Kristen Leathers: We really. Wanted to lean into ESL, not being tied only to ELA and rather it being cross content, right? So when we developed our curriculum, we were really intentional about creating the scope and sequence for each proficiency level that incorporated English history, math, and science language.  Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. This is your host, Mandi Morris, and today we have Martha Boisselle and Kristen Leathers from Boston Public School as our guests and what incredible educators they are, the work they are doing. Building out an ESL curriculum for secondary language learners in their school district is absolutely incredible and the most exciting part about this work. Even being in a huge school district like Boston Public Schools, they are. Engaging teachers in the work. [00:01:00] From the very beginning, teachers are co-writing lessons. They’re editing, they’re providing feedback. This is a really exciting project and the vision for this work, um, it’s just inspiring. So I think you’ll really enjoy this show today. Thanks for joining. Let’s go.

Martha and Kristen together hold over 40 years of teaching and leading experience in urban education. Both Martha and Kristen currently hold a position as district instructional coaches for the Office of Multilingual Multicultural Education for the Boston Public Schools. In their positions, they support and advise school leaders, instructional teams, and teachers.

They have created the programmatic guidance for multilingual learners in BPS. Both Martha and Kristen co-lead the creation, piloting and implementation of the BPS secondary ESL curriculum. Martha earned her MA in teaching and an additional MA in multicultural education from Simmons College. Kristen earned her [00:02:00] MAT from Northeastern University and her MED from Harvard Graduate School of Education and Education Policy and Management.

They are currently co-teaching a graduate course supporting English learners in the classroom at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Martha and Kristen, welcome to the ML Chat podcast. We are so excited to have you here today. 

Martha Boisselle: Thank you so much for having us.

Kristen Leathers:Yes. Happy to be here.

Mandi Morris:Okay, so I’ve just gotta ask, I wanna know all of the things about your class that you’re co-teaching, uh, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

That is so cool and sounds really exciting. What can you tell us about that? Sure. 

Kristen Leathers: It’s actually really fun, Martha and I enjoyed it so much. We are teaching this class to all students who are going through their teaching program and they’re earning their licenses to teach. And this is a required class for all students in the program around supporting multilingual learners [00:03:00] in high school and secondary classrooms.

Mandi Morris: Wow. How fantastic. And it’s totally remote. What does the setup look like for your students in instruction? 

Martha Boisselle: Yeah, so it’s one of their only classes that is in person. So we have about 60 students, two amazing teaching fellows, and it’s just been a really fun opportunity to get to teach baby teachers. We call them.

Mandi Morris: And how special for the educators in the room to be able to learn from people who are actively working in the school district still? I feel like for me, both in my BA and ma, a lot of my professors were not actively engaged in the public school system anymore either. It had been a long time ago or had always worked at higher ed even.

So I’m wondering like how does that feel like it impacts your course or what kind of response do you get from your students? I’m sure they notice the difference. 

Kristen Leathers: You know, it’s really funny. I think our teacher candidates really appreciate the work that we do with teachers every day, and I [00:04:00] think at the same time they are.

Really struggling. ’cause what we’re asking them to do is hard, right? It’s really hard. We try to ground all of our work and all of our assignments in the things we actually support teachers in doing every day, which is thinking really intentionally about language and content and ways to scaffold and plan for that.

While I think our students, by and large really appreciate it, I think they also have told us repeatedly, this is really hard. 

Martha Boisselle: We also have the, an approach to the class to almost frame it like a professional development in that they are in the classroom doing their practicums. And because we’re a Massachusetts, we state, we really dig deep into the wida.

Standards framework, the 2020 WIDA Standards Framework. That’s a really big text. There’s a lot of linguistics in there, and we try to use the approaches that we use with classroom teachers and really trying to make it digestible so that hopefully they will really [00:05:00] come away with feeling like maybe that was a lot, but I feel supported and I know where to look if I need help.

Mandi Morris: Oh, that’s incredible. It sounds like such a powerful course, and how amazing for educators to have or future educators to have. A required course to learn about the application and theory of the language journey, learning an additional language. I think there are so many teachers in the classroom right now that have not had that opportunity for the foundational learning.

