Patrice Thompson: [00:00:00] There’s a big difference between social language abilities and academic language abilities, and the older the student is who comes into the classroom, the more they’re gonna have to play catch-up to their grade level. So they’re always adjusting to a moving target, and if they’re not supported from both sides, like their home language abilities and their target language abilities, then they’re gonna have a much, much harder time, and they’re not gonna be given the right number of tools.

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat Podcast. I’m Mandi Morris, your host. Today’s conversation is with Patrice Thompson. She is the founder of ConnexUs Consulting, an international consulting company that really focuses on training teachers around translanguaging and what it looks like in practice in the classroom.

Our conversation today explored her experience becoming an international teacher, what that’s been like for her, um, she’s been abroad for a long time, and also the passion that she found for [00:01:00] translanguaging and really building inclusive classrooms for her students that come from all different types of languages and cultural backgrounds and identities.

This conversation was a lot of fun with Patrice today. Let’s go Patrice, welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation about your work as an international teacher and the work you’re doing right now in translanguaging space. 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to it too.

Mandi Morris: Patrice, tell me some about the work that you’re doing today. You live in Morocco, and we’re gonna get into your journey of, like, how you ended up where you are as an educator, but unpack for us the work that you’re doing today. 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. So I am working with schools on what language and cultural inclusion looks like on a leadership, community, and classroom level.

I was in schools around the world for about 15 years, and something that I was always really passionate about was celebrating my students’ language and cultural diversity. So that’s what I work with teachers on, is what does that look [00:02:00] like, not only in the classroom, but on a community-wide level, and it really takes a village.

Mandi Morris: Yeah. Absolutely. So I’m excited to learn more about the work that you’re doing, and I love calling out the work that happens inside the classroom and the work that happens outside the classroom. Let’s take a step back in time. What just drove your passion for languages? Where did that start for you?

Patrice Thompson: Actually, in East Tennessee of all places, jumped into a Spanish immersion program in second grade, and everybody else started in first grade, but I moved to the South in second grade from New York State, and I was learning math and science in Spanish from six years old, and in that immersion program through grade six, and then we went into normal Spanish classes after that.

But fast-forward to where I am today, and I speak English. I’m literate in Spanish and German, and I’m conversational in Mandarin and Moroccan Arabic, and my [00:03:00] French is pretty good too. So I speak six languages, and they all came from different- walks of my life 

Mandi Morris: Oh, that’s so cool. Also, just worth calling out, it’s impressive that there was a dual language program in Tennessee at that time.

I think that’s really incredible. I think about where I live, and there are a lot of Spanish speakers in our area, and have historically been. It’s a large agriculture part of Florida, and we still don’t have dual language programs. So kudos to Tennessee back then for already having a dual language program.

Patrice Thompson: I know. It’s really impressive. And whenever I- I … They actually phased it out afterward, but in the ’90s they had it going for a while, and it was a huge benefit. I’m really grateful for it. 

Mandi Morris: That’s pretty incredible. So you ha- found this love for language, passion for language at a young age, and then it sounds like through secondary took the typical language as a foreign language, Spanish as a foreign language courses through secondary.

And then you get out of high school, and what happens next? Like, how, what happens [00:04:00] between that and your life as an international teacher? 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. So I, I started learning German in high school as well. I studied in university, and I was really interested in being in Europe. I studied abroad in Germany for, during my sophomore year and in Barcelona in my senior year.

And actually, sounds really expensive, but I did direct enrollment, which means that it was a lot cheaper to do university in those places because I studied in the language, right? So I went to university, and I was just, I, it was just like, “I’m a student now,” or I applied as a student for one year. And then it was expensive to live in Europe, especially with the euro exchange rate at the time.

It was always 1.4. And then that’s where my Spanish and German really got to a much higher level. I was studying, like, the philosophy of Don Quixote in Barcelona, which a really advanced course. Everybody, a lot of people left. But anyway, after university, I was waiting tables, and I knew that I [00:05:00] wanted to travel, and I talked to somebody who said, “Oh, if you like traveling, maybe you should go teach English in South Korea.”

