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Fred Pleis: [00:00:00] Data doesn’t lie to you. So if the data is telling you that a fifth grader is struggling with phonemic awareness, it’s because they are. Also having the opportunity to have coached football, like we watch a lot of game film. So when a player says, coach, I got double teamed every play. No, you didn’t. Your footwork was bad.
There’s the game film. So the data isn’t going to lie to you. And you have to live in that uncomfortability that data isn’t for punishment. The data is for growth and knowledge of yourself to say, this is real intangible. Now, how do I take that data? And how do I leverage it into the practices that I’m using?
And start to realize, oh my gosh, it is about growth.
Mandi Morris: Hi, my name is Mandi Morris. I’m your host today. Welcome to the ML Chat Podcast. Today, as our guest, we have Fred Pleas. He is an instructional specialist for multilingual learners in Charleston County School District. He has been a classroom teacher and [00:01:00] ML specialist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I’m Corona, California, Aurora, Colorado, Jacksonville, North Carolina, and now Charleston, South Carolina. He’s also been an adjunct professor at Charleston Southern University and spent three years working alongside Robert Marzano in educational research at Marzano Resources in Centennial, Colorado. He received his B.
A. in Elementary Early Childhood Education from Temple University, a CLAD certification from University of San Diego, and his M. E. D. in Educational Leadership from Regis University. Welcome to the podcast, Fred. How are you today?
Fred Pleis: I am absolutely so excited, Mandi. I can’t thank you enough for giving me this opportunity to talk to you.
I’m over the moon. I really am.
Mandi Morris: We are so excited to have you here today and to hear about the work that you’re doing, the students you’re supporting. But before we dive into where you are right now, we just want to get to know you a little bit. Tell us like, where did you come from? How did you get into ML [00:02:00] education?
What was your drive?
Fred Pleis: Yeah, as I always say in Northeast Philadelphia, born and raised on the playground is where I spent a lot of my days. And as you mentioned, when five different states in 18 years in the classroom, back when MC Hammer was dropping rap tunes, ultimately my journey started with trying to be an accountant at Temple University.
And when that didn’t really work out well, because I just was like, this is not happening. Of all things, It was through the martial arts that I learned that teaching was something that I really loved and So it changed the course of my life and I was very lucky to have at the time a martial arts instructor who had a teaching background.
And I got pushed into, Hey, so why don’t you go help those two little orange belts? Or, Hey, why don’t you go work with the five year old group? And all of a sudden I just kept spending more and more [00:03:00] time there. And I thought to myself, I don’t want to be an accountant. I want to be a teacher through hook and crook.
And a lot of changes. I wound up in education at Temple University, best decision I ever made in my life, started out as an early childhood teacher in a Head Start program in South Philadelphia, right across the street from what were known as the South Walk Projects. But as a young teacher, I got the opportunity to mentor as an art teacher.
creative movement teacher and a music teacher. So what it turned me on to was the culture of art, the culture of dance, and how it is a world culture. And then I took a big leap of faith and went and moved to California. And in California I found my love of working with multilingual learners because Essentially every teacher was a multilingual teacher in California.
So you start to learn about other [00:04:00] cultures and other people from around the world. And California is incredible melting place. You start to really get to know the families and you get to know the culture of your area and you’re exposed to things that I wasn’t necessarily exposed to in the city of Philadelphia, but I was in California.
And then through marriage and moved to Colorado. Again, Colorado is an incredibly unique place in the sense of who is in Colorado and the uniqueness of their cultures. And then I went and got my master’s degree at Regis University, and through that I found a very odd way of meeting Dr. Robert Marzano.
And when he decided that he was going to pursue his last sort of great push towards educational reform with high reliability schools, he gave me that opportunity.
Mandi Morris: Okay, so Fred, you went from being an accountant to working with kids and martial arts to music and art. It was a journey.
Fred Pleis: Yeah, I wasn’t much of an accountant.
I [00:05:00] was more working in a grocery store, but that’s okay.
Mandi Morris: And then in California, you really had an opportunity to work with multilingual learners, and it sounds like you really fell in love with with multilingual learners there in California, and we’re able to expand that experience in Colorado. So take us through Colorado.
What was it like there? What were your, what was your next step in the world of education there in Colorado?
Fred Pleis: So basically at each stage, whether it was Philadelphia, where I was more working head start early childhood to California, where I taught grade levels one through five. And then in Colorado, I was.
teacher and this is where the journey started because they were like, Hey, you were in California. We need this knowledge base. So it really in Colorado, I got the opportunity to apply everything that I had really worked on in California. in an elementary school as the kind of the first time of being what they called an ESOL teacher.
I was [00:06:00] working with every grade level, loving that as well because now my reach was beyond what was in my classroom. And now I’m working with fifth graders and fourth graders on a daily basis and watching them grow linguistically.