So I wonder for you in Boston, what is that like? Are your teachers coming in required to have background in English learning? Do they have coursework that’s required? What does it look like for you? 

Kristen Leathers: In the state of Massachusetts, all teachers who are in the classroom are required to have their SEI endorsement, right?

Which means that they are required to take a course that certifies them to teach multilingual learners in their contents. And the class is really rooted in [00:06:00] retail strategies and. That is like the baseline for all, uh, teachers who get hired in Boston. But beyond that, besides having a license, there are not specific requirements for meeting the needs of multilingual learners.

And so I think that really puts a big onus on both schools and districts to help teachers be prepared. 

Martha Boisselle: And so our teachers candidates at Harvard, they will get credit for the course towards their degree, but then they also receive the SEI endorsement, so they’re able to teach in Massachusetts. 

Mandi Morris: That’s really awesome.

We dove straight into the course that you’re teaching, and I’m sure we could go off on a lot of different rabbit trails from there. But let’s talk for a little bit about Boston Public Schools. What it does your work look like? What does your school district look like? I’m imagining like a really big school district with a lot of English learners and a ton of diversity unpack for us that are not from Massachusetts.

What’s the work [00:07:00] that you’re doing there? 

Martha Boisselle: BPS is divided into nine regions, and so within those nine regions we have a region liaison model. And so every region has a multilingual learner instructional coach that supports the schools in that region, supports the principals, the leadership, the coaches, and so.

Shout out to region seven. I’m in region seven, Christensen, region eight, and so that’s really where our work has been this past year as we’re moving to a more inclusive model, general Ed, or you know. Uh, mainstream teachers are having more multilingual learners of all different levels in their classes and have needed a lot of, um, support.

That’s a, it’s a big transition. Before that, when we started in this position three years ago, our big focus was on an ask from the state was to have ESL curriculum that was aligned to ELA. Tier one curriculum. 

Mandi Morris: So what has that looked [00:08:00] like for you and Kristen WIDA? You talked about, I loved the title of your presentation.

So you wanna build an ESL curriculum. That was a great tag and we know that a lot of school districts are feeling under-resourced, teachers specifically are feeling the burden of being under-resourced, um, either not having capacity or bandwidth to build what they need or resources within the school district to purchase what they need.

What does that look like for you when you. It sounds like latched on to the vision of let’s align to ELA and then oh, we’re gonna build the thing. Um, tell us a little bit about what was that journey like for you? 

Kristen Leathers: Yeah, so we got these, these from all of the higher ups right, as districts and, and state education goes.

And we embarked on a journey to ensure that our curriculum aligned with the tier one. As we dug deeper into the WE to 2020 standards framework, and as we dug deeper into [00:09:00] our understanding and clarification in defining ESL and what that looks like within the district, we really in wanted to lean into ESL not being tied only to ELA and rather it being cross content.

Right. So when we developed our curriculum, we were really intentional about creating a scoping sequence for each proficiency level that incorporated English history, math, and science language. So while teachers are always teaching language, the content it’s rooted in is not entirely ELA, because we really took that inspiration from the way the WIDA standards define how language needs to be taught in context and content.

Martha Boisselle: And just to add that, we really wanted to promote that. ESL is not ELA light that ESL [00:10:00] is its own tier one instruction in that ESL is also content agnostic. When we got on the ground going into classrooms and talking to teachers, we realized that’s what we thought ESL was. And we do have a state definition of what ESL is, but that’s not what everyone in the district really.

Thought everyone kind of had a different idea or approach to ESL. So we realized even before starting this journey that we had to really have a shared understanding of what ESL is, and our state really defines it as explicit, systematic, and sustained language instruction to promote English learners success in school and beyond.

So that was really also part of the journey at the beginning, was figuring out. How that we can really norm with teachers and school leaders that ESL isn’t just a resource room, it’s not just an extra support that it’s its own [00:11:00] tier one instruction. 

Mandi Morris: That’s such a unique way of calling it its own tier one instruction.

