Steve Gill: [00:00:00] The number one thing is that the vast majority of school districts are not actively teaching, listing, speaking, reading and writing, and helping language learners understand what’s normal, how this occurs, and how you move forward, and also how to overcome these roadblocks you run into. Because I can tell you each time I learn a new language, like my German I read at about the fifth, sixth grade level, if I’m reading Baldacci, it’s not too hard for me, but when I switch to Karen Slaughter, it becomes enough harder.

It’s a whole different emotional feeling you get from it. And helping normalize this for our language learners so that they don’t want to just give up ’cause they’re running into these blocks. 

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m Mandi Morris, your host. What do I say about this podcast episode with Steve and Marcello?

I don’t even know what to pull as a highlight. I don’t know. What is the reels, the top reels. [00:01:00] The conversation was so incredible. We went into Marcelo’s incredible story that he shared with us of his own journey as an English learner. Steve’s experience as a school psychologist and unpacking dual identification for students K 12.

There is so much value in this conversation and you will undoubtedly walk away with something that you want to implement in your classroom or your school district starting tomorrow. I’m so excited to release this podcast. Let’s go. Steve Gill has been a school psychologist for over 30 years and began his educational career as a teacher.

He has worked the past 15 years writing, training, and consulting. In addition to working as a school psychologist, he’s fascinated by languages and language learning and created the ELL critical data process that is now used in at least 14 countries. Steve earned his degree in school psychology and teaching at Central Washington University, a passionate advocate for multilingual learners and teacher [00:02:00] training.

Marcelo Sousa is a Brazilian born educator, writer, and speaker with over 17 years of experience. He’s the author of the memoir, the Boy from Brazil, available in both English and Portuguese. Marcelo holds degrees in history, elementary education, tesol, bilingual education and educational leadership. He’s currently pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership at Liberty University.

We are so excited, Steve and Marcelo to have you on the NL Chat podcast today. Welcome. 

Marcelo Sousa: Thank you. Thank you. 

Mandi Morris: So I feel like we have to start out, tell us a little bit about how your paths collided and what brings you here together today on the podcast. 

Marcelo Sousa: I actually was working in Hampton, Connecticut, and I was an EL specialist and working on being a coach for the district.

One of the areas that I found that needed a lot of work were identifying students who had a disability, EL students. And I’ve noticed that there were so many [00:03:00] gray areas in the district and people have so many questions and a lot of training needs to be done in that area. So I first search I did was on Amazon and online, of course, Steve Gill’s book came up and I started reading his books and then I put it back on the shelf and I said, it’s not time yet to develop these trainings.

So then fast forward, I moved to a different district and I said, now it’s time to really, as I really dive into coaching and doing things with the state. And I gave him a call and Steve answered the call and he said, oh, you are an Yale student. You’ve walked the walk, you’re a Brazilian and you have a lot to offer.

And with his background, we started talking and putting things forward and that got the ball rolling. So 

Steve Gill: for me. Marcelo contacted me, and one of the things that he found out once we got to talking was I’ve been looking for someone or people to start mentoring [00:04:00] in this field, in this world, because as you can see, the guest can’t see.

I’m getting old and I’m close to retirement, and I find very few people who have the background necessary to mentor because for me to mentor someone in this world, I need them to be bilingual or multilingual. I need them to have teaching skills. I need them to have passion, a story, the whole thing, and that’s what Marceto brings to the table.

Mandi Morris: So tell us a little bit about the work that you’re doing together. It feels like it was serendipitous or the stars aligned for the two of you to meet. I love that you reached out with a phone call and that Steve actually answered so cool. Like how often do you read a book that’s meaningful to you and then you can actually get in touch with the author.

Tell us about the work that you guys are doing together. 

Marcelo Sousa: I actually called them and Steve was like, start your presentation and send me 15 minutes snippets of your presentations. [00:05:00] And we’ve had a couple meetings and I went through his book. I underlined a lot, so I presented for call, right? She’s a Connecticut Association of Administrators and Superintendent along with the state of Connecticut a few months ago.

And the, his first thing was I went over my presentation and we went over some questions that I had regarding language development. What would you answer in this part? And we balanced each other because I, there are some things that I don’t know that’s really. Within a psychology background or testing and things that I’m not as familiar with that I need a lot of training in.

And there are aspects that I could answer, so I used my own story and then used the critical data analysis to weave that into my personal story. And it was a home run for the presentation. And I said, wow, there’s something here that you know, because it is a passion of mine to train teachers and to continue [00:06:00] developing this work here in Connecticut.

So it was through some meetings and trial and error. And then I actually attended one of the trainings at, which was last week, which was at Cape Cod online, and I was able to work with a lot of the educators. So it was nice to see inaction at back and forth and trial and error. What would I answer during this time?

And saw Steve actually answering a lot of the questions and with a lot of depth. That I didn’t have in some kind of like testing because I don’t know a lot of the testing that they do for students acquired disabled or where we’re testing a lot of cognitive things. I know most of it, but I don’t know in depth.

And that comes with years with training. Steve. I dunno if you wanna weigh in on that. 

Steve Gill: Yeah, and I think that it’s in the early stages of us working together and a big part of it is I want to be able to give away everything I’ve ever learned and make sure that other people have [00:07:00] that. So it’s not that I’m smarter than he is, I’ve just been on the road longer and so I’ve picked up things along the way and that’s part of what I’m trying to do right now is to be able to pass that along and make sure that the knowledge travels forward and this kind of knowledge is gained over time.