And I was like, “Yeah, that sounds great.” I had graduated in the recession- And so that’s why I was waiting tables. And so I thought, yeah, I’ll go teach English in South Korea. I was there for a few years, and then I lived in the US and then I … And then China for five and a half years. That’s where I … Through that time, I got my teaching license, I got my MBA, I got my master’s in education, and three years ago, my husband and I decided to move to Morocco.

Mandi Morris: That is … So what years were you in Korea, Patrice? I’m curious if our time overlapped at all. 

Patrice Thompson: Oh, yeah. I was there 2012 to 2014. And you said you were in Daejeon? 

Mandi Morris: Yes. Yes, but we missed each other. I, we were there 2009 to 2010, so we just missed each other. 

Patrice Thompson: Oh. 

Mandi Morris: But not so dissimilar in the sense that what drove us to Korea at the time was the recession that was happening, and it hit Florida [00:06:00] really hard and for longer than other states.

So it was very difficult. There was h- mass firings of educators across Florida, so it was really hard to find work. And I had … I was teaching classes at two different college and university. I was teaching adult language learners, and just, like, piecemealing enough work together. It’s interesting. You get creative, right?

Like, when y- when there’s a need and there f- there’s urgency around a need, it also forces you to get creative. And that’s cool that drove you internationally was a lot of the same reason it drove us internationally as well. So you spent five and a half years, you said, in China. What were you teaching in China?

What was the experience like? You must have really enjoyed living there and teaching there to stay for five and a half years. 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. China is a really, it’s a really totally different place because nothing is in anything that you can understand, right? So I had to learn Chinese really quite well, uh, especially the neighborhood I was living in.

There wasn’t signage in English. Any app that [00:07:00] you use in China has to be in Chinese, so you have to, like, if you’re ordering something, if you’re using the map, there’s no Google Maps, so you, you have to become at least somewhat proficient. And I’m a language nerd, so I was motivated. Anyway, I loved teaching.

At that point, I had a lot of EFL under my belt, and I started teaching in an international school about halfway through that time. And at some point, at, when I went into the international school, I was really excited because I was like, “Okay, I’m going into a truly international place.” Most of the places I’d taught before, most of the classes I’d taught before were quite homogenous, sometimes more of a mix, like when I taught ESL to students in the US.

But in this international school, I was really excited about the super international environment. But I got there, and what I saw was that it was like you could take a teacher from the US or the [00:08:00] UK and put them into an international school classroom, and they taught exactly the same. And there wasn’t that much acknowledging or usage of students’ backgrounds for the learning, right?

It was just, “Okay, now we’re doing this,” which is in the American curriculum, and, “Now we’re doing this,” which is in the American curriculum. And that’s not to diss the school. It was just the way the teachers were teaching. And I was coming from my background. I had teacher training, but in all of my experiences, I had always used students’ languages and cultures as ways to get the kids excited about the lesson.

And why- Is it just EAL teachers who are using students’ home languages and backgrounds? And so that’s when I started learning about translanguaging soon after I joined that school, and that’s, and I just fell in love with the topic. 

Mandi Morris: And I think it’s worth calling out here, too, EFL, English as a foreign language, different from ESL, right?

Or being an EAL teacher. We have so many different acronyms around this work, right? But I think something that you’re calling out is an important differentiation between [00:09:00] being a, an EFL teacher, a language teacher internationally, and working in, like, a language institute versus an international school.

And that was a big distinction of my ex- my two different experiences of teaching internationally. The first I did both. I taught kindergarten in South Korea, but then in the afternoon I taught four hours of EFL after I taught kindergarten for five, which now in hindsight I’m like, I was in my 20s. My 

Patrice Thompson: God, we had the same, we had

Maybe we worked at the same school. No, not the same city, but yeah, kindergarten for, for- Six classes in the morning, and then, like, elementary training center for four classes in the afternoon. So 10 classes a day. Yeah, I can’t believe I did that either. 

Mandi Morris: So wild. But then moving into an international school setting is completely different.

The setup of an international school is going to look and feel very much like a, a public or private school would in the US, or I would imagine throughout parts of Europe, right? So in that setting, like, I was teaching humanities to middle school, and wasn’t so different from what I was… had experienced teaching in the [00:10:00] States.