Mandi Morris: And while you were in Colorado, you came and crossed paths with Marzano, right?
So tell us what that was like.
Fred Pleis: It’s a crazy story, but I’ll try to make it as brief as possible. In Colorado, I also did a little bit of martial arts. When I went back to get my master’s degree, I read six of his books in my master’s degree program. And I had known about him in California. along with Rick DeFore and Becky DeFore and Bob Eaker, who are the foundations of what PLCs were.
And I had the great opportunity in California to sit at the feet of Rick DeFore and Becky DeFore and really find out about PLCs. It’s been their inception. So this is the early 2000s when we moved to Colorado. I was [00:07:00] now I’m in the ESL world So it’s okay. You better get together with the collaboration.
You better know what’s going on with those teachers You better know what’s going on with those kids. How are you supporting them? So then my first son was born And my wife and I had made a decision that one of us was going to stay home. And she had a slightly better or more stable situation than I did.
So I chose to stay home and I actually chose to grow a martial arts business and some other things. But that gave me that opportunity to go back and get that master’s degree. So here I am, I read six of the books of Dr. Marzano. And then through a strange set of circumstances, I wind up meeting Dr.
Marzano because through the martial arts, uh, I was working with his daughter.
Mandi Morris: Oh my goodness. That is wild.
Fred Pleis: And of all things, what people don’t know is Bob Marzano has a black belt in Taekwondo. So I happened to be working in conjunction with a Taekwondo school. We were doing some training together and here’s this really awesome young woman [00:08:00] who they’re trying to teach to be like this fierce warrior.
And I’m like, no, you’re a short girl from New York. You need to stick and move. But of course, she’s with her married name. One day I’m exploring the black belt tree of the school and I see the name, Robert Marzano. And I was like, that’s strange. So I go to the sobronym, Mr. Gawkey, and I said, Sir, you have a black belt named Robert Marzano.
He goes, oh yeah, Dr. Bob. I said, is he Dr. Robert Marzano? He’s some kind of educator. Stop it! Dr. Robert Marzano has a black belt at this school. He goes, yeah, don’t you know, Mrs. Haystead’s, that’s his daughter. What? She comes into the school the next time. I’m like, your father is Dr. Robert Marzano. And she’s like, Oh God, he found out.
He found out. There’s a tournament. We did a little inner school tournament at the place. And Mrs. Haystead, Christina says, my [00:09:00] dad’s going to be here this weekend. I was like, yeah. She goes, do you want to meet him? I’m like, yes. He invited me to lunch and my wife joined me and I got to make the call to my wife, who’s also an educator.
I was like, Hey hun, how would you like to go to lunch with Dr. Robert Marzano? And I’m like, no, seriously, hun, like we’re going to lunch with Dr. Robert Marzano. I’m like, no, seriously, just get over here as quick as you can bring the boys. Whatever. So we had lunch with him. And he was the most engaging, just awesome, down to earth guy.
And he wanted to know all about us. So fast forward a couple of months, Christina calls me and says, Hey, my dad wants to talk to you. And I was like, okay, I thought probably about martial arts. And so I go and I go to my cause. Hey, Dr. Marzano. How you doing? Great to hear. He goes, yeah, Fred, I got an opportunity for you.
I’m like, what? He goes, I have this idea. Can you come in for an interview? I said, yeah. So I come in and he hits me with this and he says, I need somebody to manage. This new school reform idea, high reliability. So he lays it [00:10:00] out for me and it was still a white paper back then. And I was like, Holy crud, sir.
This sounds the karate school. And he goes, yeah. He says, but then he starts telling me about his son, obviously Mrs. Hastings brother, who was an admiral in the Navy. And talking about how he got to go for like a family day on the ship. And because the ship had fighter jets on it, that three times a day they would do what’s called a FOD walk, an F O D walk, a foreign objects and debris walk.
So from the captain. The admiral all the way down to the person in the kitchen. They stand shoulder to shoulder like in Boulder and they sweep the deck. And he said, that’s what I see as education needs to be the littlest foreign debris, anything, the slightest thing can cause an airplane to crash and a ship to sink.
And he said, in education, I have [00:11:00] that same idea. And I was like, Holy crud. That’s brilliant. And he said, I need somebody to help me with this. And I was like, Oh yeah. And then talking to the people at Solution Tree who they were connected with and a woman named Jill say, John was like, yeah, Bob just happens to be people.
And he just says, I see something in them and I want them part of my organization. I was like, thank God he saw that.
Mandi Morris: I have to just think and imagine as a parent, myself, you and your wife were making a challenging decision of Staying home with your kids and going down to one income and then you’re figuring out Martial arts and starting your own business on the side and how stressful that part of your now in hindsight It’s part of this story, but how tough that must have been to decide and then You never know.
