi Morris: this is work that sounds like it’s growing. It’s getting bigger. I’d love to talk about. Your relationship with the teachers, what has professional learning looked like? It’s one thing for Leslie and Adriana to come together at district office and say, let’s do this work together. This is important.
It’s a need. It’s another thing to roll out work that big and important. How has that looked for you in your school district?
Leslie Jones: So we have a great, very positive relationship with teachers. So when we started rolling out this project that we presented at wida, which is it’s a project where we’re really combining content learning with writing, we approached our one set of teachers at the high school, [00:08:00] our intro to the environment team, and.
They wanted to do a project and we said, Hey, what do you, what are your thoughts on doing a project on Virginia invasive species? And we gave them the big overview, but we said, if you all are willing to pilot this with us, we will really plan in everything in the background that you need. And so we did that, and then we took, it was half a day.
Training the teachers on how to do this, and then from there, this led into a sixth grade project where we’re working on a watershed project with those teachers.
Mandi Morris: What I heard from you was you did the work alongside your teachers.
Leslie Jones: That is correct.
Mandi Morris: So instead of taking something as big as unpacking standards, unpacking learning objectives, building in scaffolds to content.
And having a one hour training and saying, good luck everyone. You said, let us partner with you. Let us work alongside you. [00:09:00] We’ll model it so that you feel confidence. And it sounds like you got buy-in through that process.
Leslie Jones: We did. It’s interesting because some teachers are hesitant if they’re not English teachers to teach writing.
So really working with them through the process, they became more excited about it. And then this is our third year, or no, our second year, excuse me, with the project at the high school. And after the teachers did it the first time and they saw the student product, they got really
Mandi Morris: excited. Adriana, you were gonna add something there?
Adriana Cernucan: I want to say that I credit Leslie and her relationship with the Science Depart and the Science depart, so secondary level who are very open to new ideas and to integrate new strategies for multilingual learners. And they were quite graciously open to all to me coming into their mission and working alongside or Leslie.
You said that we worked with them and did not only with the planning and [00:10:00] modeling, but when they started the unit with their students, we went to their classes and supported the instruction with the station rotation face and all that.
Mandi Morris: Adriana, I just, I heard some of my favorite words. You said station rotation and you’re talking about high school, right?
So we know we. Teachers that we’ve worked with over the years, like stations are for elementary school. I can’t do stations in high school. I can’t teach content through stations. It doesn’t work. I would just love to hear you talk about what do stations look like in secondary for you, and how is it supporting language learners to grab a hold of content?
Adriana Cernucan: So with this part of our inclusive practices here at the district level, and we. Professional development, districtwide in cooperative learning structures. Everyone is encouraged and supported into using [00:11:00] this. Practices and stations are one of the practices for our exclusive practice development, part of the teaching and learning cycle that we learned about during the, with a workshop.
The first step. It is building background knowledge and we do that through different modalities like reading, watching videos, conversations, and we build stations so the students rotate through or stations in groups or in pair. They have time to read together, to discuss and to build the content knowledge that is necessary for the units Before we go and talk about the.
Writing. Writing and what the genre of the text they’re going to use look like and sounds like.
Mandi Morris: Okay. So talking about your WIDA presentation, it sounds like step one is a station on [00:12:00] building background knowledge. So could you’re teasing us a little bit. We wanna know what did you guys share at Rita? What were these takeaways for others who were like, I wanna do this work.
Where do I start? Could you give us some more information about what do those steps look like?
Adriana Cernucan: Before I go to the steps, I want to give credit to this with a workshop that was phenomenal and we encourage everyone to attend one of these workshops. But the research behind this comes from the teaching and learning cycle has its origins in the 1980s in Australia, where it was developed as part of a functional linguistic approach to teaching.
And the goal was to provide structured framework that supports students in mastering academic writing through explicit teaching and scaffolding, and building on that foundational work. WestEd here in the states adapted the cycle to create a resource called scaffolding writing for [00:13:00] bilingual learners.
Then later we doc, uh, developed and disseminated this approach by creating this workshop writing with the multilingual learners in secondary grades. And the cycle consists of five stages. The first one is building the field, which is activating prior knowledge and building backgrounds on topic, and then exploring the language of text types where the students and.