So it’s interesting feeling that distinction between the work that you had done, and then moving into an international school setting. I wonder if you can share some of, like, what did it, what did it mean for you moving in that international setting to say, “I wanna acknowledge, like, I have students representing a lot of different cultures and languages in this classroom.”

Because international schools not only have local population students, but also expats or ambassadors, people working in the government or in, in the Middle East oil. And so I wonder, what was the makeup of your classroom when you became an international teacher abroad, and then what did it feel to start incorporating some of that language awareness?

Oh, 

Patrice Thompson: man. For me, I was so excited. I, I’ve always had a very, very diverse makeup in my international school classroom. My first one, there were more Chinese students, but I also had a Spanish girl, and a French girl, and a kid from the US, a, a few kids from the US. And, and oh, s- my Korean students, who af- having lived in [00:11:00] Korea, I always was like, “Oh, is your mom making gimbap anytime soon?”

So, like, just connecting with them over those things. And I think that being in an international school classroom with people that I, as, like, a language nerd, and a culture nerd, and a foodie, connecting with students about their backgrounds, that was just a natural part of my teaching. So, and that’s how I got into translanguaging.

Mandi Morris: You are in China for five and a half years. You’re really learning, like, sharpening your saw around, like, the international classroom experience, and how that looks and feels different than the EFL experience, but understanding how your past experiences are impacting the work that you’re doing in that space.

So take us forward a little bit to where you are now. How did you end up in Morocco? And unpack a little bit more about the work you’re doing now. You left the classroom at the end of this school year, and are now working doing education con- consultations, or consulting. So t- talk us through that a little bit.

I’d love to learn more about how you ended up where you are now. 

Patrice Thompson: When I first learned about translanguaging, it was at an [00:12:00] ACAMHS conference in Shanghai. And John Nordmeyer, who is the head of WIDA, now the MLRC, he gave this really awesome analogy in his keynote. And he said, “Trans languaging, you- Tell a student they can only use one language, it’s like asking them to draw a picture and only use one color.

And that analogy stays with me today because I think it is a really vivid description of the importance of not only allowing, but encouraging students to use all of their languages in the classroom. And importantly, that’s not just about students who are learning English, but students who have that language diversity.

In my role in that, in The international school in China. I started learning as much as I could about translanguaging, and I started going to webinars and doing my own research and experimenting in my own class. And soon I started doing trainings at my school [00:13:00] on translanguaging. And I was in China for all of COVID with my husband, and the, by year three at that international school, it was y- it was when China was really doubling down on all of their very strong measures.

So I wanted to leave, and that’s how we ended up coming to Morocco. We c- wanted to be a little bit closer to home because we had been out, away from the US for a, a long time. We were in China for all of COVID. So we came to my school at, in Morocco, and as soon as I arrived, one of the things I asked the head of school in my interview was, “How do you feel about language inclusion?”

He said, “I think that if you’re not doing language inclusion, then you’re not going in the right direction,” right? Because that’s, is what the research says is really important. So I got to the school, and I expected there to be very clear communication about that, and there wasn’t. There was the teacher in the classroom next to mine [00:14:00] had an English-only policy in her room, and I, I was asking administration about it, and some of them said, “Yeah, it is an English-only school,” and some of them said, “No, it’s not English only.”

And so that was really surprising to me. I’m not trying to throw anybody under the bus. It’s just that there was a lack of clarity, and it affected the students. As a pretty typical teacher, I was like, “That’s something that I’m gonna fix myself,” right? We all kind of take it upon ourselves to do something and see something and say, “Okay, I know how to fix that.”

That’s what teachers do. I started running translanguaging trainings at my school the second year I was there. I started a committee on language and cultural inclusion, and that committee ran events, and the, around celebrating home languages and spreading the, the importance of home language use and inclusion.

Then by the third year I was there, we ran, like, K through 8 for International Mother Language Day, which is [00:15:00] February 21st, and I did a handful of trainings, and they definitely don’t have an English-only policy in any classrooms now in the school. 

Mandi Morris: That is really cool. I think you’re calling out something too that definitely was not only unique to your situation, is where there are or aren’t policies around language use in the classroom, or maybe there’s just, like, a status quo policy because no one’s really addressed it before.