And I wonder, what does that look like in a school for you? So you went through this exploratory season and you’re unpacking that. Not everyone has a common definition for what ESL instruction or ESL support looks like. Now you, it sounds like you’ve worked through a lot of that and you’ve built out a very robust system of supporting English learners through content or in content with different proficiency levels.

How do you implement such a significant change in a big school district? 

Kristen Leathers: That’s a great, uh, question because we are still going through the process. Right. It has been a multi-year journey that we’ve been on, and the first two years of that journey we’re just designing and building the curriculum itself, and then beginning to pilot [00:12:00] last year, and now this year it’s being taught in.

Most ESL classrooms across the district. I think it’s probably also important to take a step back because every district does their programming differently, but in Bostons the way it works. A really defined structure of how students ESL instruction is rooted in their ELD levels as defined by the access score as defined by teachers of each year.

And so students are grouped according to that language proficiency level in grade bands at six to eight and nine to 12. And so when we created our curriculum, we were really fortunate that we cut programming in mind so that it was really. Pretty plug and play for, there are a few schools that are exceptional and outside of that norm, but for the most part, the lift for us was like developing it, income, communication and collaboration with teachers, and then working with [00:13:00] schools on how those teachers can then in their classrooms.

Mandi Morris: So do you have a model for implementation that is co-teaching, or is there an ESL or ML coach on campus that’s supporting the integration of language? What does that piece look like for you? I. 

Martha Boisselle: Yeah. So as far as our curriculum, the way that our scope and sequence and units are laid out is we have six to eight ELD, one, two, and three.

So those are separate scope and sequences, and in each scope and sequence there is the units and then nine to 12, EL, D, one, two, and three. And they have their own scope and sequence in their own units. All of the units or the scope and sequences. Have similar themes or build upon themes each year. And they do have some similarities in that they all have ELA standards, but they do, some of them might be in, for example, there’s a financial literacy unit, and so there are some mass standards in that [00:14:00] unit as well.

And there might be, uh. And just thinking of one, we have one on Romeo and Julia for ESL three. That’s another one. And so that one really is very specific to ELA, but we also have a research in a science unit about what pollution. So depending on the unit there, there may be ELA standards. There will be LELA standards, but there also might be an additional subject area.

And so there may, depending on the school and the amount of multilingual learners in that school, there’ll be an ESL coach in that school. And additionally we’ll support them. But that really is dependent on the school and the number of multilingual learners each school has, which can vary pretty greatly in Boston public schools.

Kristen, were you gonna add something? 

Kristen Leathers: No, only to reinforce Martha’s point that we have schools that are literally. Entirely comprised of multilingual learners and then some with less than 10%. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. So for your schools that are almost entirely [00:15:00] comprised of students learning English as a newer additional language, how does instruction look different in a school with numbers that high compared to a school where it’s under 10%?

Kristen Leathers: So I can speak to, I think the schools that I work with that have really high numbers of multilingual learners, their whole school is designed around them, right? So their programming is really rooted in, they have a newcomer component of the school, and then everything else is grade based and the.

Teachers really are just constantly supporting their language instruction and sheltering content for them. I’m not sure if there is. I think one of the, one of the important things to think about is they also are part of something called the Internationals Network. I. And in that they are, they use a lot of project-based learning.

They are very rooted in the community, and [00:16:00] so there’s a lot of really amazing things happening. But we also have a dual language school that is a secondary school, and the majority of their students are learners of. One language at least, but almost all of them are working on developing language in both English and Spanish, and so their programming also looks much more unique and distinct from the rest of the schools in the district.

Mandi Morris: I am sure we have teachers and directors right now from smaller school districts that don’t have all these programs, and they’re like, oh, you just gave like a whole like wishlist of things we want. But for me, for anybody that it’s new, could you talk about the international school system and talk about what is that, in what pocket of students is it created to support?

Kristen Leathers: The international network is really just schools that are designed exclusively for students who are from other countries, and they have come to the US and they’re [00:17:00] engaged in a school that really values what they are bringing to the table values, their culture, their diversity, their language, and the staff in these schools are typically comprised of.

Immigrants themselves who are multilingual communities where students, I think based on how, how warm and welcoming these environments are that students feel like they’re seen for who they are and valued for the assets that they bring and. It is the only school in Boston that is part of the Internationals network.

