Shawn Ford: Empowering Future TESOL Educators

Shawn Ford: [00:00:00] We really need to help teachers not only be able to identify the linguistic issues that the student is having, but how that can be exploited to help them explain the content, demonstrate their content learning, meet the objectives, right? That’s the goal, meet the objectives, but really it’s about developing that language and developing them.

The knowledge and putting those together to be able to share that with somebody. So somebody can read it and say, okay, yes, I understand this. You’re getting the concept. Therefore you’re reaching the objective. 

Justin Hewett: Hey everybody. Welcome to the ML chat podcast. My name is Justin Hewett. I’m your host today.

We’re so glad you’re here. I’ve got my co host here. Mandi Morris. And Mandi and I just had the best conversation with Shawn Ford. Shawn’s a little different of a guest than we typically have had here on the ML Chat podcast. Shawn is an [00:01:00] educator of educators and such a great opportunity to talk about the teachers, the training that our teachers are getting as before they go out into our schools to work with our multilingual students.

Mandi, takeaway from today? 

Mandi Morris: I really appreciated hearing Shawn’s perspective training educators, and he was very thoughtful about application. It was so purposeful in his program that students are applying what they’re learning and having an opportunity to really get a feel for, he called it the identity of being an educator early on.

I thought that was a really unique perspective that they have in their program. 

Justin Hewett: Yeah, I love that too. I just love a lot of times when I’ve spoken with professors in the past, I feel like a lot of the conversation is very ideological, and there’s not a lot of practicality and stuff that teachers can take and go use in their classroom that day and right away.

And I felt like in our conversation, [00:02:00] everything was practical, like it was Very pragmatic. He’s really focused on providing a process. And he talks about a framework that he called the content based language development framework that I think is really helpful as a tool to give teachers as they’re going into the classroom, because the work of working with our multilingual students is such a process.

It’s a journey. It’s not like where you have these huge gains in one day or whatever it might be, like you’re in it for the long haul and it is a journey. We’re so glad you’re here. We hope you really enjoy this conversation with Shawn Ford. Shawn Ford is a proud alumnus of Kapi’olani Community College in Hawaii.

After earning his master’s in ESL from University of Hawaii, Manoa. He returned to Kapi’olani to teach in the ESOL program. Shawn went on to develop and now leads the second language teaching program. It’s the only one of its kind at a U. S. community college. The second language teaching program partners with the University of Hawaii Manoa [00:03:00] to train future TESOL educators and collaborates with the Hawaii Department of Education to provide professional development for current TESOL teachers.

Shawn, we are thrilled to have you on the ML chat podcast. Welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And so, which island are you working off of right now then? Do you live on Oahu? 

Shawn Ford: Yes, I do. I’m in East Oahu. That’s our main island. I do travel occasionally to the other 

Justin Hewett: main islands, but Oahu is my home.

Somebody ought to be living in paradise and it might as well be you. I figured that out a long time ago. I love it. I love it. We’re thrilled to have you here. We are really excited to get your insight, your perspective on the work of serving our multilingual students, especially knowing that you are training a lot of the TESOL teachers that are entering into the, school districts out there in Hawaii and throughout the nation to serve our multilingual students.

But [00:04:00] Shawn, I want to go back to how you getting into education and just, it’s a fun place to start because everybody’s journey. It’s a little bit different in what leads them into it. What drew you into education? How did you get started here? 

Shawn Ford: Thanks for that question. I was a non traditional student when I returned back to college in my mid twenties.

And at that time, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just wanted to go to college. I had this thing in the back of my head that always said, you need to get a college education. make something of yourself. I think that was my family upbringing. So when I did go to college, I took a few courses that were just of interest to me.

Some of them being religion and history. I was very much interested in history at that time. Political science, those kinds of courses. And pretty quickly on, I thought, Oh, I might become a history teacher. And I had never thought about being a teacher ever. But part of that [00:05:00] pathway was having mentor teachers in the community college, refer me to, to be a tutor.