It’s not gained over a couple of minutes. So it is very much a journey. 

Mandi Morris: Mentorship is powerful. And for any of us who have benefited from that in our career, it’s a really powerful part of developing in your professional area, whether you’re a first year teacher and it’s like you need that mentorship just for survival.

You can’t get through that first second year of teaching without coaching mentorship or further along in your career where you’re really trying to deepen your skills, deepen your experience. So I love that about your story. That’s really neat. Steve, you’re the first school psychologist we’ve had on the podcast, and I’m really excited about it.

I’d love to hear a [00:08:00] little bit about your story. You are a teacher and then you went into school psychology after that, if I’m understanding from your bio right. Go there and tell us more about all that journey. 

Steve Gill: So when I started in teaching, teachers were paid so poorly that when I got an offer from the university to be a graduate assistant teacher, they would pay my.

Tuition and my salary at 20 hours a week was almost the same as a beginning future salary. So that was a no brainer. So I went over to that and as I’m going along, I end up in Tacoma, Washington, which is a very diverse city as my first place. And little boy walks into my room who doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak his language.

And I was supposed to test him. And when I was in graduate school, no one, not one single time did a professor talk about evaluating a language learner. And so I called my professors and I didn’t [00:09:00] take me any further along the way. So I went to the library and back in the day you’re looking through the little cards and getting journals and there was really there, there was almost nothing to help a practitioner at that point in time.

And now it’s 30 something years later and there is very little available to help the practitioner actually. Working with the individual child sitting in front of them. And that’s where I try to focus my time is the practitioner and the school building. If they have a language learner who’s struggling, how do they approach that so that they have a better likelihood of really understanding the needs of the child?

And then developing a plan to meet those needs. Because I’ve got over 2000 school districts worth of data over these years, and language learners in my data set, which is pretty good data set, about 48% more likely to get qualified for special education than non-language learners. [00:10:00] And that is non desegregated data.

So the problem’s actually worse than that. So that was my beginning. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. What makes me think of this director that I was working with in Texas and she said something that really felt powerful to me. She’s the director of a decent sized school district with a lot of English learners. And she said, I’m so tired of my teachers being under-resourced.

And then they don’t feel successful. And we are scratching our heads of why teacher turnover looks like it does, and why can’t we get enough teachers in the classroom? And she’s, it’s sitting right in front of us. They’re under-resourced year after year. And it was, it just, it gave me goosebumps in the meeting when she said it because I thought, wow, like this director really is feeling such sympathy for that challenge of being an educator.

That moment that you had Steve those years ago at the boy in your office, and you’re thinking like, you’re asking me to do a task that I don’t, I’m not [00:11:00] resourced for. I don’t have the resources I need. So how did that propel you into the ELL critical data process? At what point in your career did you start to develop a process?

Steve Gill: So from then I was always thinking about it. So my next district, I had a little girl who the local children’s hospital called me and said she must be intellectually disabled. And what turned out to be was the only thing is that she didn’t speak the language that was speaking to her, but she was not even remotely close to being intellectually disabled.

So I go onto the next district, and it’s a district where the English speakers are not the majority. And that really got me moving forward. And just totally by accident, I ended up eating dinner with Steven Crash. And that got me moving forward. And about that time, the ideas were coming together and I switched districts to a whole new rule where I was gonna be the lead and coach for over a hundred [00:12:00] people.

And the district said, you’re really interested in this. Why don’t you do some graduate work and we’ll pay for it. And they paid for 90 something percent of it. And that during that I had to have a project. That project was the beginning of the ELL Critical Tater process, which I’m actually right now working on the fourth edition.

Mandi Morris: Wow. I love how you just blew past dinner with Steven Cren. Can we just stop for, can you just tell like high level dinner with Steven Cren please? Whoa. That, like, how did that propel you? 

Steve Gill: When I was in that district, I said, okay, I’m going to finally learn Spanish. I’m gonna do it. So I had two years of high school, straight A’s.

I had two years of college, straight A’s. I had no useful skills. I could not do anything other than conjugate verbs. And so there’s Stephen Crashing giving a talk, and after the talk was over, I invited myself to eat with [00:13:00] him and I told him, Hey, four years straight a’s I can’t do anything. I have no skills.

I. He told me, he goes, go get kindergarten books. Read them till you master ’em. Get first grade books. Read ’em till you master ’em. I started doing that within six months everything started coming together and so now this summer I’ll be starting my fifth language. I did what he said also in German earlier when I was much younger.

I spoke Hebrew also, but Hebrews long gone, so yeah, it was a very interesting thing. He’s a very interesting person. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. Okay. Note to self for Marcelo and Mandi, we just invite ourselves to the dinner for, so Marcelo for you, where did this work really become a passion for you? You spoke a little bit earlier about.

In the position that you were in, you felt, okay, I need to like, in a sense, build out your own skills and build out your own muscle around being able to support teachers in the need. I’m sure that there was a critical [00:14:00] moment or a turning point for you where you felt like this isn’t now a book on a bookshelf anymore.