This feels like one of those stories where it was like if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t taken that leap of faith, if you will, you wouldn’t have met Dr. Marzano and had this incredible experience.
Fred Pleis: And it was crazy because again, [00:12:00] in what I was doing was still keeping my hands in education because again, as I approached my martial arts I really did it as a classroom teacher, and I think that’s what grew my reputation.
They were like, no, it’s he’s like a classroom teacher. He isn’t just about breaking boards and kicking people. And it did. And what was really funny was that that Dr. Bob and I would have these conversations. In relation to our martial arts experience together. So that shared experience of, Hey, yeah, getting the high reliability is the same thing as getting a black belt.
Like you have to earn a black belt. Like you can’t like, just, they don’t just give them to you.
Mandi Morris: So use the term high reliability. Tell us more about. What was the theory that you and Dr. Marzano were unpacking and what did that look like for you in practice?
Fred Pleis: So it goes back to a lot of the work that he had done over the course of his career.
So starting with things like Building background knowledge and developing academic language. [00:13:00] And then it started to build in connection with learning communities and how professional learning communities are really intended to be data dives into what is working in a school, what’s not working in a school, and to build that collaborative nature.
Rick DeFore would always say, God rest his soul, he would say that if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to keep getting what you get. And Bob was like, yes, and Rick’s right about that. And then Dr. Bob started to really look at John Hattie’s work and that huge meta analysis that John Hattie had done with through visible learning about effect sizes and what works in schools and what doesn’t.
And if have explored Dr. John Hattie’s work, that. There’s 47 things that teachers and schools do on a regular basis. And the effect sizes of that with student achievement, it varies. And, but ultimately the biggest thing. And largest effect size teacher efficacy. And Bob would take that and say, [00:14:00] yeah, and by the way, here’s what goes into teacher efficacy.
It is having that mission focus. It’s having that attention to detail. It’s about not just holding students to high standards. But holding teachers and administrators to high standards to say, we understand that this is their educational lives. And if we mess up or keep making mistakes and we cost them their educational lives, then that’s essentially an educational malpractice.
Mandi Morris: I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about PLCs and what that work looked like when you were working with Dr. Marzano. I think PLCs are definitely have become pretty commonplace now, but I hear you back in the early 2000s, they weren’t even mid 2000s. I feel like they’re pretty broadly used now.
What I’ve experienced with My career is you have PLCs that are data driven where there are really clear goals and objectives for the time spent. And you have PLCs that are not very tightly [00:15:00] organized and then it ends up becoming a lot of complaining about student behaviors or complaints. Complaining about not having enough time to do the things, and I’ve sat in both of those work environments.
I’d love to hear you talk some about what does teacher efficacy look like in A PLC and how did the work you were doing impact PLCs?
Fred Pleis: Yeah, I always say is girl preach. Girl preach. And again, what I was working with Dr. Marzano, what I got to do was sit at the feet of the learning tree, if you will. So what he did was he picked up.
The four work because they were all connected and started to look at, okay, how can a PLC work at an elementary school? How should I look at a middle? How should I look at a high school? And then this is how you need to be looking at the data so that the professional learning community has to start with data.
And then because data doesn’t lie to you. And then from that data dive is let’s look at the trends. So if you’re trending [00:16:00] downward, say in a vocabulary, then what are the factors that are causing that trend downward versus, Hey, this teacher has a spike in that. What are they doing in their practice that’s helping to make sure That they continue to keep student achievement where it’s at.
And when Dr. Bob and I would have that conversation, it was almost like, yeah, like you got it. And we would say this all the time in the martial arts world is you have to check your ego at the door. Or you check it at the pagoda. And a PLC that is effective is where all the teachers are there to say, how can we make our practice better?
Versus the ones that you and I both have experienced where This is not what this is. This isn’t about these many fiefdoms that are connected by the hallway. No, this is about, Hey, listen, I know that you have your students and I have my students, but the reality is no, they’re our students. So how do we build that efficacy [00:17:00] around, Hey, as a third grade team, these, this is what our mission is.
This is what the data is telling us. Hey. Teacher A, I noticed that you had great success delivering this standard of this content. Tell me how you did it. And they would say, I used this teaching practice. Hey, that’s awesome. Tell me why that teaching practice worked. Oh, it worked because I built a whole lot of background knowledge.
Aha! That might be the key of why my students didn’t achieve and your students did. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take a look at how did you build that background knowledge. You brought in realia. Awesome! I can do that. I can bring in a pistol or I can show them a video of flamenco dancer or I can find a song about a pteroman because we’re finding out what a paleta and build that background knowledge.
And through that, What I can do is also work on the academic language of doing that. Now you magnify this [00:18:00] in other roles as a multilingual teacher. And now it’s going, no, we have to do this. And by doing that, what we’re doing is we’re helping grow their language.