Features they analyze the specific language features of the genre they’re going to use join construction where teachers and students collaborate to write a text together. Independent construction students apply their knowledge to read their own texts and reflect, review, and revise. And what we realized during the workshop was that we are very familiar.
With the building, the background knowledge, building the [00:14:00] field, and with the independent construction, we teach and then we toast to them. Now they’re right, but we skip these important steps, exploring the text type, joint construction, and then reflecting, reviewing and revising. And I think this is what the missing piece that came to us, right?
That workshop where we. It is this structured step-by-step approach with explicit teaching and modeling for the students and scaffolding for them make it removing barriers and supporting students to access the content.
Mandi Morris: What strikes me is how structured and methodical your approach was. So you wanted to do this big thing, but it sounds like you broke it down into steps that felt very applicable.
We are going to move through these cycles together with support. And you had teacher buy-in. Leslie, I would love to hear from your perspective, working with the science teachers at the [00:15:00] secondary level. What we’ve seen talking to school districts, and I’ve seen it in my career working in public school districts, is that there can sometimes be a lot of resistance at the high school level from content teachers where they say, I know my content.
It’s your job to teach English. It’s my job to focus on my content. Let’s just each do our own thing. So what was it like from your perspective to negotiate those conversations? It sounds like you had a great relationship with your teachers from the get go, but I’d love to hear from your perspective what this work looked like
Leslie Jones: when we walked the teachers through it.
Because I, Mandy, I completely agree with you. I think the teachers, they were very, at first. Very nervous and apprehensive about this project and Adrian, and I said, let’s walk through it and ac we walk through it with you. If you’re still hesitant, that’s fine. And so the beauty of this project is that second step, [00:16:00] exploring the language of text type is simplified in a way that it really breaks it down step by step, not only for the students, but also for the teachers.
It’s actually really hard if you’re following the steps to mess up the writing. So we are very specific in that. In the two groups of teachers we’re working with, we were teaching how to write a persuasive letter. So the students ultimately wrote a persuasive letter to a government official, but we didn’t go outside of that, which I think is important because we stuck to a specific.
Process to write that type of
Mandi Morris: letter. After you went through the process and you had a really clear objective and you stuck with your objective, were teachers confident to be able to replicate the process? What does it look like after that?
Leslie Jones: So what we did is after we went through the process the first time with teachers, with both of our, with both of our [00:17:00] secondary teams, our sixth grade and our ninth grade teams.
Adriana and I did a deep dive, a deep debrief with the teachers, and we were also there throughout the process as well. But what, what worked well, what didn’t work well? What do you need more clarity on? Where do we need to support you more in the process next year? So that’s really what we went through with the teachers last year, and based on their feedback, we tweaked and improved.
Process. So I can give you a quick example. For example, between last year and this year, we actually built some cooperative learning strategies within the second part, the exploring the language of text type. We added a few more cooperative learning strategies that were structured for students to collaborate together on exploring how to do the persuasive writing.
On the teacher feedback.
Mandi Morris: Oh, that’s awesome. So you started small and it sounds like it’s organically growing because it, at the beginning you were saying teachers saw the end result and felt [00:18:00] impressed by what students were able to do. I would love to go back to that for a moment. What were students able to do that felt different from before you implemented this teaching cycle?
Leslie Jones: So that is the, that’s the most amazing and exciting part of the whole process is students were able to produce letters to, some wrote to mayors, some wrote to senators, some wrote to the Virginia governor, and they were, they took a lot of pride when they looked at their federal product and it said, oh, hey, I can actually do this.
Not only can I talk about this science content, I can speak about it verbally, but I can also write about it. To a professional and have a stance, an argument on how I feel about something, whether it was saving a particular species in Virginia, or the sixth graders, they wrote about why the Chesapeake Bay should be cleaned up and their letters were very impressive.
Mandi Morris: And I love to [00:19:00] hear from your perspective, what was exciting to you about how students experience this shift in instruction, or what the end product looked like. For me, it was very
Adriana Cernucan: exciting to see writing in content area that was the most exciting part, and the fact that the teachers agreed to do this and the students were able to write.
So kind to back to the point that you said that teachers are reluctant to do writing, it was, it supported our argument that all teachers are language teachers. Because students are learning language through content, and we had some examples that we presented at a conference with their end product that looks amazing.