Now, so I got a campus job as a tutor. I quickly realized I like helping people. I started putting things together. Okay. I’m like history. I like. like helping people, maybe I’ll be a history teacher. And I had a really important conversation one day after class. I had taken several history classes with this one really great professor.

And she stopped me after class and said, Shawn, what do you want to be a history teacher for? Why do you want to do this? And I said, We need a job and I want to be a teacher. And I think history is great. And she said, you’re young, you’re starting a family. I don’t think you’re going to make a lot of money doing this.

So you should find something else that you could teach that would have a better job option for you. And right at that same time, I was referred by my tutor coordinator on [00:06:00] campus to tutor in an ESL program that was just starting up on our campus. It was just being reformed, and I applied and I got that job, and really quickly I realized, okay, I’d never heard of it before, I’d never thought about it before, but tutoring just that one semester got me hooked.

Okay, Language Acquisition. This is interesting. Wow. I’m helping these immigrant kids develop language and helping them be more successful in their college courses. And the one thing led to another, I got referrals, I got more campus jobs. And eventually I found myself, wow, I’m an ESL teacher now. My route was not planned at all.

It fell into my lap, but I’m so grateful of having these mentors. in the community college. I’m so confident that the community college is that kind of space that gives students this opportunity to meet really great [00:07:00] professors. Who have the time because their class sizes are smaller, and they really are devoted to the craft of teaching not just research, and that really set me on the pathway, okay, I think I want to be a DSL teacher in the community college, that, that was an early on decision.

Justin Hewett: I love that story. That is amazing. That is so fun to hear. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard quite such a great definition of serendipity for choosing a career as that one, right? In the pursuit of something, something unexpected and better comes along, and it sounds like it’s been a really good ride ever since.

I want to know though, when you were doing that tutoring and able to help these immigrant students do better in their classes, You said that you got hooked. Why did you get hooked? What was it that just grabbed you that you just could not get away? 

Shawn Ford: I think really early on as a tutor, both in the tutoring center, and then as a tutor in a [00:08:00] classroom, I really got hooked on seeing students.

Aha moments. I saw that in every educator talks about that, right? Do you want to create those aha moments? And I saw that when I would work with a student on their paper, I was mainly a writing tutor for ESL students at the college and then in the classroom, it was an integrated skills. Classroom so I got to see not only writing but reading and the speaking and listening all everything connected But it was those moments that I saw a student go.

Ah Okay, I get it. I understand this form now this phrase always How the tense works or oh, yeah pronouns I always have problems with these. Okay. That’s a way to remember that. So those kinds of aha moments really got me hooked. And to me, I [00:09:00] think that’s, what’s always kept me hooked as a teacher. When I see somebody that I’m putting my energy into helping get it and acknowledge that, right.

Ah, to do this now, because that’s the goal, right? Our goal is. Independence. One of my mentors told me years ago, the job is of an ESL teacher. Is to work themselves out of a job. Ideally we develop our students so they don’t need us anymore. That’s right. That’s the irony of our field. 

Mandi Morris: So Shawn, you found yourself in this career and then tell us from there, how has it developed and a little bit about the work that you’re doing now?

Shawn Ford: Yeah. As I was developing myself as a lecturer and then a tenure track professor in the community college. Right when I started my tenure track, I was asked by our chancellor at the time to help with a project that the college was working on. The college had gotten [00:10:00] a very large grant part of the NCLB, No Child Left Behind funding.

And College, when it first put in its application, had said that it would create programs to help educational paraprofessionals in special ed and in ESL get two year degrees, which at that time was a requirement of NCLB. All paraeducators had to have a two year college degree. In order to be a highly qualified para educator and very quickly, our college got our special education program going, they had a faculty member, a tenured faculty member who is positioned to do that and several years later, then they were doing their reporting.