This is something I’ve really gotta commit to and dive in. If 

Marcelo Sousa: you’ve rewind my story a little bit, my dad came to the United States in 1988 and I always tell the story. He send us a postcard the year before, a little spoilage, the church on the hill, and we arrived in Newark, New Jersey in 89. And that was a culture shock for me and my mom and my sister.

But what happened was as I was in school, they saw that something was wrong. They didn’t know really how to teach to a yellow learner. If you look in the eighties, with whole language coming up, coming together, it just wasn’t working well the fast forward. They identified me as cognitively impaired in third grade, so they missed the whole language thing. Wait a little bit. Un understand that the student a lot more, they didn’t do any of that. I sat in the back of the classroom, didn’t know what to do, and I got labeled. My mom thought it was [00:15:00] extra help, right? Fast forward to sixth grade, seventh grade, they thought I was too bright.

Fast forward to ninth grade, I started. They mainstream me for all the classes, and now I have honors biology, but then I have all these academic language that I still had to catch up on, but couldn’t. So what did my mom do? She actually went and hired a school psychologist to come in and do testing on me and just to see does he really have disability?

I need something confirmed that he doesn’t have a disability, that he was just misdiagnosed. Come to my to the table of my last PPT. I did not have a disability come from the evaluation, and the assistant superintendent was at my PPT and they said, miss to my mom that the education system failed Marcelo.

And we apologized for that. And I think from then on I made my mission to never let what happened to me happen to other students and that I was [00:16:00] gonna slowly break those little cracks in the ceiling, but didn’t know how to do that. I struggled in college a little bit. I was the kid that was smart, but had to find alternate ways of getting things done, writing a paper or, so I went to Southern, we had a great TSO program and I just started to get better.

I just started to understand a lot better, and this area was always part of a passion of mine. It’s so complex. I was always putting it on a shelf because it’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s so many great areas. You gotta know all about disabilities and you have to know great areas. And it wasn’t until I started to become a coach and doing training at the state level where I say, Hey, I think I could use my experience.

And started to do a lot of research. I started reading a lot and I started to get better. I started to understand a lot of cases and I started to love it. And then that’s when I started to question Steve and reading all his books. And I just, because they’re so easy to [00:17:00] read and there were so relatable and I started to dive in deep.

And then that’s how I got to where I am now to really train administrators and to go. So I was at Callus Mabe wherever I get a stage. I love it and I love to perform. I was in perform arts in New York City, so gimme a stage and I, and if I know what I’m talking about, I’ll go far. And it’s fun to do I love it. 

Mandi Morris: Marcelo. I’m just imagining, thank you for sharing that story with us and or your story with us. And I’m wondering, I’m imagining you as a high schooler sitting there with your mom and top a leader from the school districts apologizing like I, I’m sorry. Like we, we failed the system. Like the system did not serve your child.

I wonder for you going through school, how did you see yourself as a student and maybe that shifted from elementary school to middle school to high school. Did you feel like the adults around you just didn’t see, you didn’t see where you needed support [00:18:00] did, and when you’re maybe at that time of life, you’re not retrospective enough.

But I wonder, looking back, how did you feel as a student? See yourself? 

Marcelo Sousa: I’ve, in high school, I really thought I was dumb. I, freshman year I was this little skinny kid. I didn’t have a voice. It really wasn’t until my drama teacher who put me on stage and she says, you have a gift. I did a really difficult play was Louis Carroll and the writing of Louis Carroll was very difficult, right?

So I would sit in the back and I would read it all the time, read it, and I just got better and better. It took one teacher who believed in me that to know that I had a gift, I could do well in these areas. And I started, I didn’t understand that when teachers were saying things to me to write things down, like in biology, that I was translating things in my head and I couldn’t catch up fast enough ’cause I was translating, but nobody, I had nobody to tell me.

That’s how you acquire language and when you have multiple [00:19:00] languages in your mind, you’re gonna have a little delay and that’s okay. You’re doing all these things cognitively in your mind. 

Mandi Morris: And now we call it translanguaging and we’re saying it’s a great thing that students should be doing. And 

Marcelo Sousa: now I then I started to, by the time I was a senior and I did, I think I did the music man, and I had a lead, and I just felt like I was empowered.

I felt great. And then when I got to college and I started reading a lot of Neil Simon, all these plays and I started to really have, it took one educator to really change the whole, my whole trajectory of my education system. But I graduated high school, broken. I was not whole yet. It took me years and years.

And I went, I started at a community college and then I was working at a corporation ’cause I didn’t think I was good enough to be a teacher. And then I started my TESOL degree. I got my bachelor’s at Kane University in Union, New Jersey. Then went to get my TESOL while I was teaching [00:20:00] fifth grade, still not thinking I was good enough.

And it took another professor, Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Pl from Southern Connecticut University to say, you’re good, you could do this. And then I graduated. And then it was just like little things like that. It was like you break a little. Build little steps. But I think that helped me because I can walk I’m walking empathy because I look at my kids and I’m like, Hey, this is what you gotta do.

And I think when you have that, you can go a lot further with your staff because you build, when you tell your story and people connect with your story, you can, you have a lot more buy-in I think. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, absolutely. Steve, it looked like you were gonna say something. 

Steve Gill: He said several things that I hear so often.

So he said extra help. They told her his mom will be extra help. You have to say that the person has a disability to give that. Once you do that, you’re going to change how everyone views the [00:21:00] child, including the parents and the child themselves when they figure this out. So he said, I felt dumb. That’s what a lot of the people who are language learners who get mislabeled, feel, he was robbed of somewhere between one to three hours a day of core curriculum.