But I think it’s, it’s a really great model for how we can really look at our students as coming with a host of assets that we often don’t have that mindset when we’re thinking about our newcomers in secondary space. 

Martha Boisselle: And I think in contrast, we have schools that are either exam schools or IB schools or schools that maybe in district charters where [00:18:00] there’s a smaller number of multilingual learners.

And our job is to figure out how do we get them to feel that same way. Um, that students feel at Boston International. So that’s part of the work. And also part of the work with that is there isn’t a newcomer program, right? So they have ESL class and then they’re an ELD one or a two, and they’re in high school and content area classes, which I think a lot of is the norm for a lot of smaller communities.

And so a lot of our work this year has been really supporting those teachers in those schools on how to make content. Accessible and how by adding in scaffolds and differentiation, you are not lowering the rigor. So really changing minds and hearts and minds on how to do that and what that really means.

And then supporting them how to think about how do we slowly change or remove the scaffolds so that they don’t become dependent on them. So that’s been a lot of the work [00:19:00] in some of my schools especially. That we’ve been focused on this year as we have more ones and twos in schools throughout the district and not specifically in a school with a newcomer program or Boston International.

Mandi Morris: I love something you said there. Remove or change the scaffold, and a lot of times we hear people talking about. Removing a scaffold. Okay. Students have overcome. I was in a workshop actually in Massachusetts with a coworker of mine and she was in the classroom up until just a year ago. She works on our curriculum instruction team, and she shared this wonderful moment, aha moment of we remove scaffolds when we’re working on a.

Skill that might be remembering or recall when we’re thinking about Bloom’s Taxonomy and then we’re moving students up to more complex skill demands like analyze, create, and somebody didn’t need the scaffold anymore, is really that scaffold was for a different skill and then we removed it [00:20:00] when really what we needed to do was what you said, Martha, change the scaffold.

And that is a complex part of teaching that I think takes years of experience to be able to master. And also it takes some level of continuity in your content, in your curriculum in order to master what that looks like. Even just in your classroom. I wonder if you guys, if you could add anything to that.

Are these conversations you’re having with teachers or any insight you have around that? I think 

Martha Boisselle: that we, this is the work, this is the constant work that we’re doing and I feel like we’ve been doing for the past. I. 10 years. When we started this journey, the department, Massachusetts Department of Education, we really started this journey and I think it really changed our approach to teaching.

When we were, we were tasked to create a model ESL unit, um, and we created, you can find it on the Department of Education website. The unit is free. There’s a bunch of [00:21:00] units there, but we created a unit on women’s rights. And from there, when we really started, started to think about and really master how to braid content and language, it really set us up for being able to.

Support other teachers, content teachers that didn’t have the language expertise doing some of this work. So just to shout out to Fernanda Cray was the, was working on that at the time and then moved to WIDA and really was a big leader in the 2020 standards frameworks. And you can really see a lot of that work.

The beginning kind of seeds of some of that work in this, this first project that we did. But that’s really where we were like. Wow, this is really hard. And how do we make this accessible to content teachers when they have to do so many things and you only have so much time, so you have to make it like bite sized and accessible and not overwhelming.

’cause it really, linguistics can get really [00:22:00] overwhelming and thinking of language functions and features can be really overwhelming. So that’s really been a lot of our work the past few years. 

Kristen Leathers: Yeah, and I think Martha and I have really played with how to best approach that work with content teachers specifically, right?

Because I think anybody who works in a secondary space really understands that content teachers typically see themselves as the teacher of their content, right? I’m a biology teacher, I’m a math teacher. That is really a huge part of their identity as educators, and so we’ve. Really worked hard to figure out how to best harness that in a way that helps them tap into the language demands of their content.

And sometimes that means looking really closely at standards and unpacking not only the skills and the. Knowledge, but also what is the language embedded, right? You work with teachers and have them really create that student model and then look at that student model, identify what are all the language features I’m [00:23:00] seeing in here that I need to pull out and give access to students so that they can therefore have access to the thing I’m asking them to do.