And they were reporting that we haven’t gotten their ESL TESOL program up and running, the college was told by the kids, you’ve got to do this. They asked me if I would be willing to work on this [00:11:00] project. And with my mentor in the ESL program, he was a coordinator at the time, we both started mapping out coursework based on the TESOL standards at the time, based on best practices that we both knew through going through the ESL program at UH Mānoa.

We mapped out our program, put it through our curriculum committee. And it became the SLT program. That was the beginning of this program that we created. At that time, we were the only community college that has this sort of program. 15, 20 years later, we’re still the only program that we’re aware of.

Anywhere in the United States, it has a teacher training tracks for ESL educators at the community college level. That program got started. We created our articulation agreements with the university. And early on, we thought that we needed to pull the [00:12:00] DOE into this as well. This can’t just be a university.

Oftentimes the universities and higher educators create classes and programs that are their interest and are maybe good for publications and things like that, but don’t really fit in the real world. So we were very cognizant of this in the beginning. So we pretty quickly pulled in the DOE and made sure that our courses would align to DOE needs.

And that then opened the door for us to start offering courses or offering training directly to the DOE as well. We had two populations of students at that point. We had our regular Kapi’olani students who wanted to become teachers. We call them pre service students, pre service educators. And then we also have this little sidetrack of.

[00:13:00] In service teachers who needed either upskilling or working with DSL students or who wanted a TESOL license, right? So those two populations led me to where I am now. 

Mandi Morris: Since No Child Left Behind, I think there’s been a Stronger movement or push exactly what you were talking about that current teachers get their certification in ESOL.

And every state has its own requirements around whether that’s bonus and pay or it’s required in order to hold a position. I wonder what has your experience been like? I feel like a lot of teachers do look to community college to gather those credits to earn that additional certification. What does that look like in Hawaii and with your student population?

Shawn Ford: What we’ve been able to manipulate our program into and work with the DOE to offer courses directly to teachers within the DOE, mainly at this point, it [00:14:00] is to satisfy what Hawaii calls the sheltered instruction qualification requirement, the SIQ requirement. And that is a state mandate. That all educators in the Hawaii public DOE system have six credits, two college courses of ESL related, TESOL related coursework so they can serve their students, their multilegal students.

This is not necessarily to train the EL program coordinators in the schools and the teachers in those schools. It’s for everyone. Everyone. Science teachers. Math teachers, English language arts teachers, librarians, counselors, everyone has to have this six credit requirement. And that has become something that we’ve been doing more frequently, especially since the pandemic.

There are political reasons that maybe I won’t [00:15:00] get too deep into, but there has been a push by the DOE. to make sure that every educator in the state has these credits. We are doing now with our DOE population, we’re helping them get their six credits, but then we also have a small population of teachers who do want to become TESOL educators.

Occasionally, you’ll have an elementary teacher who is ready to do something different, and they want to, instead of being a classroom teacher at the third grade level, or something they want to move into an EL role. It is a state requirement that all EL coordinators and EL teachers have met the requirements of TESOL licensure, either through coursework or through passing the TESOL practice, right?

That is one option. If a teacher is licensed and they have been teaching for a number of years. I think it’s three years. So there, there’s a set of requirements. Then they can take the TESOLP [00:16:00] praxis. We don’t really train teachers to help pass the praxis. We’re more interested in actual coursework. I’m a believer that the praxis is just you’re meeting the requirement, but you’re not necessarily developing all the skills that you would develop.

Justin Hewett: By doing the coursework, yeah, I’m a big fan of saying something to the effect of you build capacity by doing the work and that’s what I’m hearing here is going through and doing that coursework, you’re going to build a capacity that the assessment to the certifications can be a nice and easy byproduct.

Shawn Ford: Yes, we’ve been asked for years to provide like TESOL praxis workshops, and we’ve resisted that. And we basically just said, the DOE, you can do that to your own educators, if that’s something you’re interested in. We’re not interested in that. We’re interested in them doing the work doing the collaboration with each other, right?