And you wouldn’t say that these are multilingual learners at the beginning of their journey. And that’s because it was this structured approach step by [00:20:00] step where the writing was, the genre of an argument was unpack. The students understood how to create a compelling argument and how to organize the letter and they explore the language features and then the joint construction where they wrote together with the teacher and they had an anchor chart, they could go back and see what is the process and what they need to do.
I think that was critical.
Mandi Morris: So some schools are trying to figure out if we are going to do language through content, where is it for people automatically the ELA and then ELD. Those seem like such a natural bridge, but more and more school districts I think are getting curious about what does that actually look like in science or social studies.
I would love to hear what your thoughts are. Why science? Why did you land on science being the place? To [00:21:00] try this inter interdisciplinary work, this language through content. I don’t think we
Adriana Cernucan: want to start with science, but our partnership landed to science. It was said, let’s do this. And we piloted this project and obviously now we want to extend to the other content areas.
So if we didn’t choose science, let’s go first. It was our strategic partnership that led to science being first.
Mandi Morris: Leslie, you’re a first adopter. You were ready to get out there and try something new. What, why do you think that? What made you energized to try this or interested in it?
Leslie Jones: I walk into the schools here in Minno City and I walk into the classrooms and we do have such a diverse student population, and I am a firm believer that every student can be successful and looking through the lens of an asset-based mindset.
When we’re looking at our, when we’re working with our multilingual learners, and I’m also very [00:22:00] extremely competitive and I wanted this to be, I wanted to show that students can write within the content even if they’re not native English speakers.
Mandi Morris: I think it’s just, it’s really exciting work and personally, I feel like language through science is really such a natural.
Partnership because there’s so much language that happens in science and you get the hands-on component. So you have experimental language, you have the content language. It’s also very vocabulary dense content area. So there are so many reasons why that partnership for English language journey through science makes a lot of sense.
But then we have these barriers that are like, oh, this isn’t a natural fit. Go work with the ELA people. And what I heard from you, Leslie, is, and Adriana is like you are willing partners, and sometimes we have to pivot, right? [00:23:00] Roda, you found in Leslie a willing partner. And maybe that’s not where your mind went at first, but look how successful because of the relationship, the outcome has been.
And I think that’s a really great lesson for any school district to hear about where do I start? Well, who is your willing partner? Where can you start?
Leslie Jones: That is one thing that somebody mentioned at the WI Conference that was at our presentation, is that they have been trying in their district to collaborate with their content coordinators, and that relationship is so vital that we don’t work in isolation.
I, as a science coordinator. Work very closely with not only Adriana, but our elementary Esau specialist, our special education specialist, and even across contents with ELA and social studies and math. The relationships are so important and to support our students across the board.
Mandi Morris: Adriana, I wonder for you from the ELD perspective.[00:24:00]
What do your other collaborations look like? Leslie, speaking to all of these students are our students, we’re committed to the success of all of our students. What does that feel like for you to hear the SL coordinator? What are your thoughts around that?
Adriana Cernucan: Yeah it warns my easel heart to, to hear that.
How I see this in the district for our multilingual learners and how we are moving forward is, for example, through integrating language objectives with inclusive instructional practices. And I think we are very fortunate that the leadership in our district realize the importance of integrating language objectives.
And we had some, something unique where we trained all teachers. In our district with developing language objectives. And I would say, so it was like a division wide training and it was [00:25:00] bringing this awareness that language objectives go hand in hand with the content objectives. And the language is not learned in insulation.
And we have to blend this tool for our students to be successful. And this is across all. Content areas. So we are ensuring that every lesson includes clear, measurable language objectives alongside content walls. So we create opportunities for students to develop their academic language where fully engaging with the subject matter.
Mandi Morris: Adriana, that’s big work and it’s amazing to hear that your school district is committed to having district-wide, not only conversations, but training around that. I think what we see a lot of times is that it’s a teacher over here or a principal over here or a building. What advice would either of you have for school districts listening today who say, I wanna get others on [00:26:00] board with this work.
I’m cheerleading you over here, and I believe in it. Where do I begin or how can I get a district-wide momentum going?