That’s what he had to catch up. So he’s a living example of when I talk about how if you give the wrong label, when it’s really language acquisition and you don’t focus on the language acquisition and you call it a disability, you will take them one to three hours a day every day, and then that hole that’s created takes years and years to catch up if the person can, because it takes a lot of courage to catch up from that.

And it takes, he said that one teacher and all the research shows one teacher can make an enormous difference in a child’s life. I do have a funny note from what he said though. Okay. Every state has their own name for the [00:22:00] meeting and he says PPT, and for some unknown reason, almost close to a hundred percent, it’s three letters.

I don’t know why it became way, but almost everywhere. It’s three letters and I’ll hear their MDTs. Or their sssts or so that. Then the other funny thing to me is he mentioned they’re easy to read, so I write as though I’m speaking to someone. I want it to be like I’m talking to the person. And when I get certain groups that review my writing, they are highly critical of it because it’s so profoundly different than a journal article.

And I have journal articles published and my joke to them is always, you write a journal article, you get it published through enormous amount of work, and then four people read it. So I’d rather have people reading my work. 

Mandi Morris: I think that’s so powerful. And it sounds like [00:23:00] your work is very practical. Very pragmatic.

It’s intended to be read by teachers and administrators and implemented by teachers and administrators. I. Something you said earlier. Marcelo really stood out to me in different roles I’ve had in my career, whether ELD teacher, an ELA teacher, working in district level, I always felt really passionate about, especially secondary students, not losing access to electives.

And we see that so often, especially in the high school level and middle school. But you’ve got students that have been labeled as English learners since kindergarten, were born and raised often in that same town, and they’re in high school and they’re losing the opportunity to participate in band and graphic design in art in the list goes on and on, and drama.

I was such an advocate when I was in that space for students. You cannot take art away from this child. She’s coming to school for art. That’s it. That’s why she’s here. You cannot take the [00:24:00] soccer elective away from this child. He is here for soccer. He will stop, he will drop out of high school without soccer.

It’s just so powerful. I just wanted to spend a moment going back to that because talk about practical, pragmatic change, something that simple to apply. Being an advocate for the students in front of you, that we cannot take elective options away for students in high school because those are often the spaces where they’re allowed to play with language, to play with social interactions, to feel a part of their peer community, to feel success and ways that students might not always as English L language learners, unfortunately, feel in core content classes.

Marcelo Steve, I don’t know if you have anything else to add to that or if you’ve observed similar situations. 

Steve Gill: Yes, absolutely. Because many states have created laws that. Require the number of credits [00:25:00] that you can get in four years leaving? No, no leeway whatsoever. When every law, also, every state also has the law that kids can go up to 20, 21, 22, depending on the state, but the school districts want to have on time graduation so they won’t let the kids out of it.

So they try and rob them of the electives and let ’em, instead of letting them stay one semester longer. And this play that’s vicious. And it’s not just the language learner world, it’s also the special ed world by itself of non-language learners where these kids are being robbed of their electives.

But something you said, and I wanted to make sure to mention this today in the fall, I spent a bunch of time trying to get LTEL data for the United States long-term English learner kids who don’t pass the test. So I emailed every single state department in the United States except to, because I couldn’t find an email address for them.

And I tried really [00:26:00] hard and I started getting back responses. And several states, I would say at least a third of the states told me We have no definition of that. So the single most important thing that you should be monitoring in that world is whether or not they passed the test, whether or not they’re really truly learning English in that district.

You’re not even monitoring it. You have no definition. Then the states that did have definitions, they varied up to about three years in time. But my data, and I say this roughly because there was so much variation, about 50% of language learners are never passing the test. Meaning we are failing language learners in this country, absolutely failing them.

So you wanna rob them of an elective while you’re not helping them learn English at the same time. We’ve got to change what we’re doing 

Mandi Morris: that is so powerful. Up to 50% of our students not passing a state [00:27:00] language assessment over, and I know, I’m sure I am not alone observing students take us an assessment, like a state language assessment and they’re Christmas treeing.

The answers because they’ve done it for 12 years in a row, they’ve done it for 11 years in a row, and it’s like, this doesn’t mean anything. It is just a dumb test that I have to do. I am really curious, what are your thoughts around that? Like how do we shift that mindset, shift the work around it so that students are seeing success on their state language assessments?

Steve Gill: So Marcelo and I are going to come at this from different angles. Why don’t you go ahead, because you’re gonna go at the angle. I believe that is about what we really should do. I’m gonna go at the angle of where we need to start so that we can get to yours. 

Marcelo Sousa: So go for it. I was gonna say a little bit about language development plans.

It’s like my big joke when I go to these, they, I talk to administrators, superintendents here in Connecticut because I believe that every student need like doing blood work, [00:28:00] right? You go get your blood work done. Here are the areas where I need focus on, we gotta fix this, and then we go forward. I look at language development plan in an additive approach, right?

Positive. If you’re coming in from a romance language and you speak Spanish, here are how you would teach phonics, right? The E in the I are interchangeable and you have to understand that. And you go from a 12 step, like the language, the linguistics implication you would go from how would you modify? And I think that teachers having a tool like that in their hands, it gives a perspective who the student is, how, what are the recipe for success for that each of those students.