That is something that is underrated by many, many people. Administrators is the ability for teachers to get together in a [00:17:00] class, in a workshop and collaborate with each other, share experience, share stories about working with students. Teachers find across the grade levels, you’ll have a high school chemistry teacher working with a kindergarten grade level teacher.

And they’re talking about language development and they realize, wow, we have a lot more in common than I thought we did. And I’m not exaggerating there, right? Teachers oftentimes don’t. I think that they have anything in common with their colleagues and other disciplines, much other grade levels, but get them in the room, get them talking about ELs and how to work with them.

And they realize, wow. Okay. Yeah. 

Justin Hewett: We do have a lot in common after all. I love that. I think that’s fantastic. It’s amazing. How, when we start sharing our stories, how much we realize. We have in common and how much shared experiences we have. And I love that. And I think that’s an important reason as to why we need our English learners, our multilingual learners to tell their stories so that teachers and the students can relate with each other as well.

Shawn, I’m thinking [00:18:00] about the work that you do and just how paramount it is to impacting so many students throughout the islands, but also in a number of other places in the world. And I imagine that’s not lost on you, that the work that you’re doing is impacting. A lot of students. And so there’s some practices that we’ve retired that we used to do back in the day that were widely taught as best practice.

And now we look at that and we’re like, Oh my gosh, how did we, what were we thinking? How do you think about curating the content that you’re teaching to teachers now to make sure that what you’re teaching, will do no harm, right? Will hopefully not only not do harm, but also will really accelerate language growth.

Build connections for English learners so they can really grow and learn the language and become what Mary, we had a podcast guest on recently and she said, I’m a part of a 1. 5 generation because what she said is she said she was Mexican American and she’s not necessarily part of the second generation [00:19:00] or the first generation.

She’s in the middle there and there’s a big part of integrating there and becoming a part of that. And I just would love your thoughts on how you’re curating that to build Those best practices for those teachers that you’re going to send out into the world. 

Shawn Ford: It’s interesting that you mentioned the G1.5. I’m not G1.5, but in my graduate coursework, and then immediately when I was hired by Kampiālani, I was doing a lot of research and a lot of work with G1. 5 students. Actually, that’s what brought me back to the G1. 5 research that the college had been doing in conjunction with the University of Hawaii, looking at our local immigrant population that is in this middle space.

We have classical ideas about how to educate our international students. For example, we know an EFL student, right, is, has certain characteristics. They’re, more likely to, uh, [00:20:00] study grammar, they’ve been educated through a grammar translation approach. We, at that time in the early 2000s, had a good idea about how to work with international students.

We exploit that knowledge of grammar and then get them to apply it, right? Work, that was a lot of our workload was getting them to apply the knowledge that they had acquired through textbooks. Then we, on the opposite end, we had our immigrant students who were Struggling with just day to day survival and me basic English.

And we had a pretty good idea about how to work with those students, but it was the immigrants who had immigrated when they were young and were occupying kind of two spaces, right? They were. but they were also Chinese. They spoke English, but they also spoke Mandarin. They were in this middle space. And oftentimes they were not fully fluent in either Mandarin or English, right?

They had huge gaps in their learning of language for [00:21:00] various reasons that we know now about the characteristics of 1. 5 students. Our program and my own. Current pedagogy was really shaped by that, that understanding of these different groups of students. And this G1. 5 population was very instrumental for us to create our second language teaching program.

It could be Alani and more importantly, to create the framework that we use to educate teachers. And then the framework that we use Not only in our own college but the framework that we use for teaching DOE educators we call it the content based language development framework. And that framework basically tells us that there are three crucial stages of language development.

In anything that we do with the student, whether it’s an activity, whether it’s an assignment, whether it’s a lesson plan, whether it’s an entire semester or unit of time [00:22:00] with them, you have the input phase where the students need to be able to process the input. They need opportunities to process input.

They need opportunities. In a purpose for that input, and then they need an extended time where they work with content that is rich in language where they can analyze forms as they’re developing content knowledge, right? That gets some purpose. And then we have the formative assessment that is ongoing and continuing.