Leslie Jones: I think you start with. The mindset that multilingualism is an asset and that everything you do, whether it’s your policies, it’s your instruction, instructional practices, your school culture, all supports that mindset and so that it comes from central office, from administrators, from teachers mean that old fashioned saying it takes a village, but.
We started small. Here again, we started small with baby steps. Let’s start with language objectives, and let’s start with inclusive practices. For example, our lesson plans, I, I can speak more to science than any of the others, but our lesson plans within them have an inclusive practices [00:27:00] section. It has a vocabulary support section.
What are you thinking about for your scaffolds? What do your students need in this class versus that class? Because it’s, we’re trying to meet every student by name and need, but it really did start out small in that baby steps in what we’re doing in the classroom, but really what the mindset that we’re gonna support this
Mandi Morris: across the district.
I love what you said there, Leslie, that you’re meeting every student by name and need. We talk a lot about individualized meeting students individually and their individual needs, but I love calling that out, meeting them by their individual name and needs. It’s really great. Adriana, what were you gonna add?
Adriana Cernucan: I wanted to add, Leslie said that we started small and you asked about advice, and I’m pretty sure that all this great work is happening everywhere in the country and in every district, but it might happen in small pockets. And [00:28:00] for administrators and leaders, it’s very important to recognize the success in this small pockets and start from there and create a model and then expand from there.
It doesn’t have to start from the top because it’s very important that we have teacher buy, buy-in and with our features, we cannot do anything. They have to be convinced of this great work,
Leslie Jones: and that’s the other important thing too. Adriana just said, start with a group of teachers that would like to try something.
And that’s what we did. Approach teachers and say, Hey, can, would you be willing to try this? And then it naturally grows
Mandi Morris: from there. Leslie, earlier you were talking about when you’re trying something new that you told teachers, we’ll try it and then we’ll see what happens. And it struck me when you said that it takes some pressure off.
You’re not setting teachers up at the beginning of something new to say, we are gonna try this. It needs to be perfect. Our [00:29:00] students’ lives are on the line. There has to be a hundred percent fidelity and like building up all of this pressure. You’re doing it in a way that feels like it’s inclusive for students, but it’s also inclusive for teachers.
It’s owning that this might be uncomfortable because it’s new. This might not be as smooth as we think it’s gonna be going the first time, and that’s all gonna be okay. Let’s come back at the end and see how did it go? How could we improve it? Could you speak a little bit more to how did teachers respond to that and what advice could you give to other school districts about how you set it up with that tone?
Leslie Jones: So we’re really fortunate here in Manas City in that we had a specific. Protocol for CLTs. It’s called The Cycle That Works. And one of the important pieces of that protocol is that reflection piece. And I know so many times I know in my past history as a teacher, I get so busy and what I’m doing that even if something doesn’t go the way I [00:30:00] wanted to or I’m like, oh my goodness, that lesson was a complete disaster, I don’t really have time to sit down and reflect on it.
We have really worked closely with teams with the teachers to say, you know what? Let’s have the honest conversations at the table about what is working, what is not working. Nobody is going to take offense if you say, this was just a disaster. We will start over, or this needs to be tweaked.
So we do have our secondary teachers, most of them meet. At least once a week for 16 minutes, but normally twice a week. And they are really great at having these reflective conversations with us, and we’re sitting at the table with them.
Mandi Morris: Wow. Leslie, any insight around scheduling and your secondary teachers being able to meet for 60 minutes a week?
Because we know that PLCs or the version that you have in your school district are so powerful, being able to. [00:31:00] Co-plan to reflect together to brainstorm, collaborate, support one another, but we hear from schools all the time, we don’t have time, we never get to see each other. We have to collaborate asynchronously on a Google doc or passing in the hallway on the way to running to a bathroom break during passing period.
Any tips or tricks for how you have figured that out?
Leslie Jones: So that was made a priority from the district level. Content area teams have time to collaborate together. And I wanna emphasize, it’s not just the content teachers, but the ESOL teachers and the special education teachers supporting those contents also are sitting at the table.
So when the master schedules were created at our secondary schools, they were created in such a way that all of my, for example, all of my biology teachers have off first block. And so do their ESOL teachers that they’re supporting, that are supporting them and the special [00:32:00] education teachers that are supporting them.