So there, it sounds like there was a lot of ambiguity w- even across the admin team at the school around, “Oh, we- What is our policy? Do we have a policy around English only? Which then in turn can allow teachers to have classroom-based mandates versus a cohesive school-based expectation. And I’ve found, I’d be curious to hear what your thoughts are, sometimes teachers have English-only policies in their classrooms because they’re coming from a good place, like good intentions maybe, of like maybe a little bit older thinking around, “But I want my kids to be [00:16:00] successful, and they need to be able to do X, Y, and Z in English.

And if I don’t have an English-only policy, then they’re not gonna be able to do X, Y, and Z, and then I’m not providing them the best education possible to set them up for success.” Whereas we know from research that y- you don’t need to have an English-only policy in your classroom in order to do that. In fact, students’ languages are coexisting in their brains at all times, and it’s empowering their learning to be able to move quicker and faster and to be more agile in their thinking when they can use all of their languages.

So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that from your experience. 

Patrice Thompson: Oh, man, you hit the nail on the head. I think the biggest thing that happens when there, when teachers are inconsi- when there’s inconsistency across classrooms, is that who is affected the most? And the students are affected the most. And when their identities are not acknowledged and clearly valued, they feel that, right?

And I totally agree. It’s not because the teacher doesn’t value them, it’s just [00:17:00] that they, that the teacher has been told, and, and there’s al- there’s been a very prevalent attitude in classrooms that if we keep the kids in English, the time on task or the amount of time that is spent in English equals better English skills.

But there are so many, so many examples of that not being the case. We know that, like you said, better language skills in the home language equals better skills in the target language, and that’s been proven to be true over and over, over the past 40 years that this research has been done, 45 years at least.

But the thing that teachers are unprepared for is how to have those conversations with Their students on what language inclusion among each other looks like, right? So it’s not just about how the teacher delivers lessons in the classroom using their teacher toolkit for strategies on translanguaging, which [00:18:00] we can go into later.

But also using a language of inclusion among the kids. So I had a super international classroom this past year, for example. I had kids from Morocco who spoke the local Moroccan Arabic, Darija, and French, and then also English. And we also had a, a handful of German students, and we had, oh, a Korean speaker and a Japanese speaker.

And I tried to make it very clear from the very beginning of the year, and then throughout the year, that I expect students to use the common language that they share with somebody next to them. And I don’t care what that language is. In fact, I encourage them to use, if they share Darija with another kid, even if they’re fluent in English, they should use their home language.

And then if somebody else comes in and doesn’t speak Darija, but they do speak English, then everybody should switch to English. But that is a conversation that teachers haven’t been trained to have in a lot of cases because, like you said, it’s gone [00:19:00] unaddressed. My first year, the other grade five teacher told her students, “This is an English-only class.”

And I was having the, those conversations about language inclusion with my class because that’s my methodology, and there wasn’t consistency from… And then that teacher told my students on the playground when they were s- when two of them were speaking French, “This is an English-only school. We only speak English, okay?”

My students, there was nobody else around them, and I they came and told me that afterward. So now I’m in a strange situation as a teacher because I have to say, “Next time that happens, I want you to smile, nod, wait till she walks away, and then keep speaking your home language.” 

Mandi Morris: It’s tough when going back to the policy established by admin, right?

Because when you have that classroom to classroom difference in methodology, but also just philosophy around what a classroom looks and feels and sounds like, [00:20:00] and that it can be really tricky. So how did you, as the school went on, it’s, it’s not on the kids’ shoulders to have to burden that, right? It shouldn’t be.

It shouldn’t be on the kids’ shoulders to have to burden that discomfort of, “I’m not allowed to speak my home language in this environment.” As the school year went on, how did you address that with admin or your teaching partner directly? And I wonder if you have any, sometimes you think about things, you reflect on them in hindsight, and you’re like, “Oh, I learned from that,” or, “This is advice I would give to somebody else in that sit- situation.”