Mandi Morris: Absolutely. Thinking about PLCs, there are different ways of organizing PLCs.
And I’ve worked in environments where the specialists aren’t invited to PLCs because this is the sixth grade PLC and you’re not a sixth grade teacher. You don’t come to this PLC. And I’ve also worked in environments where it’s no, as the specialists, like you are on all those grade level PLCs because we own the students together.
I wonder what is your advice? Let’s say there’s a specialist listening to this right now, and she’s a, an ELD specialist and she’s got teachers that are resistant to inviting her to PLCs because they feel like we don’t have time or we have a lot of students we need to talk about.
It’s not only the English learners. So how can those PLCs get creative about including everyone so that we make sure that those students are included in the conversation?
Fred Pleis: You just gave that perfect example [00:19:00] of a school that is focused on efficacy of the teachers and truly focused on student success versus the prior one that, that really is all about that teacher focus.
So the advice that I give my teachers is call me first because I’ll call your principal and I’ll talk to your principal and say, Hey, it’s important. Or if you’re I’ll call your principal and tell him, I’ll come to the PLC and I will collaborate with you. But again, it’s about advocacy. They have to be willing to step up and say, No, we need a seat at the table.
And I will tell you that we fight for our teachers every single day. I can tell you that my colleague who you’ve had on a prior board, Podcast Robert Guthrow fights for his teachers because again, we come from that world of high reliability. We come from that world of understanding that it, you have to keep the mission focused.
And part of the [00:20:00] mission is making sure that you have the right people at the table to execute that mission.
Mandi Morris: Absolutely. And I think it’s helpful mindset matters, right? In order to collaborate effectively with our colleagues, we have to assume best intentions. And sometimes I learned over the years, teachers were resistant to collaboration because they had been really burned in the past with a co teaching that went poorly or a specialist who said they were going to show up and didn’t.
But we have to understand everybody’s coming into that room in that conversation with their own baggage, their own experiences, whether positive or negative, but don’t give up, right? Assume best intentions, show up when you say you’re going to show up, do your best. And what I’ve realized is that when with time, teachers will realize that That as a specialist, you are adding value and we’ll invite you into that conversation as well.
Fred Pleis: And Mandi, I couldn’t put it any better. That’s absolutely it. And I think again, it goes back to even what is your initial [00:21:00] focus as an educator? Are you teacher centric? Or are you student centric? You just laid out as a student centric. And it like, it goes back to every time you hear a teacher go, how come they don’t know this by now?
Or they should know it by now. And my response to that is always what in their story or what in their history has told you that they’ve had those opportunities? Yeah, it is about that continual focus of, look, I’m, you may not assume positive, but I do, because I hold myself. to these norms. I hold myself to these standards.
And if you don’t choose to hold yourself there, that’s fine. But I’m not going to take a step backwards as a professional just because others do. No, I am mission focused. And part of that mission is I’m going to hold myself as accountable and I’m going to keep the mission student centered.
Mandi Morris: I’d love to talk with you a little bit about what your current role looks like, and if you can touch on PLCs too in your school district, that would be [00:22:00] wonderful.
I’ve seen where some PLCs start grassroots, where a principal has a vision for it and it starts in a building and spreads, and then the other way where it’s more district mandated all the way through the school district. I wonder, what is your environment like now, and how well are PLCs received and being utilized?
Fred Pleis: Yeah, dare I say that Charleston County Schools, a large district here in Charleston, South Carolina, has a very traditional model of everybody’s going to do a PLC, everybody’s going to do this. What I have found, and again, this is a great stressor to me, is that they’re not trained in how to run a PLC, or they have some consultant’s version of what Dr.
DeFore and Dr. Baker put forth originally, you get this sort of mishmash of, we do PLCs, but you don’t do them correctly. You don’t follow those norms and expectations. You don’t look at data. You don’t have an agenda of this is the [00:23:00] expectation of the PLC. So at the beginning of the PLC, we go over our norms and expectations.
Here’s the question. That is posed at every PLC. And then what is the outcome? And so what I have tried to do, because again, a lot of times our teachers are, because they’re specialists, they don’t have a seat at the table. I’ve been inviting myself into school PLCs. I’ll show up. It’s. I’ll be there because it’s that important to me because if the teachers that I coach are not getting a seat at the table, then I need to make reservations on my own so that I can at least have that conversation with those teachers about, listen, you have to be collaborative.
And you keep throwing your hands up saying, we don’t know how to teach these kids. And it’s, you have two people or three people or one person in the building who does, and if you’re not taking the time to be deliberate in the [00:24:00] collaboration with those teachers, then you’re doing a disservice.
Mandi Morris: Fred, I love something you said, make a reservation.