It gives like a plan of actions with goals and pushing forward. So I’ve been like a proponent with that. I’ve been using, I’ve been learning a lot about AI and how do we do that, but do it in a faster way and more productive way where teachers are not spending hours. I’m learning a lot about automation and I’m learning a lot about ai.

I just did a training in AI and [00:29:00] what we can do, I can do a language development plan in, in five minutes, look at the last LINK scores or the wida, put that into a database and then I tell ’em what I want and then within five minutes I have a scope and sequence of a language development plan for that student.

That has revolutionized the way I teach. That’s my approach so far. 

Steve Gill: Yeah, and I totally agree with him that we have to be understanding where the children are and making plans for them so they can be successful. One of the things that I’ve run into, because I’ve been traveling the country now for about 15 years, the number one thing that we’re doing for language learners that I see.

Helping them finish their homework and helping them finish their classroom work. We’re not actually teaching them anything about language. And so what I’m working on right now, and you guys get to see this, but they don’t, but these, the three biggest photos that you see are the covers to my three kids books.

And in them, I’m [00:30:00] trying to help people focus on listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Because if a teacher goes and takes Psyop training or GLAD training, which both are amazing, so no one can get me wrong on this, they’re both amazing. But you go and you take that and you’re overwhelmed, absolutely overwhelmed.

And so what I’m trying to do through this very simple books is show them here’s how you can start teaching, listening, and how you can transition it into teaching, speaking, how you can transition it into reading, how you can transition it into writing so that we get teachers having something incredibly simple.

They start having success and then they’ll start implementing some of the PS up and glad at a deeper level. Then when Marcelo comes to him and says, we really need a language plan for this kid. They’re having success and he’s able to show them through AI how to make it, because I’m way too old for that.

And so we get these things where people are having success because a friend of [00:31:00] mine who works on a national level sent me a bunch of the articles written by the leading experts about what we should be doing, and they’re so far away from what’s really occurring in the real world that people read them and just shake their head.

I want people to start being successful so they can get on a road to doing the things that Marcello and the other experts are saying are necessary. 

Mandi Morris: Steve, what is happening in the real world? What do you see with the school districts you’re working with? What is, what are the most pressing needs and concerns right now?

Steve Gill: The number one thing is that. The vast majority of school districts are not actively teaching, listing speaking, reading and writing, and helping language learners understand what’s normal, how this occurs, and how you move forward. And also, how do I overcome these roadblocks you run into? Because I can tell you each time I learn a new language, like my German I read at about the fifth, [00:32:00] sixth grade level, if I’m reading Baldacci, it’s not too hard for me, but when I switch to Karen Slaughter, it becomes enough harder that it’s a whole different emotional feeling you get from it.

And helping normalize this for our language learners so that they don’t want to just give up because they’re running into these blocks. So there’s so many things that we need to do to really help them be successful learners. 

Mandi Morris: That’s really powerful. In a lot of ways it goes back to the conversation of teachers being fully resourced.

I remember when I was teaching a sixth, seventh, eighth grade, ELD standalone class. So I had seven class periods in the day mixed by proficiency level, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. And the content teachers would come to me and say, this student’s got a test on Friday, or this student has this assignment done and can’t, can you do it?

And it was, this isn’t a homework help class period. Like we can meet, I can come to your PLCs, we can talk about scaffolds for your core content classroom. [00:33:00] But I have a curriculum that I teach. I have four domains that I’m responsible for. I have a language journey that I’m responsible for, but for teachers who are put into a standalone ELD classroom or whatever model, pull out, push in, et cetera, and they don’t have a resource, they don’t have a curriculum that they’re expected to stick to, they don’t have a scope and sequence or a map to follow.

I think that those teachers don’t have a clear. Map of what they need to do, and then they do become like that homework help. So it, it feels very connected what you’re saying with teachers having the resources that they need in order to feel validated in their space as a professional and their responsibility and ownership of that language journey.

Marcelo Sousa: And Mandi, I’ll say this, I think that you bring up a great point because understanding the student and where they are is very important. That’s why I say go back to a language development plan. Because if you have a kid who speaks Spanish, there are so many countries that speak Spanish. One Spanish might be different than the other.

And I have a student [00:34:00] that grew up in Peru and he was in the mountains of Peru where he spoke the dialect of the native from Peru, which was a logo, graphic language. So I think we sometimes. Have this mentality that Spanish is Spanish ilian Spanish is different than a Dominican Spanish or the Peruvian Spanish, right?

Knowing Portuguese from Portuguese, from Portuguese, from Brazil. And I think that a lot of teachers need that guidance because if you are looking at the wida, the descriptors, if you have a level through a two student and if they can master those at a level two in that literacy block, that’s an A for that student.

If you can master that, because we’re working and differentiating back to those language descriptors. And that’s why I go back to understanding your student, what level language that they’re in and how do we build on that? Because if I’m teaching Rome and Juliet, for example, if I have a new arrival of a slice student who we’re still working on letter sounds, we’re gonna go with [00:35:00] visuals.

Starting to build letters with words. With sentences, and we’re understanding just simple things about families and caplets and things like that. And I had a great session with the student where he was able to recite all of Roman Juliet think critically, but couldn’t read yet. Yet. Right. 