And I think we’ve really. Try to lean into ways to hook teachers that it feels relatable and approachable and rooted in their content 

Mandi Morris: student model. I want you to go back and talk a little bit more about that. How are you using student models to have your teachers think about backwards design and planning and building out scaffolds?

Could you go into a little bit more detail about that? 

Kristen Leathers: When working with the teacher, usually we try to start of, of course, with the UBD framework and have them really think about the end in mind. And so whether it’s at the unit level and they’re thinking about a final assessment or they’re just thinking about an individual lesson, we always push to to do that.

Unit level planning first, but you wanna have a teacher create a student model so that way they really [00:24:00] get an exemplar and they’re thinking about, okay, if these are all the standards students are going to meet, and this is my success criteria, I. Then what is that? What would that truly look like? And honestly, not only has creating that been really helpful, but we’ve also worked with teachers on introducing all of the AI tools that are available now.

So that if you have the success criteria and you have the assessment and the standards, then AI will create it for you as well. So that is another big time saver for the teachers when we’re working with them. ’cause sometimes that can be a barrier as well. Teachers only have so much time. But once you have that student model, then.

It is really such a rich way to be able to point out in real space what are particular, you know, sentence frames you’re seeing come up frequently. Maybe there are certain clauses, um, or you know, complex sentence structures that teachers might be using. What is the discourse look like? What are the vocabulary?

Right? Teachers always wanna hang their head on vocabulary, but we feel like this is [00:25:00] one of those ways that can be really powerful to demonstrate for teachers. The language at the sentence and the discourse level. 

Mandi Morris: It’s really in some ways easier to go through your content lesson and just pick out, these are the vocabulary words that you need to know for this bio lesson for these six weeks.

Right. Actually going through and doing the backwards design on the. Forms and function of language that students can actually talk about the content and write about the content. That’s much more complex work. And I wonder, is this how, in the work that you are doing, it sounds like your department is doing a lot of that lift for your content teachers.

If I’m understanding correctly. 

Martha Boisselle: There’s only a few of us. For a big district. We try to, you know, in our professional learning, that’s one of, we’re actually building a professional learning series right now on supporting multilingual [00:26:00] learners like that are the lower levels like ELD one and two specifically for content teachers.

’cause they are struggling with this in one of our. Strategies that we do think about is this modeling because every student in the class is an academic language learner. They’re all learning how to speak, read, write like mathematicians or scientists, and they can all use specific examples on how to do that.

And then another thing that we are really trying to push for people is that. Even as adults, having a model like is like I was just building a grill last weekend and if we had the instructions, but still it’s like we had to go online and look at the picture by pa. It was like a two hour, three hour, and if we didn’t have the model, we would’ve never been able to build the grill.

These are like. You know, two adults, my husband and I. So it’s just, if you just think about life and how much, I had pushed back a vice principal at a school about an AP class having a sentence frame, and that [00:27:00] she actually would’ve told the teacher that they shouldn’t have had a sentence frame in an AP class.

And I’m not even sure if there was multilingual learners in the class, but the level of the sentence, level of that frame, and he didn’t have it for all. He had a model. And the level of specificity in language that they wouldn’t have written a sentence frame that I’m, I would be hard, it would be hard to find that they would have written a sentence that academic without that support in 11th grade, even in an AP class.

So it’s not necessarily just for multilingual learners that using models and. Front sentence frames can really actually support every student in the class because again, we’re building them up to the more sophisticated language that you’re even learning. Still at the college level, 

Mandi Morris: I’m sure we have all been in professional learning opportunities or at a conference in a session.

I. And you have this moment of, wait, what are we supposed to be doing? What I, who am who [00:28:00] is taught, who is doing it, right? It’s like if they have an example of this is the outcome we’re looking for, or a structure to the dialogue, you, here’s your sentence starter, or here’s your frame if you need, if you want to go off script and go beyond that, but here’s a place to start, even as adults.

A hundred percent. I agree with you. This is why like YouTube. Tutorials are everything, right? Like you’re trying to figure out how to do your grill or how to cook a new meal, or as adults, we’re doing it all the time. So you’re, I love that connection that you made, mark, that it should be an easier sell for us now to help teachers make the connection that like, yeah, our students do really need this and benefit from it.