Those PLCs are on schedules and the sixth grade team knows that they’re going to have their PLC on the first Wednesday of every month. And the seventh grade knows so on and so forth, make a reservation for the PLCs, book it out ahead of time. Show up when you say you’re going to show up and be an open listener and be willing to helping hands, right?
Show up with open ears and helping hands and people will bring you into the fold for those collaborative conversations.
Fred Pleis: And again, Mandi I love exactly how you’re putting it because that’s how my mentality is as well. And again, what the goal is collaboration. So we have learned through hook and crook, you, we can’t do this alone and you mentioned it with the hands.
But as I always tell all these teams, it’s like many hands make a light load. And Rick DeFore would always say about, listen, it’s not about working harder because we already work hard. It’s about working smarter. Here is how we can [00:25:00] deliberately choose to work smarter. But again, you have to check your ego at the pagoda, because if you don’t, and you don’t come to it as a professional with positive intent, then you’re again doing a disservice not only to you, but you’re doing a disservice to the school and to your students and your families.
Mandi Morris: So you’re in Charleston, what an incredible city. If anybody’s listening and they want to visit the South, Charleston’s got to be on the top of your list. It’s an unbelievable city. So much history, amazing food. So tell us a little bit though, what is being an ML specialist in Charleston like in 2024?
Fred Pleis: Yeah it’s funny.
And this is not to denigrate the area. But again, immigration is a new phenomenon to the South. It’s happened. Obviously we go back to. The annexation of Texas in 1845, and then the migration of the way our country developed when the 1900s with California and all that, [00:26:00] and then the Northeast with the immigration that came through Ellis Island, so it was everybody magnated here, but it was.
And the South, with the exception of Florida, because obviously a lot of people come up through Florida, but Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina didn’t necessarily experience it, and now it’s happening. So what I feel is, that as a multilingual instructional specialist, you have a lot of people that say, I have no experience.
working with these different types of populations. So my goal is to say, I hear you and I want to be present to help move this forward because we understand you haven’t had a whole lot of experience, but we have. So let us help.
Mandi Morris: What I’ve seen over the years, exactly what you’re talking about is It’s sometimes resistance is coming from a place of fear and unknown.
And when you can get in that space where you can be real, you can be vulnerable and say, yeah, this is uncomfortable, change is uncomfortable. And I’ve [00:27:00] done something that you’ve done, Fred, we’ve moved around a lot and we’ve worked in different places and it really broadens your experience. It broadens your perspective and like you were talking about, you learned practices in California that when you showed up in Colorado, they were like, Yes, please.
Like we need this implemented into our schools. I’ve had very similar experiences. I’ve taken with me a lot of learning from the different places that I’ve been lucky enough to work in. And I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that. Do you see that sometimes teachers are just saying, I just don’t know, but it might come across as, I don’t want to.
Fred Pleis: Mandi, you touch on this in the perfect way. You have to be able to see through that. So one of my. sayings in life is that a life lived in fear is a life half lived. And the reality is that, yeah, fear can be the greatest hindrance to success that is out there. And again, that’s why assuming positive intent [00:28:00] starts to alleviate some of that fear.
Because what you’re doing is you’re setting the table for collaboration to say, look, We get it. We’ve been there. Let me tell you a little bit about my story. Let me find out a little bit about your story so that when we start to put this together and there’s that trust and that communication and that culture of collaboration, then it’s only going to translate because now you’re going to find out the stories of your students.
And what we have to learn to be comfortable with is living with your students. With other people’s truth, like you have to set the parameters for people to speak their truth because when you speak their truth, they speak their history and then from their history, you start to gain the background knowledge to say.
Hey, you’re right. You really have not ever been outside of small town, South Carolina, but that’s okay. That’s not, it’s not good, bad or indifferent. I have. And let me tell you that growing up in the city of Philadelphia, where they still had ethnic enclaves, [00:29:00] like you knew that South Philadelphia was mostly Italian.
Northeast Philadelphia was Irish and Jewish. West Philadelphia had a lot of the Asian population. There was a China town in center city, Philadelphia. If you started to go out to different areas, it was black and Latino. Like I taught in Northern Liberty. predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. And again, it was about those experiences.
And then I moved to California where it was just like this unbelievable melting pot of cultures. And then you moved to Colorado and Colorado was starting to get there, like Arizona and Nevada and all those areas. Cause they were pushing in now. You make the leap all the way to the Carolinas where it’s like, we haven’t had that problem.
We’ve had other problems. Understood. Okay. This problem, it’s not a problem, but this new norm is now starting to affect this area. Let us help you. But again, it’s about letting people speak their truth so that when you know their [00:30:00] truth, you know them.
Mandi Morris: So how has your student population changed in recent years?
What does it look like now?
Fred Pleis: So I will tell you that the Charleston County area, there’s Charleston County, which is one of the largest counties in the state of South Carolina. And then our neighbors are Dorchester too. And Berkeley County, where again, a few weeks ago, my friend and colleague Robert Guthrow was able to speak to you about this.