To help them move to the next stage, right? The next step of their language development. So simply, it’s not so simple though, beginning, middle, and ending, right? Anytime we’re working with a student, we have these three crucial phasers where we have to help them with the input. We have to help them develop the linguistic and content knowledge, and then we have to give them the opportunities to get feedback and assess them.

And that’s a continuous cycle. It just continues. I [00:23:00] am a very big fan of this approach. It’s very intuitive. DOE educators can look at this framework and say, okay, I can do this. I know strategies for helping with input. I know strategies for helping develop content. I know how to get forward with the assessment.

But putting it in the framework of an EL that’s their challenge. That’s really the space that I try to work with. 

Mandi Morris: I love the cycle that you talked about. And I still have teachers, whether content teachers or an ELD specialist, ML teacher, whatever the phrase is used in different States. Could I connect well with this in the classroom myself?

What the part that I would often get stuck with because I didn’t have tools or resources that I needed is the productive language piece for the formative assessment and your instruction can’t be informed if you don’t have those data points or. Telling you where to go longer, where to cut short because they’ve got it, where to grow the vocabulary that’s missing, where there were [00:24:00] opportunities to connect background knowledge or schema.

I wonder for me, something that made me fall in love with Flashlight from the very beginning, because as an ML specialist was like, yes, this is what I’ve been building on my own. And this platform is, does an incredible job with productive language, formative assessment. I wonder when you’re training teachers, you’ve got that, High school chemistry teacher you were talking about in the kindergarten teacher, and they’re collaborating together, which I love.

I love that visual. And they’re grappling with language instruction and language learning. What is it that you find that they’re saying? This is the piece that I’m stuck as a teacher, as an educator, when you’re talking about your process of input, extended time, formative assessment, what feedback are you getting where people get stuck?

Shawn Ford: Most non EL teachers, the most concern is their understanding of language, them being able to tease out the pieces of language that are not related necessarily to their content, right? [00:25:00] Many gen ed teachers, many middle and high school content teachers, they’re so focused on their content that they lose track of the language and they’re pretty good at assessing content, but they are not.

So confident at assessing language vocabulary, I find teachers to be a little more confident, but it’s the unexpected grammatical forms, the unexpected. And by unexpected, I mean that many non EL teachers, they don’t see general patterns that their students are giving them. All the time, right? We, as an EL educator, can start noticing certain patterns.

Japanese students, they tend to do certain things with language that are unexpected and sometimes they cause confusion for the reader or for the educator. Why did you put it in this form? Why did you structure it like that? So, teachers don’t have that confidence that they [00:26:00] can look at language and understand, okay, what are the needs of the student here?

How can I explain to them, or how do we even know where to begin? How do I know that this is a tense issue here, or this is a pluralization issue? And I they may know the content really well and they can assess the content and they’ll say, Hey, I don’t really understand it, but that the student was able to say this, that.

If I’m explaining it well enough to you, that to me is where teachers have the most concern is how do I give my students feedback on the linguistic language components of this, and not only give them feedback on content, because that is something that I And the firm believer in these content teachers do need to be able to give different types of feedback, not only on grammar, but vocabulary, on use, on choices that they’re making with forms sometimes it might be pronunciation or hearing certain [00:27:00] sounds especially working with the East Asian population and the Pacific Island population that we work mainly with here in Hawaii.

Some teachers just don’t know where to begin with pronunciation kind of issues. 

Mandi Morris: It brings me back to your point before collaboration. And I love that, like coming full circle here, that’s where the power of language instructors working with content teachers. Is helping the content teachers unpack what are the forms and functions students need the structure to be able to meet the learning objective, the content objective.

So when students are working on opinion or argument, they, this is a sentence , they need to be able to form sentences that say, I believe this because, and the evidence says so. It’s having the language piece to be able to meet that learning objective, content objective. And I just really appreciate you calling that out.