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. I think that the biggest thing that I’ve seen is there is a misunderstanding of, of- What it means to be inclusive. Uh, one thing that I did is I asked another teacher to help students make videos about language inclusion. And this other teacher, she was on that committee that I formed, Language and Cultural Inclusion.

And she said, “Hey, I’ll help the secondary students,” because I wasn’t working with secondary [00:21:00] students. I was like, “Great. Okay, go make videos.” And she came back with the videos, and it was Several videos of kids speaking their home language with each other, like two Spanish speakers, and then an English speaker comes up and says, “Hi, what are you guys talking about?”

And the Spanish speaker said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s not important.” And then a teacher jumped in front of the camera and said, “Ah, don’t do that. That’s not cool.” And it happened many times where there were, like, three or four different videos of kids speaking their home language, excluding an English speaker, and then the teacher comes out and says, “Don’t do that.

That’s not cool.” And I know that the teacher who helped arrange those videos, and the teachers who were in those videos, and the kids who were in those videos weren’t trying to say, weren’t trying to send a specific message. But I think, but for me, that message was, “Don’t speak your home language,” and that was the opposite of the effect that I was trying [00:22:00] to create.

I think what I would say to teachers is try to be aware of the implicit messages that you are sending with everything you do, because so much of what we do accidentally sends the message that English is the most important thing, right? Ofelia García talks about the internalized language hierarchy, and when we send a form home to parents to fill out about their kids, that form is gonna be in English, right?

And that’s showing them English is the most important thing. So one thing I do at the beginning of every school year was send home a form about, where they fill out information about their child, and in bold at the top, I say, “Fill this out in the language that feels most comfortable to you.” One year, I sent that form home with that sentence on it.

A mom filled it out in Chinese, and then she emailed me privately, and she said, “This is the first time I ever filled something out in my language for the school.” And that was a big deal for her. 

Mandi Morris: Absolutely, yeah. And something that’s worth [00:23:00] noting, too, is just the, the time that we’re living in, and access to trans- translation tools, transadaptation tools, it is unlike it’s ever been in the past.

So there was a time, like, in my teaching career where, yeah, you could send a form home in Spanish if someone in your building spoke Spanish and could, like, by hand translate that form. And then I’ve ha- used services years ago that were like, “You can call in,” or you could, like, email in, and the school paid a service fee to have access to a lot of different languages.

And now, to think about just the access is unbelievable to be able to provide families with home language resources, apps that are translating. I’m messaging in English, and you’re messaging me in Korean, and we’re- Having a conversation, it is just incredible. I think sometimes all of it, for any of us, all of us, like the technology itself can feel overwhelming.

But if teachers are in an environment where they have students that are speaking languages other than English, start somewhere, right? [00:24:00] Like I, I think a, a quick Google search is gonna help you find like the best apps to use for parent communication that offer languages other than English. But the- pick something this school year, or it’s like before the school year starts, I’m going to have my forms that go home, and I’m going to offer them in the five languages that are represented in my classroom, and I’ve got tools now that make that super accessible for me.

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. And I mean, in my case, I didn’t, it, it was just in English, right? And saying like, “Your language and your culture are welcome here.” It’s not difficult for me to snap a picture of the form and use Google Translate. This was before ChatGPT or before I used a lot of GPT. Just like a quick Google translate, oh, this kid likes to play chess, right?

Or this kid’s, kid- this kid’s allergic to nuts. And I definitely have parents who don’t speak English, and I- it’s not fair for me to say, “Practice your English by writing the, writing something in English on this form,” especially in an international school. I live in Morocco. I [00:25:00] have parents who speak Darija or Arabic or French, especially the Arabic speakers.

They have a different script, and writing in English is really hard for them if they didn’t learn. 

Mandi Morris: Absolutely. Such a good point. So tell us more about the work that you’re doing now. You offer self-guided courses, so it’d be neat to hear you talk a little bit about like what excites you about the courses that you’re providing.

What drove you to do that work? 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. So I have a course called the Translanguaging Mindset that’s just a self-guided, it’s PD hours, and I talk a lot about recognizing mistakes as language transfer instead of mistakes, and there are some really fun examples of language transfer. As a language nerd, that’s what I get super excited about, right?