So essentially what has happened to Charleston itself is it’s become the 11th largest area of growth in the United States. So population wise is the 11th largest. of growth in Charleston County itself. In one school year, last year, we grew over 2000 learners who were non exited multilingual learners, which means our.
population of those students now comprise eight and a half percent of the entire student population of Charleston County schools. And that, that has increased [00:31:00] every single year. There was a point where language learners only comprised like 0. 5 percent about a decade ago to now it’s eight and a half percent.
Of the entire school population are non exited multilingual learners.
Mandi Morris: That’s a huge shift. And what is your role look like there? What is your day to day role look like? How are you supporting teachers and students?
Fred Pleis: I will tell you that I am one of one right now, so we have 49 schools total, and at this current time, having conversation with you, I’m the only instructional specialist for multilingual learners.
So I have to cover preschool, elementary, middle, and high school for an entire district. Now I keep being told help is on the way, which I’m very excited about. But prior to like last year, there was just two of us. Now there’s just me, but my push is, and for me, it’s about sheltered instruction. So I really want to take what I had [00:32:00] to do out in California where every single teacher was certified.
Florida has the same thing. Texas has the same thing. New York. All those areas that have been traditional hubs of immigration and hubs. So I’m pushing really hard to get into the schools and do professional development, not only with my teachers and making sure that the, those who I coach are strong in their sheltered instruction.
practice. And for those of you who are familiar with sheltered instruction, it’s really about a system of thinking about how you approach your lessons and using content objectives and language objectives and being very deliberate about vocabulary, being very deliberate about the practices that you use and making sure that not only the people that I coach are strong in sheltered instruction, but also that the classroom teachers or the general ed teachers are also understanding that is the lens that they have to look at our multilingual learners through.
Mandi Morris: Okay, so when you have a coaching [00:33:00] session, when, whether district wide or in a school building about sheltered instruction, what are your selling points? Like, how are you getting teachers on board with sheltered instruction and they want to be able to implement this in their classroom. What is your advice for getting people on board and this is how you get started?
Fred Pleis: You have to connect to the heart before you connect to the head. It’s about starting with community and it’s about connection. So it’s listening to them, no matter if it’s just one of our team sessions or if I’m presenting it at a rural school in Charleston County, it’s first and foremost, tell me what it’s like on a daily basis.
Talk to me about a time where, hey, you were ready to present this lesson and you were so excited and the kids just looked at you and you went, Oh my gosh, they don’t speak English. So remember that feeling. Now let’s project to imagine you’re a kid who’s come from a refugee camp. You’ve had a disrupted educational life and all of a sudden they drop you into a school in Charleston County and all of a [00:34:00] sudden that person is speaking a language that you’ve never heard in your life.
And then getting that connection to say, Oh yeah. Now, is it an easy fix? No. Is it a doable fix? 100%. So let’s start with What is your objective? So we start with what’s called a content objective. And again, you I’m talking to the choir here with you, Mandi, but so what are you teaching? And then looking at the language objective is how are you going to get them to tell you that they understand what you’ve taught them?
So that’s foundational to everything that my professional development center around. Then from there, All right, let’s talk about building background knowledge. And this is something again, I dare I say to the podcasters, I just presented this morning to a group of teachers. It’s about you got to at least make a connection with them.
So they may not be able to speak English, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t had experiences in their lives. If you’re teaching a lesson using leafy green [00:35:00] and the various Vikings is your story in fourth grade. And, Where the connection is and build the background is a boat. By the way, many of those kids have come via boat.
They’ve come via walking train, what have you. So the Vikings, even though you’re talking Nordic and all this stuff. Had to use means of travel and it took them a long time. So now we make that connection and build their background knowledge. Okay. Now let’s look at the vocabulary. Let’s look at how we can take the story vocabulary of again, leafy green or whoever and go.
How do I build that vocabulary into something that’s tangible or comprehensible to my students? Maybe it’s, I’m going to have the word, but I’m also going to have the visual that goes with it, and I’m going to have that posted in my classroom, so that when the kids hear that word, They know to look at that picture, just like they know to look at a stop sign or they know to look at those arches, those golden arches means, Oh my gosh, that’s McDonald’s [00:36:00] because at least in my country, there was a McDonald’s.
So it’s all about making those foundational systemic. Ways of thinking about teaching your lesson.
Mandi Morris: Absolutely. And you talk some about content objectives and language objectives as being part of the coaching that you’re doing. When you’ve got teachers who are like, okay, I’m ready. I want to try this being one of one with 49 schools.
Are you triaging your time? How are you thinking about if you need to, Infiltrate sheltered instruction for students across the school district. Where do you start? Math? Science? Tell me more a little bit about the practice of like, how to apply this in the scenario that you’re in.