Mandi Morris: The power of yet.

Yeah, I love that. The power of yet, so the thing you said earlier, Marcelo about blood work, it’s like getting blood work done. That is such a great way of describing it. I just had blood work done recently for the first time in a really long time, and I was low in vitamin D and I live in Florida. I was like, wait a second.

So eat more vegetables I guess. But blood work, it can show things that we didn’t see there on the surface. That’s one of those things where it’s, but I live in Florida, I’m surrounded by sun. What are the things that are revealed for our students? It, when you do the blood work, right? When you’ve got your benchmark assessments, you have your formative, you have your progress monitoring, you have the data that you need.

Steve, I’d love to hear your [00:36:00] perspective around data and identification, because we know that is a tension between that. When do I identify a student? How long do I wait? What kind of data should I be collecting from the beginning? What are your thoughts? What advice do you give? 

Steve Gill: As I’m writing the fourth edition, I’m trying to simplify a few things.

One of the things I’ve taught for years is that depending on what state you’re in, you might have 13 different disability categories, but most of them there is no disproportionality. If a student’s blind, they admit the language they speak is secondary to the blindness. The problems are all, for the most part in specific learning, disability, speech, and language impairment and developmental delay.

So what I want a district to do is one of their first things is to understand their own data. So understand who you’re qualifying and at what rates. Because if you’re looking at a child that’s from a group that virtually never gets qualified for special education. That child is sticking out from their group [00:37:00] and therefore you might have some traction.

Whereas if you’re looking at a child that you have significant disproportionality in that language group, then you probably have the systems level failure. So the second thing I have districts do is look at your data, your long-term language learners by language, what is it showing? How does it relate to this child?

How are your kids doing on the state reading or English language? Not that, not the language acquisition, but the English portion versus the math, and how are they doing by building in your district, how is your individual building doing and looking at all these different things of data. ’cause I’m trying to see, number one is do we have a kid who sticks out in a system that’s doing really well with language learners indicating it might be student specific problem.

Or is a district or a building that is doing very poorly with language learners and [00:38:00] therefore it’s really hard then to see this child sticks out. The second layer to that is then comparing that individual child to other children within their, so same building on rate of language acquisition, English language acquisition.

I am hoping that people are doing interventions. If you have a child who’s struggling, you should be doing interventions. Okay. It’s probably not the only language learner who’s struggling. So how is that language learner doing on interventions compared to others? So I have the big system and then I have within that individual group in that building to try and compare them because that’s what gets you to telling me, no, this child really is performing differently than other language learners.

Then I need to know things about the child’s background too. But I, from a data standpoint. Is it a district that or an individual building that’s successful? Yes or no? Is it a child who [00:39:00] truly is performing differently than their peers? 

Mandi Morris: Steve, at any point do you recommend comparing multilingual learners to monolingual learners?

So where do you do that Cross peer analysis? Is that part of the equation? 

Steve Gill: Are you taking, talking about monolingual in their own language or in English? 

Mandi Morris: English monolingual peers. 

Steve Gill: There’s almost no peer comparisons to monolingual English speakers that are meaningful. So one of the things a lot of states have gone to using RTI to qualify under specific learning disability, and I asked them, do you guys have normative data on what is.

Or oral reading fluency for language learners in that language. Nope, we don’t have that. So you’re comparing it to an English learner, Orff. And I said, do you know that the actual reading process, that the cognitive [00:40:00] process, what occurs in your brain to read is totally different between your native language and the language you’re learning?

Almost none of the people know that. And then there’s only one study I’ve found in the entire world that actually looked at what I’m talking about by language acquisition level to show that there is significant differences. The last piece of data along that is if you look at kids who have passed their state language acquisition test, they still perform uh, 18 percentage points below native English speakers.

And that’s the kids who passed. Because I can tell you, for me, I. I took the subtest in the Batia probably 10 or 15 times trying to max it out in reading comprehension in Spanish. I understood every single sentence. I knew exactly what it was talking about, but being able to get the right answer took me years, and I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the daily system, my Spanish is at [00:41:00] the daily level, C two.

Even with that, I still, because it’s not my language doing that specific task, I perform differently. 

Mandi Morris: I wanna go back to the layers that you talked about earlier. So just unpacking those a little bit more. What you were saying is that if you’ve got a school district where out of a hundred percent of their multilingual learners.

40% of them are dually identified, versus if you have a hundred percent of your multilingual learners and 3% are dual identified, what would you define as a normal percentage or a healthy, you talked about a healthy multilingual program identification process versus an unhealthy, what should that ratio look like when school districts are gonna listen to this and they’re gonna pull their data and they’re gonna figure out their percentage?

How do they know we’ve got a problem or we’re on the right track? 

Steve Gill: So the national average qualification for special education varies between about 12 and 14% for all [00:42:00] children, and that is non desegregated. So it has our language learners in it. If you pull the language learners out, it would actually probably go down one to two percentage points, even though it’s a massive data sample.

My data from over 2000 districts shows that we’re qualifying language learners. About 48% more likely. So if a district was at 12%, they’re gonna be at 18 or 19% for their language learners. My first step with every district I work with is telling them, I want you to be on the positive side of average. So if you’re at 12 to 14% for everyone and you’re 18 to 19% for language learners, you’re at least on the positive side probably.