Justin Hewett: And it just reminds me of where Flashlight 360 is helping in school districts around the nation now, and even throughout Hawaii, where [00:28:00] that’s what we’re able to do is provide a prompt that’s really aligned to different content standards and can fit really well within any classroom, depending on what they’re talking about, and give students a chance to show their teacher what they can do.

And then the, if you’re a content teacher, you can go talk to your ELD specialist or whatever it might be and say, Hey, listen to this student. Let’s, how do I incorporate this into my classroom? What can I do right now? We can actually sit with that. Listen to the student two or three or four times if we need to better understand what it is that they need next.

And so I just, I, what you shared really resonates with me. Cause you know, that’s the work that we’re really passionate and really invested in. 

Shawn Ford: I think that’s important, connected to what you both said, is the notion of sentence frames. Most teachers know what that means. When I bring that up in class, every teacher goes, Oh yeah, sentence frames.

I know what that is. But, how do you use a sentence [00:29:00] frame? What does a sentence frame really mean linguistically for the EL, right? That’s the piece that’s missing oftentimes with our content teachers, right? They understand that this is an important tool that they can use. But how do you use it and why am I using it?

That just gets me. I really am not a fan of the top 10 strategies, workshops, right? You go to a workshop, you learn this strategy, but you don’t have enough time in that workshop space to dig into the why. And the real how you’re just introduced to a tool. Here’s this tool. We really need to help teachers not only be able to identify the linguistic issues that the student is having, but how that can be exploited to help them explain the content, demonstrate their content learning, meet the objectives.

Right. That’s the goal, meet the objectives, but really it’s about. [00:30:00] Developing that language and developing the knowledge and putting those together to be able to share that with somebody so somebody can read it and say, Okay, yes, I understand this. You’re getting the concept. Therefore, you’re reaching the objective.

There are many things I try to point these out as I go through my own classes and my own workshops to teachers because I do know that they know what a sentence frame is. They know what visuals are. It’s important to show visuals. Okay. But why and how, it’s not just the visual that you’re showing, but you’re connecting that to language.

And I’m not exactly sure, but I would think a program like Flashlight. It’s very rich in visuals, but it’s also connecting that visual to the language and the content, right? The concept is being developed through the visual. And that’s the thing that I think many teachers need to get. They need to get the how and the why of the strategy.

Mandi Morris: [00:31:00] I had a professor when I was doing my master’s at University of Central Florida. He was Dr. Fulce. He was a mentor to me and incredible in the world of Yale education. And we had lived in South Korea teaching and then came back to Florida to finish her master’s. It was a hybrid program. And our plan was to go directly overseas again.

And he said, you’ve got to go to the public schools. Get some K 12 experience under your belt. I’d been teaching for a few years at that point, but he said, you’ve got to take your theory and you need to apply it and live with it in public schools. You’re going to have totally different students than your international students.

And then you’re going to be better prepared to go overseas again. And we took his advice. We did exactly that. And I thought a lot over the years about that. You brought it up earlier, the theory versus application academic versus K 12. And we’ve heard from people. On this podcast and even people have come across our past and the work that we do.

Yeah, I took the classes that I checked the box [00:32:00] for the requirements, but then when it came to my classroom, I didn’t know how to apply any of that. It didn’t feel applicable. How are you addressing that in your program? Cause it sounds like something that’s close to your heart in the work that you do. 

Shawn Ford: I love that question and it is very important to me and my program.

Our introductory course, SLT 102, is language learning. And from the start, as a matter of fact, next week, my students will start tutoring. My students are teachers From the beginning of the program, I tried to get them to look at themselves as teachers. They are helping people to learn, which is essentially what a teacher is doing.

Helping the student to become independent, which is essentially what a teacher is doing. In our program, we have five core courses. And throughout every course, students are doing service [00:33:00] learning in an education context, either in our tutoring center on our campus or in a language classroom on campus.