Fred Pleis: Yeah, you are correct. We start there.
But ultimately what we do is we go to our highest impacted schools. And we go to those schools that are essentially in our North Charleston area, but in what’s known as West Ashley section of Charleston County, where they’re having the highest impacts. [00:37:00] So with that, we start there with those teachers, and then we start to triage out to those that are less affected and less effective.
But the mission is, We have to change how we approach this. And again, the message continues to be, this is something that these are small wholesale changes that we can make in our practice that are going to help make the whole situation better. So just. Acknowledging, unpacking a content objective with a language learner is going to help them to at least understand what they’re being taught or what they’re going to see.
And then in turn, a language objective gives that notion to the teacher to say, hey, listen, what I’m going to do is we’re going to have an academic conversation. Now, you don’t necessarily have to use that, but you say, hey, listen, In our turn and talk, specifically, this is the sentence stem that I want you to use because you’re getting practice with the vocabulary, you’re learning the academic language, and you’re in a safe [00:38:00] space because you’re talking to a peer.
Mandi Morris: Earlier you talked about high reliability with the work that you had done with Dr. Marzano. I wonder, what does high reliability look like now in practice and the work that you’re doing? And how do you think about ML education? And how is high reliability impacting that work?
Fred Pleis: Yeah, it filters every part of my mentality.
So when I approach being an instructional coach, I approach it as a high reliability instructional coach. And sometimes that can be a tough pill to swallow for certain people. Again, we look at. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to keep getting what you get. So what I want you to do is I want to start with the data and I want to start with where are you struggling?
And then from there, Hey, how’s that working for you? So let’s take a look at what our practice is and let’s look at where you’re feeling like the gap is widening and how do we not only stop the gap but start [00:39:00] to close that gap through practice. Because again, there’s no magic dust. There’s no magic wand.
It’s going to take work, but it’s going to take the right kind of work. It’s going to take deliberate practice. It’s going to take structured work in order to make sure that you’re able to That you get to where you want to be. My cousin is a retired colonel from the United States Marine Corps. So when I was doing this initial work with Dr.
Marzano and trying to get my head around this, I reached out to him and I said, how do you do it in the military? And what my cousin, Lawrence J police, the third retired colonel. So the colonel said to me, yeah, Freddie, we framed the problem. And I said, tell me about framing the problem. He says, we put the problem right there and then we draw a frame around it.
And then we look for all the other things that can be solutions of Oh my gosh, it’s like a thinking map. And he goes, yeah it’s a structure. So that’s my approach when I walk into any situation, whether it’s just a group of teachers, whether it’s afterschool PD, whether it’s a group of principals or on the [00:40:00] district level, like I always try to frame the problem and say, okay, let’s talk about where’s the struggle.
Okay. And how do we get beyond that struggle point to where we’re moving forward as a collective unit?
Mandi Morris: I know for me, in the classroom, it was often difficult to get the data that I needed for students because for English learners, we’ve got that one data point a year with the state language assessment.
And you have your classroom data, which, there’s a lot of research also showing that grades aren’t very reliable because they are very subjective and they fluctuate and it’s a difficult data point to, to drive. It doesn’t give us enough nuance to be able to drive instruction in the way that we actually want it to.
It’s something that I feel really passionate about in the work that we’re doing here at Flashlight Learning is because we’re providing an opportunity to really encapsulate that data for speaking and writing, and it’s data I didn’t have in the classroom. What kind of data are you using now? Are you recommending PLCs to use for your English learners?[00:41:00]
Fred Pleis: Shameless plug. I have been pushing and pushing to a broader use of Flashlight 360 beyond demo in, in our district, because again, that progress monitoring data and that data towards growth is far more reliable. than an arbitrary grade. Again, it’s been hard, but I still keep banging the drum of how important something like Flashlight 360 is, because that’s real and tangible data.
That’s daily data that you can be pulling from. It’s authentic data. But in the absence of that, I have to live in the uncomfortability of the other data points that the district uses and say, listen, what are the factors that are causing that? Yes, This child is a newcomer. And yes, even though they’re in fifth grade, they’re at a kindergarten phonemic awareness level, because again, they’ve only been in the country for a month, but that’s okay.
We have to meet them where they are. And it’s okay for us [00:42:00] to say, Oh my gosh. This student, we need to even differentiate the support that we’re giving them, because when they come to our time with our instructors or in the classroom, it has to be targeted. And if anything, that high reliability model, and Dr.
Marzano’s been talking about it, and Dr. John Hattie for decades, is that data doesn’t lie to you. So if the data is telling you that phonemic awareness, it’s because they are. Also having the opportunity to have coached football. Like we watch a lot of game film. So when a player says, coach, I got double teamed every play.