But then how do we get better? Because there’s absolutely no reason that we have a difference in qualification rate between language learners and English speakers, because there’s nothing about speaking Portuguese or Spanish or German that increases your likelihood that you’re [00:43:00] gonna have a disability.

Mandi Morris: Marcelo, I’d love to get your take on this because I’m very passionate about dually identified students. This was work that I was very fortunate to be able to be involved in when I was able to be in a district position and love this conversation. But I do know that there are teachers listening who were saying this, I’m just telling you that I’m in the classroom and this is really hard.

I need more support, I need more answers. This is some admin’s job to figure out and to do. And I think some of that feeling that sentiment isn’t wrong, because I think what teachers are sometimes feeling is a system that’s broken or not, maybe even in place at the district level to be responsible for pulling the data, for segregating the data, for unpacking the data.

Marcelo, I wonder, in your role, how do you see this? Who’s responsibility is what part and piece and how do we work together as a team for success? 

Marcelo Sousa: Yeah. I was just in a district in northern [00:44:00] Connecticut and they’re, I’m helping them put all this together and I just did a training up there. I think it really starts at the top.

I think if you have a district goal as being supreme. Where every school is looking at those goal, and then that trickles down into the literacy specialist classroom teachers. If you are gonna put language objectives, content objectives, and that’s a goal for the district, you are already two steps ahead.

And I like what Steve said before these 16 points in this matrix, those are just good practice, right? Teachers already do things like that. I’m gonna compare the students to two other students, right? We do that normally, right? If we’re looking at RTI, we’re looking at data. Oh, if I just know that it’s five to seven years to acquire a language, and I’m looking at little Johnny here, I’m starting to have that mentality in my training to start to think in different ways and having that mentality.

I think you’ll start to have a [00:45:00] movement in your district that, ’cause if more people are talking, more people are analyzing. And my next goal would be to go into the SRBI meeting. Like they’ll have teachers come in every block during the day. I’ll start with kindergarten, go all the way up to sixth grade, let’s say in elementary school or fifth grade.

And I will have that conversation with every single teacher. So it’s like having A-S-R-B-I day. We would have an EL day and SRBI or just an EL day. So the assistant superintendent comes up to me, she goes, Marcello, that’s a great idea. And I said, how about we start as goals, the district goals, right? We start there.

Then I work my way into every school and start having that conversation with teachers and the conversations that I’ve been having was, I did a whole, I did a whole lesson with them in Portuguese. Without any modifications. And I went lightning fast, right? And then I redid that. I got their reaction.

[00:46:00] And then I redid the lesson with all modifications and we went through the psyop checklist. And what teachers got from that was so much because I let them tell me what we should be doing in the classroom and how, and they got to the end finish line. So you’d be amazed at how we can shift our mindset to have teachers think like an EL student and have that empathy for them real quick.

And then you start making these little changes. Well, first of all, know what level your student is in, right? And then how do we start modifying a lesson? And that’s what I do. I have them as part of my training, have them bring a lesson. I start helping them modify and giving them models what it should look like.

Right now. I got, the thing about my district that I’m in now is I got to co-teach sixth grade all the way up to 12th grade in the last three years. So my assistant superintendent over there, she’s like, Marcella, do it. So I got to go into class when I got to collect a lot [00:47:00] and I got to understand because I did elementary for 13 years and then now to be at the middle and high school and to get that type of training, how do you do the Great Gatsby in all levels of language acquisition and just how do you approach that?

Shakespeare is very interesting. We’re doing a Macbeth right now, but you’d be amazed like how much I’m just having so much fun with it. So that’s my approach to a district and how I would tackle it. So good. Steve, 

Steve Gill: so one quick thing. About two, three weeks ago, I was doing a training and I did the, just a quick lesson in German, just.

Like he was talking about, and it’s fun to watch the grownups because I didn’t do it twice. I just did it once to show them that I can do this in German with you. And they were really excited and curious and as well, and they were learning the words and then they started asking me questions and that was just three to five minutes.

And it gets [00:48:00] people understanding what a profound difference it makes to use just a handful of techniques even. But the other thing, Marcello had said that five to seven years, I am shifting that. That’s one of my 16 items. I’m shifting it to true false in this, the version four. And the reason why is that close to 100% of all language learners are qualified prior to five years.

So our research shows us that it takes five to seven years to be competitive. And that if you look at what Cummings or Collier and Thomas said, that’s with good programs. With just anything that’s good programs. Not all programs are good or successful, whatever, however you wanna word that so that people don’t get their feelings hurt.

But we’re qualifying close to 100% of the kids under that. So I’m just gonna make it a yes no. And then tell people below. If you answered yes to this is where the problem is to get that brain flow. 

Mandi Morris: And I’ve been [00:49:00] hearing in recent years, seven to nine. So people, they say now it’s seven to nine, I’m not exactly sure who they is, the experts.

I think in some spaces there’s even a shift in that the language journey is even longer. And this work that you both are doing is so exciting, so inspirational. I, this conversation has been incredible. Today I wanna go into some lightning round questions, but I also wanna know if people want to connect with you more, learn more from you.

Where should people find you? 

Marcelo Sousa: Actually they can go to my website, the boy from brazil.org. They can send me info at the boy from brazil.org as well. And they can get in touch with me. They can see all the workshops that I’ve been, that I offer and also what I have been doing. They can just go through on my website and 

Steve Gill: and 

Marcelo Sousa: go from there.