I would love to turn and learn a little bit about each of you and how you found yourselves in the world of supporting English learners and multilingual learners. Kristin, I’d love to start with you, like how did you get here? Right? Like, where did your passion start? Where did your [00:29:00] journey, how did your journey bring you to be where you are?

Kristen Leathers: Sure. Yeah, I, it’s funny in having done so relatively early and young, I had started out in public relations and after a year or two of that, I realized pretty quickly this is not what I wanted to spend my life doing. And I. Then I just, I did a thing that some of us are lucky enough to do where I went in the Peace Corps for a little while and I went in AmeriCorps and just really trying to figure out where I could make really do work that felt meaningful and I started to look into teaching and it was.

Moment of getting hit by lightning. As soon as I got in front of a classroom, it was like, oh, this is it. This is what I, this is what I wanted. This is what I was looking for all this time. And I started out teaching ELA for the first five or six years, and then as our population dramatically began to change as a school, it was clear that a lot of us were going to have to switch over.

So I went back and. Got my license and learned and [00:30:00] started teaching ESL, and then it’s just every single time I have done a switch since I’ve started in education. The perennial constant is that the students are absolutely the best part, right? Whether it’s teaching high school students in ELA, it was like, oh my God, these students are just amazing.

And then I started teaching ESL and I was like, oh my God, these students are amazing. And then recently now teaching with college level, it’s, oh my gosh, these superstars are fantastic and it’s so fun. Uh, so it’s, it’s really been, um, a great 

Mandi Morris: evolution. I don’t know if it’s education broadly or specifically ESL, but I feel like.

So many professionals in ESL, they had this moment where you fell in love with the students. They fell in love with the work and they’re like, I’m hooked. And like I’m changing from it being like straight content to being in ESL. And it’s so neat to hear that journey. Martha, what about you? How, what, where did you start and how did you get where you are?

Martha Boisselle: Yeah, so I’m a little different than Kristen. I’m one of [00:31:00] those people that, by the time I was four, I was like, I wanna be a teacher, even though I hadn’t even gone to school yet. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. I always loved bossing my brother, my little cousins around and making them sit while I had my little blackboard.

I just didn’t know what kind of teacher I wanted to be. I just always wanted to help people, and I felt like it was a. A job where I had a pretty rough time in high school and middle school, and I, I really felt like I, I could. Support students the way I wasn’t supported. So that was like a, a big one for me.

But we actually started, Kristen, I started a little earlier, a couple years earlier than her, but we were at the same school, so we were both at the same school for 15 years, maybe a couple years more than that. And I also started as an ELA teacher and went back to school. To Simmons to become an ESL teacher.

And my first year, I remember almost all entirely, my students were almost entirely from the Dominican Republic. And [00:32:00] I remember that first year being like. I gotta go to the Dominican Republic. I gotta like just see what it’s like. Like this. I just thought like there, it was just like the most fascinating year I had at that point.

I had taught for three years. That was my fourth year and I was just like, this is amazing like this. This is, I’ve never experienced like a culture like this before. And so I went to the Dominican Republic and did all the things and visited one of my students. There and that was really just sealed the deal where I just, it was, I was just learning so much from my students.

As, as much as they were learning from me, and that was just amazing. In our class, our last class at Harvard, we had a panel of our old students come in who were in their twenties and thirties. So they had a good perspective of just like their experience in high school, and one of them is a dual language principal.

One of them is a social worker in Boston Public Schools, the one that I actually visited in the Dominican Republic and. Honestly, I think that was our best class. [00:33:00] It was the class we really did the least, but like hearing from students and like putting students at the center has always been what I’ve really tried to do.

And so it’s just like a good reminder that the more. We can do that and remind ourselves like, why are we doing this work? We went through a walkthrough today at a school and usually the principal talks and then we go and we observe and go to classrooms, and this one specific school always has a student come in and introduce themselves and talk about the school a little bit, and it’s it liter.