Quotation marks are different in different languages, okay? So in English you have the, the two, or in American English you have the two air commas, right? In, and they’re facing a certain way. In German, the two air commas [00:26:00] are, or the, there, there are two commas, but at the beginning of the sentence, they’re at the bottom, uh, instead of in the air.

And also they’re all facing the opposite direction. So I know that was a– If you’re watching the video, you can see me switching my hands in a very dramatic way like a flamenco dancer. Um- Or just looking at quotation marks alone is a really fun investigation, and it’s something that I love to do with my students who come from a multilingual background.

Even if they speak English fluently, a lot of times they’ll make those mistakes. For example, in French, when you finish a phrase and you add a comma at the end, in French you have a space before the comma. So I realized that when I was grading papers, and I was like, “Why do they keep putting a comma after a space?

You need to put a comma at the very end of the, the word.” And, and then I’m, was… I was reading French text and I realized, oh, they do. That’s what you’re supposed to do in French. [00:27:00] It’s… I could go for hours talking about these differences. If we look at math, fractions are written opposite. I don’t know if you learned this when you were in Korea, but fractions are both written and spoken as the opposite.

So instead of saying three-fourths, you would say of four, three. If you have a Korean or a Japanese or a Chinese student in your math class and they say the fraction reverse, it might not be a mistake. It might be evidence of language transfer. That’s something I talk about in my course, is viewing mistakes from that lens in a lot of cases.

But also there are just some really fun… Speaking of translation tools, there are some really fun things that you can do to be inclusive with home languages. So one of, one of coolest breakthroughs I’ve found in the past year or two was when I had a student come to my class who didn’t have, who had a pretty low level of English, and I needed to do a writing assessment, [00:28:00] a pre-assessment for, for our unit.

I would ask that student, “Write me an informational piece about a subject of your choice in your home language. And what you can do is you can snap a picture of it and ask AI, tell me, first give me a translation of this, and try to include equivalent grammatical or spelling mistakes. And then tell me how is this student’s level in terms of grade five?

Is this student writing at a grade five level for the culture and language that they’re coming from?” That’s a total game changer, right? Because now I can see this student is coming to me from this level, instead of this student is coming to me with no English. We know that if this, if a student strong in their home language, they will not only be strong in the second language, but in a lot of cases they will probably outpace their peers, as long as that home language is maintained.

Mandi Morris: [00:29:00] Yeah. It’s, I love that tool, that h- how you were utilizing that tool. I think that’s incredibly clever. What a cool takeaway for teachers and admin listening. And I think what you’re also hitting on there is just, it’s being asset-driven in the way that you see students. And also, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, it’s like language learning takes time, right?

Like, you don’t, you’ve lived internationally for years, you speak six languages. It takes time. And does it take practice and persistence and consistency? Yes. But a student- I love what you’re calling out there. A student who’s arriving proficient and on grade level in their home language, give them a little bit of time, give them experience to really grapple with the content in English with the right support, and you’re calling out as well the continuity in home language, and they will show growth and gains.

I love that tool. Thank you for sharing that with us. 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. Oh, there’s so much. And I, I love that you’re bringing that up, too. Language learning takes time. [00:30:00] It’s not just language learning, too. It’s cultural learning, right? And it’s also, a lot of times, a kid will come, come to you at the beginning of the year with very low English or whatever the target language is.

To an American audience, we’re probably sp- talking about English. But then by the end of the year, sound fluent, right? And they might go into the next grade level, and the teacher doesn’t even realize that they were, uh, an English learner the year before. But there’s a big difference between social, social language abilities and academic language abilities.

And the older the student is who comes into the classroom, the more they’re gonna have to play catch-up to their grade level. So they’re act- they’re always adjusting to a moving target. And if they’re not supported from both sides, like their home language abilities and their target language abilities, then they’re gonna have a much, much harder time, and they’re not gonna be able– they’re not gonna be given the right, the [00:31:00] right number of tools.

So my, the seventh grader who comes in with very low English abilities is gonna need is gonna need more time to catch up because the academic English at seventh grade is very different from the academic English at, for example, second grade. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, that it’s the content burden in addition to the language need, right?