So it definitely, it takes some work and all heads at the table to make that schedule work, but we have done that. Now, this is a second or third year giving that time to teachers during the school day
Mandi Morris: to work together. Adriana, how do you think that has impacted English learners? That core content teachers have that time together every week because
Adriana Cernucan: we have an useful teacher in every content area.
We have that support. When they’re unpacking standards and they’re talking about language objectives, our L teachers have their input there. What type of support do we need? What are the level of proficiency in your classes? How can we support? What type of strategies do we have for this activity and so on?
The impact is. In
Mandi Morris: [00:33:00] all levels. While this has been such an incredible conversation about collaboration, starting with willing partners, starting small, like it sounds like you guys give yourselves grace and you give your teachers grace that we’re gonna try and then we’ll make changes as we need. I would love to know, is there anything else from your Rita presentation or the work that you’re doing that you just feel so excited about, so energized about that you wanna share?
Adriana Cernucan: I think we are really excited about expanding this work. I am very excited about expanding this work at other content areas. And as a matter of fact, we have been doing this in parallel with the science projects with our English learners. In the newcomer classes we have a project, voices of the Heart where the students are writing their personal narratives.
Following the same teaching and learning cycle, building a field and analyzing the [00:34:00] genre and so on. And it ends. It ends up with a family engagement project where families and parents are coming and they’re listening to their stories. It’s very emotional and also we are very lucky because six of our English learners.
Were published authors, their personal narratives were chosen to be published in the Origin Project, which is a project here in Virginia developed by the author Adrian Tianni and her team. I’m very excited about expanding this writing with multilingual lawyers at all levels and in all content areas.
Mandi Morris: Wow, that’s incredible. It’s very exciting work that you have going on there. Leslie, what about for you? What’s something that you just feel excited about right now or excited to pursue in this upcoming year?
Leslie Jones: I think I’m excited about the collaboration. I’m excited about getting this information out, for example, in the podcast that we so [00:35:00] appreciate you all inviting us.
And we also have been invited, we spoke at the National Science Conference in the fall, and then we just got asked yesterday to speak at the Virginia Science Leadership. Association in May. So I’m excited about that just because more and more people wanna collaborate around supporting multilingual learners in the content areas.
Mandi Morris: Yeah, absolutely. Leslie, what is something that you’ve learned along the way? You’ve been an educator for a long time. Uh, you’re working in a school district with a lot of multilingual learners from diverse backgrounds. What is something that you’ve learned along the way that you could share with others?
Leslie Jones: So I think the number one thing that I would share is to not try to do anything in isolation. To reach out to your network and to work with your colleagues to support student learning just on science alone would not get our students in science content [00:36:00] where we need to be.
Mandi Morris: I love that collaboration.
Joining efforts to serve all students. Adriana, what about you? If you could go back and tell yourself a piece of advice from when you first started what advice would you give yourself, if you could think of the beginning of your career? To have patience,
Adriana Cernucan: let’s say, to have patience with yourself, with a process, and with ERs, and always maintain an open-minded attitude.
Patience is key because growth takes time. Whether it’s your own development, building relationships, or seeing progress in the system, students or the systems that you are working to support.
Mandi Morris: Hmm. That’s so good. Northern Virginia is often thought of as just a leader in education. The professional learning that comes out, the teaching practices that come out from Northern Virginia.
When I think back to 2006, my first year teaching out of college and. [00:37:00] I think back to professional learning that I did in 2006 in Northern Virginia, and I saw show up much further along in my career in other places, I’m like, oh, wow. Of course I was 20. I didn’t know that it, it was like progressive or pushing at that time.
I didn’t know any different. Why do you think that education in Northern Virginia is really pushing the boundaries around how can we do this better? Where can people get access to the professional learning? What are avenues that people could say, I wanna know what they’re doing there so that I can learn more myself?
Leslie Jones: So I think Northern Virginia is a leader in this area because when you look at the state of Virginia as a whole, Northern Virginia is more diverse than any other area of Virginia. They’ve been the leaders because they’ve. They have the most diversity. So they’ve had to be the leaders. And I just, so for example, I was at a conference yesterday in Charlottesville and I was speaking to somebody who taught in Southern Virginia and [00:38:00] she just had her first multilingual learner this year.