It makes all the difference. We have to remember to keep students at the center. And so, yeah, I’ve just always wanted to be a teacher. I’m really happy that. To be teaching this class because I do miss being in front of a classroom. I’m always like, maybe I should go back because I just miss it so much. I miss the kids so much.

Mandi Morris: I think you bring up a really important point, like the students are in the center of the work that we do, and I know I’ve heard over the years like, is this an adult [00:34:00] problem or is. Student problem. I feel like if the people in the room are willing to take a step back and set ego aside, and a lot of time it’s an adult problem, right?

It can be very uncomfortable to change our system to do something different. And when things are hard, change is uncomfortable. And when. Teachers often just feel like there’s so much change, there’s so many demands. There’s much that’s on my plate that I have to figure out. And I love that the work that you guys are doing, it feels very systematic and thoughtful.

It sounds like a lot of what you’ve done, it’s like we’re built, we’re uncovering, we’re unearthing, we’re building, we’re piloting. It’s like. Small steps to go further in the long run because it’s really exciting to hear about that work that you’re doing. I wonder what advice you would give to another school district that said, we want to do a better job supporting our students with language.

Through content. We want there to be a better system in our school district for braiding. What advice would you give to a [00:35:00] school that’s trying to start this journey? 

Kristen Leathers: I would say one of the. Most important things would be engaging all your teachers in this work and make that work collaborative and make.

The students, the center of the work and have teachers think about, we really, we can’t say enough. We literally never do a PD or work with teachers without grounding it in the WIDA 2020 standards framework. We are a WIDA state, so if you’re not in a WIDA state, hopefully your state has a similar resource that you can use and lean into.

But having that foundation where you can really dig into your own standards and the way that language shows up in those standards is just such a powerful place for educators to start and having, having them engage in that work as the starting point. I just think it is really a place you can’t go wrong.

Martha Boisselle: I would say [00:36:00] that you can’t do this in a one-off pd. That you, this needs to be a part of your school goal and mission. That this needs to be a part of how you plan your schedule, how you think about the way that your school looks, the food you offer. It’s it all the way down to like your instructional practices.

So this can’t just be something that’s Oh, yeah. And our multilingual learners. And so thinking about how to really do that and get every single person in that school to be part and believe in the mission. 

Mandi Morris: That’s such good advice, such good advice I’ve felt over the years and talked with colleagues over the years that you do, uh, professional learning for content teachers or for your building, and it’s like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just gimme the thing. Give me the paper and I just don’t wanna take it and go back to my classroom and be done. Just gimme the magical thing. And I feel like I often will start with just [00:37:00] framing language, learning as a journey. I. It’s a journey. It’s not a one size fits all. It’s not, uh, we’re gonna do this one thing and it’s gonna work for everybody.

It takes time, it takes flexibility. I love that. You’re just really grounding and like, this is not a one-time pd. This is in the water, right? It’s in the water of what you’re doing. From district to school. That’s such an important head space to be in for this work. I’d love to go through some questions with you and hear from both of you, your thoughts on these.

Um, what are you in the process of implementing in your school district that you feel like could have the biggest impact on students? 

Kristen Leathers: We are in the middle of a. Multi-year implementation in our district where we have been working steadily towards as a district and I think norming around equitable literacy, around high quality [00:38:00] instructional materials, around what it means to take those materials and universal.

Design principles for access for all students. And I think all of those things are really messy. They’re really hard. They involve a lot of mindset change, but I do think we’re moving more towards a place of everybody having a common understanding of what high quality instruction looks like with it, which I think ultimately can be really meaningful for students in the long run.

Martha Boisselle: Yeah. And just to add on, and what does academic language look like, right? Like we throw it around, what does that really mean? How do you do it? How do you have objectives, language objectives in your lesson? How do you plan language at the unit level? How do you look at what really students can do at each proficiency level?

And then how do you use that to help you think about the scaffolds that you’re creating? Yeah. We’re on a big journey right now in the Boston Public Schools, but [00:39:00] it’s pretty exciting because. Like Kristen said, this is. Multiple. This is gonna be over multiple years. And so all of our professional learning as a district around these big ideas, okay, 

Mandi Morris: so you’ve got some long-term vision, right?