We’ve talked about that, like on my team, when you think about a kindergartner, a first grader, even second grader coming in, a lot of the learning that’s happening in class is the same across the board, right? Like in kindergarten if s- or pre-K, kids are all learning their ABCs, like that language learner is like doing the same thing that their monolingual peers are doing academically.

You’re speaking to is like that content load just as the, the years go on, and it takes a different approach, right? And different… This, the students need different skills in order and different types of support in order to feel success in that environment. Earlier you talked about, or you were pointing toward teacher [00:32:00] behavior in the classroom and how that can impact how students see themselves as part of that environment, part of that classroom, how they fit into it, and sometimes even micro moves, right, that a teacher, the way that they talk about a student or the way the expectations they set ha- can have a big impact on how students see their own language and identity represented in the classroom.

I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about that and the work that you’re, how that’s impacted the work that you’re doing. 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah, sure. There’s this really great book by Jim Cummins that I’ve been reading with a group of educators lately, and there was some, some really awesome takeaways that I think crystallize this really well, and it’s about belonging and identity, and it’s the importance of students being able to see themselves not only in the curriculum, but also the way teachers interact with them, right?

And when teachers clearly value students’ identities, the students, [00:33:00] students also, students start to value their own identities more, and they see themselves as more capable. When s- when teachers don’t, and also again, not trying to say that anybody’s trying to do this, right? We all have the best intentions for our students.

But when teachers even unintentionally seem to devalue their students, belonging decreases and then so does engagement. And then so does achievement. So achievement is really closely connected to seeing the student as a whole learner, as Ofelia Garcia talks about a lot. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Patrice, you gave us a little bit of a teaser with a practical tip earlier.

I, I loved it. I- what else do you have? What else can you share with us? Like for some other, these are, this sort of stuff is so helpful because translanguaging is, it’s a way of thinking about education, and the very limited time that teachers have, and the limited resources in the s- states, resources around professional development have really been [00:34:00] shrinking, while access to free PD online has grown, right?

But then it’s like, where do you go? Where do you start? So I’d love to hear whatever tips do you have for teachers. I want to do more inclusive practice in my classroom. What does that look like? 

Patrice Thompson: Yeah, exactly. And, and there’s a lot of misconception around translanguaging because it sounds really abstract, right?

And there’s a lot of theory around it, and theory, the practice hasn’t really caught up. It’s actually pretty, when you start learning about it, it all kind, it all starts to make sense, right? Like that example with A- you’re probably like, “Oh, of course you can do that,” right? You can do that. Some other examples that are really fun is anybody who’s learned, anybody who’s read a book in one language and talked about it in another knows that you have to really kind of get deeper into the content and think more, think m- more about it in order to talk about it in, in another language.

That goes for pretty much any [00:35:00] Situation. I love to have a mini lesson. I’m– I sit students next to their language buddy, right? Somebody that they share a language with. And I teach something, I have a teaching point, and then I have a turn and talk moment, and I ask, “Okay, here’s a question. Turn to your language buddy and talk about it.

Answer the question in your home language.” And a lot of teachers might think, “Oh, I’m– can’t control that. I don’t know if they’re gonna stay on task because I don’t know… I can’t understand them.” There are very easy ways that teachers already have in their teaching toolkit to prevent that from happening, right?

You can say at the beginning, “I will be cold calling a handful of you to tell me what your partner said.” Right? And, and then they’re gonna have to relay that to you. So that’s eliminating task abandonment, and it’s also making them listen more actively to the person next to them. And then they’re also gonna be working on their oracy.

And [00:36:00] that do- that means that the speakers of English who are monolingual, they still have to do the same activity. So we’re not redesigning anything here. We’re just putting another thing in our teaching toolkit. So that’s one thing. Another thing is cross-language, cross-language engagements, is something like note-taking.

So I was teaching note-taking to my students this past year, and obviously, I’m very language inclusive. I’m the translanguaging teacher, right? My students know what translanguaging is because I love talking about it and I love celebrating their home languages. I did a lesson on note-taking. One of– We did, “Okay.

Here, read this together, and take out a main point or whatever.” And I do, we do, you do. They went off to do it themselves, and one of them said, “And this has to be in English, right?” And I was like, “No, I want you to use your home language, of course.” And all of them, their jaws dropped. It was like, in the world.