No, you didn’t. Your footwork was bad. There’s the game film. So the data isn’t going to lie to you and you have to live in that uncomfortability that data isn’t for punishment. The data is for growth and knowledge of yourself to say, this is real intangible. Now, how do I take that data and how do I leverage it into the practices that I’m using?
[00:43:00] And start to realize, Oh my gosh, it is about growth.
Mandi Morris: That’s right. And I love that you brought up about the recording the games and going back and watching them. I think that’s the power of having a coach or a colleague in your classroom. There were definitely lessons I taught where I thought that was, it was so clear.
Everything was so clear. I did all of the steps and either if you’ve ever recorded yourself as a teacher and watched it, it’s. It’s so painful, but having a coach in there that said, actually you went through it really fast and kids didn’t have an opportunity to process what you were talking or you didn’t have a scaffolded opportunity for the students to try to like process the beginning of the lesson before you dove in.
So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about using that same kind of analogy of like gameplay and going back and watching it. What does that look like for teachers?
Fred Pleis: And I will say that I recently had the great fortune of talking to Dr. Jim Knight and his impact cycle, again, through happenstance, I just happened to be in a position where I was actually having [00:44:00] a conversation with Dr.
Knight. And what I learned a lot, cause I’m a big fan of his, as far as his model of instructional coaching, but it’s new pushes this idea of what he calls a dialogical thinking so that I have to understand that my role as a coach is to make you better. I can’t do that if all I’m doing is telling you what to do.
So what I need to do is to have that mutual conversation. And this is where, again, pulling from other sources as a JV high school football offensive line coach, it’s, Hey, we use game film for a reason. Now let’s go back over as a teacher. Let’s not me just judge you on. The film, let’s break the film down together.
Tell me what you were thinking in this part. Hey, are you noticing this trend? Tell me what you, what your mindset was. Tell me why you did that. And once you break that down, even if you don’t have game film, it’s about scripting the lesson and going [00:45:00] through the state rubric about how to be a mentor and the, all that stuff.
But it’s understanding that the role of a coach is to make your players better, not. to judge them. And Dr. Knight had that exact talk. And when he talked about this idea of dialogical conversations between a coach and a teacher, you go, holy mackerel, that’s it.
Mandi Morris: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Fred, this conversation has been so wonderful.
But I, we’d like to end the podcast by asking this question. If you could go back in your career, back to the beginning, and you could give yourself advice. What advice would you give yourself at the beginning of your teaching career?
Fred Pleis: A life lived here is a life half lived. Don’t be afraid. Be bold.
Advocate for yourself and advocate for what you know is right and speak your truth.
Mandi Morris: That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Fred. This has been such [00:46:00] a pleasure to have you on the ML chat today.
Fred Pleis: I cannot tell you what an honor it is to be able to speak to you and to be able to speak to others. And again, if you’re hearing this and you go, Oh my gosh, that guy can help, call me because I’m happy to do it.
Mandi Morris: That’s wonderful. Are you on socials or what is the best way for people to get in touch with you?
Fred Pleis: Follow me on the X. I’m at Sensei Fred’s Mojo. And if anybody wants to know why I’m there. I am also on the Instagram and it’s Sensei Fred’s Mojo underscore shownuff. And the great thing too is that being on the X connected with so many amazing educators.
And again, there’s a little cachet with having worked for Dr. Bob Marzano. But what I love about the X and I, and people can say what they want. All things are yin yang. But I can connect with educators around the world who are doing the same work. Friends in Texas like Dr. Carol Salva, who is like incredible, or Valentina [00:47:00] Gonzalez.
Friends all up in New York, Dr. Andrea Hagensfeld, who is leading the work for co teaching in the multilingual world and doing such incredible work. Dr. Maria Dove. And even connecting with the flashlight folks and how The work that you’re doing is so intentional about being part of the solution. So I’m Sensei Fred’s Mojo.
All one word.
Mandi Morris: We appreciate that so much. And before we hop off, before we had begun, you mentioned that podcasts are really a place where people in general are just finding more professional learning, more opportunity to connect with people in a way that’s very different from sitting in a half day professional learning session where there’s value for that.
But then. There’s also, it’s great on your way home or when you’re working out, you can hear a podcast and I feel like you get to know other educators that are sharing similar experiences. So I really appreciate you pointing that out and we hope to provide that space for people. And we’re so thankful for you to come on today and share your story with us.
Fred Pleis: And I, and I’m really grateful that [00:48:00] you took the leap to do that. Again, it’s there, there’s a, there’s so many venues now and your podcast. Is just one more door that people can unlock and say, Oh my gosh, they get me, they get my story. And I’m just, I’m very honored that you gave me this opportunity and this platform.
So I truly appreciate it. And again, call me if you need me. I’m in Charleston.
Mandi Morris: That’s great. All right. Thank you so much for being here today.