Very different compared to what? To compared to the diversity that we have here.
Adriana Cernucan: You would say the professional development that you have, where are these opportunities? For us here, it comes from districts partnering with universities around here and also through the Virginia Department of Education.
And also right now, with the internet being available to everyone, we can access trainings from coming from Texas from where they. Like diversity and huge number of multilingual learners.
Leslie Jones: That would be my advice to educators is to get on educational podcasts, to get on social media, on edu educational sites, and to subscribe to your state’s newsletter.
There are so many free resources. For example, [00:39:00] Virginia, the newsletter just came out and they’re having on February 4th, the ESOL Workshop 1 0 1. It’s free. Get on there. It’s a place to start and there’s so many resources out there.
Mandi Morris: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so for wrapping up today, I’m gonna ask you both the same question.
So Leslie, I’m gonna start with you. Could you talk about a paradigm shift? That you’ve had in your career that changed the way you see your students.
Leslie Jones: So I taught for 18 years in a rural area of Virginia, and I did, when I came from there, I did not have, there wasn’t such a high EL population in that area.
However, I did teach the Ecel students that we had and also the special education students. So I came from a mindset that every student can succeed. And when I came here, there was a, there was an a health moment for me because [00:40:00] there, there were educators in this area who really had a deficit mindset when it came to multilingual learners and that they really confused a language barrier with a knowledge barrier.
And so that was a real paradigm shift for me, at least in this role. Is really working closely with teachers to shift that mindset and that there’s a language barrier does not mean that there’s a knowledge gap. And that was my real aha coming from a rural district
Mandi Morris: to Northern Virginia. That’s so good.
Adriana, what about you? A paradigm shift that you’ve had in your career?
Adriana Cernucan: For me. It was recognizing and leveraging the rich linguistic repertoires that our multilingual learners bring to the classroom because early in my career, I focused heavily on helping students master English as quickly as [00:41:00] possible, often unintentionally sidelining their home languages.
And over time I realized that this approach not only underestimated their Western abilities, but also missed an incredible. Opportunity to deepen their learning. And of course, I drew that from my own experience as a second language learner in how I use my first language to unpack dense concepts. So that shift happened when I began to see my students’ home languages.
As for tools for thinking, for learning and connecting and encouraging trans languages where students fluently. Fluidly use all their languages to make meaning. I’ve seen remarkable improvements in their confidence and academic outcomes.
Mandi Morris: Okay. I’ve gotta ask a follow-up question. For the teaching cycle that you implemented with science, you were focused, it seems more, with experience multilingual learners.[00:42:00]
Did you have newcomers go through this cycle and did you leverage home language? What did that look like?
Leslie Jones: So our introduction to the environment students, the majority of those students are level one and level two students. So when we are building the background knowledge, Adriana mentioned before how we use multiple modalities, and part of that is if they’re reading an infomercial, for example, we would provide it in English and in the student’s native language.
If they’re watching a video, we would make sure that the video, the closed captioning could also be in the student’s Native language definitely is building that content knowledge. It’s it is important that students can access the content. Their native language. Wow, that’s fantastic.
Mandi Morris: Adriana, is there anything you’d like to add?
Adriana Cernucan: Yeah, to piggyback on what Leslie said, for example, allowing students to brainstorm or discuss in their home language, even [00:43:00] when they go to through the stations, the before transitioning tool, English often results in richer and more sophisticated ideas.
Mandi Morris: This has been such an inspiring conversation today.
I really am thankful Adriana and Leslie, that you took time out to be with us and have this conversation. I am sure there are going to be so many educators that feel inspired by the work that you’re doing, and I’m wondering is there any way for people to reach out to you? Are you on LinkedIn? Where could people connect with you if they wanna ask you questions directly?
Leslie Jones: We are both on LinkedIn. If you ask me what my LinkedIn. And profile thing is, I couldn’t tell you right now off the top of my head, but email is a great way to reach us as well. So my email is lJones@cpsv.org
Adriana Cernucan: and y email is A-C-E-R-N-U. CAN at MCPS [00:44:00]
Mandi Morris: or va.org. Wonderful. This has just been such a great conversation.
Thank you both for being on the ML Chat podcast, and I’m so inspired by the work that you’re doing. Thank you again for being here.