And that goes back to those implicit messages. I was really surprised that they were [00:37:00] surprised. And it’s because they’ve been getting those implicit messages for a long time that English equals success, right? And that’s across from pre-K through IB or grade 12. There is this association of good English with, with succeeding in life.

But really, I hope to reverse that and say, “Yeah, you can have good English, but you should also have strong home languages too.” I’ll give you one more example just using that. math lesson. One of my, I, I was teaching a math lesson, and I asked students to go off with their language buddies and work through some problems in their home language, right?

They had the problem on the board. They had whiteboards, and I wanted them to talk about it in their home language. Some of my students, Moroccan Arabic is not an official language, and it’s, they call it a, a street language. One of my s- students who is perfectly fluent in English, he told me afterward, “It was really weird [00:38:00] to use Darija to talk about math.

I’m not used to having to do that. It’s like I had to switch something in my brain.” So we’re talking about, like, a different level of engagement when they’re doing something that they’re not used to. And inquiry, I put a word on the board at the beginning of the year. It was nourishment. And I said, “Okay, what does this remind you of in your home language?”

Knowing, for me, that nourishment is a very similar word to a French word, which means the same thing, food. In French, nourriture. And I have five French speakers in my class. Nourriture is a very common word in French. Nourishment is more academic, right? And none of the French speakers could tell me what I, what could, none of the French speakers could make that connection because they’re not used to having to make that connection.

And when I sh- when I reminded them, “Oh, it’s, it’s nourriture,” they were like, “Oh, okay.” By the end of the year, they automatically made those connections. I would put a word on the board, and my German speakers would be like, “Oh, that’s like this in German.” [00:39:00] Spanish, “Oh, it’s like this in Spanish.” They also… It’s new for the teacher, and it’s a lot of times new for the students, and so it’s just different routines, but once they learn to make those connections, then we’re talking about leveraging home languages for achievement, engagement.

Mandi Morris: I really appreciate that vocabulary example and what you’re calling out there. Students hadn’t practiced the skill of making the connection, and you… I mean, we’ve all heard for as long as I can remember people saying there’s tens of thousands of cognates between English and Spanish. Here’s your cognate list.

You’re like, “I’m gonna somehow memorize like 40,000 cognates?” Like, I… So it’s like you stumble upon them, and you’re like, “Oh, that was helpful. That word wa- is this basically the same between English and Spanish,” right? And that you’ve got your k- cognates too between the languages. But I really love what you’re pulling on there, which is being very explicit around, like, these are your helpers.

Like, you should be [00:40:00] mining the language transfer opportunities. They’re sitting right in front of you. Kids aren’t explicitly taught how to do that. It’s not necessarily a light bulb is gonna go off for a 10-year-old. But if teachers are calling that out, and it’s such an easy shift. It’s such an easy move.

And then I think, too, about helping set that, establishing that norm in your classroom, and now even your students, they become the ambassadors of that work, that they’re making those connections even when maybe you would’ve missed it or you wouldn’t have. You knew that- connection because you speak French, right?

But I love that. I think that is such a strong example of the language transfer opportunities and, like, really establishing a culture around that work in your classroom from the very beginning. 

Patrice Thompson: Exactly, yeah. And that once they … You’re right. Once you, once they get used to it, you’re giving them the tool to be more successful as they get older.

And as they get older, they’ll also use translanguaging a little bit more differently. They don’t like to be told what to do. But if they [00:41:00] have, if we get them at a young age, then they have those tools in their toolkit, and they can do brainstorming a paper in one language or, and then writing in another.

And something Eowyn Crisfield, who’s really big in this space, talks about too is using input, processing, and output. And I’m, I just made a circle because her graphic is a circle. And so input and processing are excellent opportunities to use that home language even when the output is also in English.

Such a 

Mandi Morris: great call-out. Patrice, this conversation has been so much fun today. I’m excited for people listening to go find your courses and to stay in touch with you, to get connected on socials, and follow your work. But thank you so much for being here and sharing these practical tips with us for translanguaging.

Patrice Thompson: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been so fun.