And it requires all, it’s gonna require a lot of short-term steps to get there. So let’s ground it in this year. What would you consider this year to be your biggest win? And I know we’re, I don’t know, maybe three quarters through the school year, but what would you name from this year as? This is a big win that we feel excited and proud about.

I. 

EpisodeBodyMartha&Kristen: For 

Martha Boisselle: me, I would have to say getting to see the curriculum being used in classrooms is just pretty amazing. Our units were written by Boston Public Schools teachers or teachers in Massachusetts, and so being able to take a picture of an anchor chart or a worksheet or. A lesson and to send it to that writer to be like, you did this.

And it’s pretty amazing to see. [00:40:00] It’s still, we still have lots of editing and changes to make, but you really can see some elevation in the classroom and just also just some continuity of what ESL instruction looks like. So that’s been like really exciting to see. 

Kristen Leathers: Absolutely. I think alongside that would be we.

Created a 12 hour learning module for our curriculum and to go alongside it. And I think that the reception has been. Really positive for the most part. And teachers really appreciate not only having access to a curriculum that is really designed for them and their students and have been designed by their colleagues, but then also a professional learning space that really supports them in the implementation of it.

And we’re again, also constantly working, revising, you know, we’re going into our third iteration of it this spring, [00:41:00] but. It’s really exciting, right? If we developed it last summer and then now we’re working on revamping it again for this iteration, it’s been really exciting to look back and be like, oh yeah, I think this is holding up.

It feels pretty good. So, um, that, that’s really, that’s really great and I think it, it lets teachers know that. Creating something in a vacuum and then saying here and walking away from it, right? But rather that just like teaching, this is an iterative process where we’re working together to design materials with you and for you that are grounded in what our students need.

And then we’re working together to help you learn how to use them well. And then we’re making changes on our end as well to make it better for you. So I think that whole piece has been really powerful. 

Martha Boisselle: And it’s exciting, like it’s a curriculum, right? But like teachers are what bring it to life and who you have in your class and how you need to make changes for them.

Like it’s a major vehicle for teachers. But like every classroom looks different. [00:42:00] Every teacher puts their own spin on it. And depending where they are in their career, that’s gonna be different, right? If you’re a first year teacher, it’s, I have something to use. This is. Great. Right. But if you’ve been teaching for a while and you’re really trying to add in a lot of UDL principles and think about your students multilingual learners on IEP and get really deep, it gives you something to start with so that you can really tailor your lessons to your students and you can spend your time doing that and not creating like the original lesson from scratch, which takes so much time.

They can actually really make it specific for the students in front of them. So it’s exciting to see each teacher do something. With the curriculum and put their own stamp on it. 

Mandi Morris: It’s really so cool because it sounds like teachers have a lot of buy-in because they were asked to come in to create and then to come in and give feedback and I’m sure How cool does it feel as a teacher to provide feedback and then see that feedback show up in a new iteration or a new version, or for that feedback to [00:43:00] be honored?

And it really speaks to me that it also holds. Such a, a place of value for the educators that you work with, that your experience matters, your perspective matters, what you’re doing in your classroom matters, and that you’re just creating space for that in a really important and powerful way. Definitely 

Kristen Leathers: it was one of the foundational pieces of what we did when we started this it.

We did not want to. Go with a curriculum that was already developed because we really knew and believed in what our teachers were doing in the classroom. And while we needed to norm, and while we all have work to continue to grow and develop, we also knew that while on one hand our district left our teachers to figure it out along the way.

Teachers figured it out. They did a lot of really amazing work and we felt that in order to honor them [00:44:00] and have them be a part of this process, they absolutely had to be, uh, a voice in the work and a collaborator in the work. 

Mandi Morris: Kristen and Martha, this has been such an incredible conversation. We could go on for hours and I could just.

To listen to all of your experience and expertise and learn so much from both of you. We are very honored that you are here with us today, that you came to spend this time with us. And I hope this is not our last conversation because we want another version of this where we get to hear, okay, now you’re a year down the road and you’ve got a broader implementation.

What does that look like? And what are you learning from the process? So I hope this is not the last time that we have this conversation with you. It’s been so enjoyable.