Mandi Morris: Wonderful. And Steve, when is the fourth edition coming out? 

Steve Gill: I would say in the fall, I’m not a hundred percent [00:50:00] sure. I’m about 80% of the way through my edit pass and then I have to reconstruct things ’cause I’m making a pretty significant shift. It’s not that the third edition shouldn’t be used, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to get people a little bit more efficient and also at the same time focused in on how is your system working for children in general and how does this child, I.

Present within that system compared to their like peers. So that’ll take a little bit of time. And I do have a website where people can contact me, but on my upcoming trainings, if there are openings, I always put that in the upcoming trainings because the vast majority of the times that I do a training, the group who’s sponsoring it doesn’t open it up to guests.

Mandi Morris: Okay. Good to know. I’ve gotta ask Marcelo, we’ll start with you. What is a piece of advice that you [00:51:00] would give to a new teacher? So thinking back like that manic of the first one or two years, and maybe it’s an ML teacher, maybe it’s a content teacher, grade level teacher, what is a piece of advice that you would give essentially the younger version of you coming in fresh into the classroom?

Marcelo Sousa: Just have a positive mindset. Either you are gonna hit a lot of roadblocks. Education, educating a student today, there’s so many elements, it’s so vast. And first thing, get to know your student. Be open to positive even when things come at you. And if you keep a positive mindset, find one good mentor in your teach in your first year, you’re good to go.

I think those are some really good coins that I would say. And perseverance. Perseverance. I’ve, my first year teaching was tough. I taught in Wyndham, Connecticut at a bilingual school and I was learning a lot, but I found one teacher who held onto me a little bit, [00:52:00] so that was good. I never gave up. Just all in.

Mandi Morris: Steve, what about you? 

Steve Gill: So what I’d really like people to do is to start simple and do something. Because a lot of what I see is people are actually doing nothing because they feel paralyzed, do something. Then once you start having some success, you’ll be more motivated to do more stuff. If you wanna go hardcore, you want to go in and dive in, learn a new language, even if you already are bilingual because you grew up bilingual.

Try a new language because when you try and learn a new language to the point where you actually can function in it, you learn so much more about language and about the journey. 

Mandi Morris: Steve, we’ll start with you on the second one, so Marcelo can have the last as at it. What is one practice that you would like to see implemented more often?

Steve Gill: I think the most important thing that we need to do is [00:53:00] get children reading, whether it’s in their native language, whether it’s in English, whether it’s in Bo, and reading things, whether they’re being successful. Because I think that reading the act of reading is profoundly powerful on language development and it goes everywhere with you.

Mandi Morris: Marcello, what about you? What is an ex, what is a practice that you’d like to see more of? 

Marcelo Sousa: I would like us to understand the student a lot more. I think if we just ask the student what they like, I like what Steve told me about this kid who loved vacuum cleaners and he said the story, I did a whole thing with vacuum cleaners and I had him tell me about vacuum cleaners and all these informational texts, and he was more involved in that than I have a fifth grader who loves like music, right?

So I do a lot of things with ESL videos, ESL songs, and he just blossoms when I come to pick him up. So student interest, why not? Why not go there and you’ll go a long way. 

Mandi Morris: That’s good [00:54:00] advice. Go ahead Steve. 

Steve Gill: That’s one of the things that absolutely drives me crazy is how we always want to pick the books for kids.

Instead of go to the librarian and find out the book that all the kids are fighting over the one you had to buy extra copies of. Because so many kids are fighting over it. It’s what they want to do. And like he had said the vacuum cleaner thing, it was a little boy with autism who wouldn’t do any work, but he loved vacuum cleaners.

And when we let him read, write, and do math about vacuum cleaners, he worked nonstop. Let ’em do what they’d like. It’s the same activity. Cognitively, 

Mandi Morris: man, it’s student choice, right? Allowing creativity and space in your classroom for student choice to engage students. I think teachers depends on where you are in the state and a lot of different variables, but there are definitely times when teachers feel so much pressure.

You have to be on page 49 on day 13, and if you are not on page 49, I. It feels so punitive to follow that [00:55:00] map that’s given from your school district. And when you feel that pressure as a teacher, you often don’t feel the creativity or space for students to have autonomy to create space for student choice.

And this is such a great reminder of the teacher advocating for herself and himself, for their classroom to, to be able to have the opportunity for student choice. 

Steve Gill: Yeah. If you, if your students are doing well on the state test, they will leave you alone and they won’t worry about what page you’re on, what day.

If your students are doing poorly on the state test, they will want you on a certain page, on a certain day. 

Mandi Morris: Steve, that is such great advice. Okay? So do the right things for your students at the right time. Get your blood work done for your students. Have the data that you need for your individualized plans so that you can create a space where students want to come and learn and thrive, and then they’ll leave you alone.

Well, 

Marcelo Sousa: and so simple. 

Mandi Morris: What a wonderful conversation. I am so thankful that you took the time to be here with us [00:56:00] today, and I, I hope that we can connect again maybe when your next book comes out, Steve, that’d be a great time to reconnect and get some updates. This has been so much [00:57:00] [00:58:00] [00:59:00] [01:00:00] [01:01:00] [01:02:00] [01:03:00] [01:04:00] [01:05:00] [01:06:00] fun.