Sometimes if a teacher, or if a student, not a teacher, but as a student, these are pre service teachers, if they have a connection already to the DOE, Then sometimes they’ll do their tutoring in an actual DOE school. This happens quite frequently with my immigrant students. They have had good experiences in an elementary school or in a middle school, and they want to go back to their alma mater and be a tutor for the school.

This has happened many times. So my point is, I believe that from the very beginning, we need to train our future educators to be educators. To look at themselves as educators, to own the responsibility of being an educator and just over the years. I found that is just something that [00:34:00] cannot be disputed within our program.

We provide such a rich experience. It’s a lot of work, but we balance that with not being too heavy on the theory. We’re an introductory program. I want to get students hooked on teaching, hooked on language development. So we do have a course textbook, a program textbook that we require students to read.

It’s very well written, very theoretical. It’s a textbook, but it’s written in a very teacher friendly, student friendly way, so you can apply it immediately. Chose this textbook specifically for that reason. I like to think that, I tell my students, our program is theory lite. We focus on application. So I will synthesize a theory to students, and then I want them to go try it out.

I want them to see it. I try to model it for them in my own classroom when I’m working with them. My students and then I want them to go try out the same things with their students as [00:35:00] they’re tutoring. And with DOE teachers, they already have their tutoring, right? They’re doing field service though.

So the DOE teachers are going through our classes and our programs. Again, they have the theory, but they’re not doing the academic tasks of literature reviews and doing their own research and looking up articles on the internet and sharing those with their classmates. All of that’s good for graduate school.

Save that for later. Now I just want to give you the basic concepts of language development and get you to try it out. And teachers also. Report regularly that they really appreciate that approach because they can take something that we do in class and immediately go apply it in their classroom, and then they’ll share later.

So our classroom is really exploiting that same framework that I shared with you earlier for language development, right? [00:36:00] Even in our teacher training program, I try to get them to grapple with the input. Have an extended period where they play with it, figure it out what it means, figure out how to explain it to others, and then their formal tasks through mainly collaborative activities.

I think that’s super important. So a lot of collaborative activities in our program help teachers and students to continue developing their ideas. I’m very much a product. I’m very much a process teacher. The product will come at the end if you’ve given enough time to the process and you revisited enough.

So yeah, process over product is another tenet of how I try to design 

Justin Hewett: the program. And I love that. And I think that honors the journey, right? And I think that’s especially appropriate for our multilingual learners anyways. And to be able to instill that into the teachers who are going to be working with our multilingual learners, I think is that important.

The reality is. [00:37:00] Each student is on a journey and it is about the process. We’ve got to fall in love with the process and not necessarily. Expect results right away. If we isolate this particular aspect of language, we might be able to increase it, or we might be able to grow it. But what is that doing for the whole student here, for the whole child, for the whole person, and how does that help them actually develop friends and be a part of the community?

If they’re just over in the corner working on this one specific piece of language, that’s not actually happening. So there was something that you said there that really resonated with me, where you said that your goal is to really help. The folks in your program, make sure that they’re approaching this with the identity of an educator and really trying to help them understand.

I feel like that’s a really important aspect and component of your approach. And I’d love for you to expand on that if you don’t mind, and just maybe talk a little bit about why you feel like that’s important, because I think we’re beginning to understand more and [00:38:00] more throughout. The nation throughout the world, how important identity is to anything and everything that we do and how much it permeates our daily decisions.

And so I’d love to have you maybe just expound on that if you don’t mind. 

Shawn Ford: Yeah, thank you. I’d be happy to. I can’t help but reflect on my own journey as an educator. I was, as I said, a non traditional student. I had no notion at all of becoming a teacher. I was not really interested in that idea when I first started my education journey, but it was through mentors helped me shape my identity to be a teacher and going through our tutor training program.

I was certified. College Reading and Learning Association. I think it’s C R L A certified. And that was very early on in my tutoring. That was instrumental to me. Within my first semester, I received the [00:39:00] certification. I went through training through the college, and that alone gave me this Confidence, a cheesy certificate that we all have gotten these certificates and you just file them away.

They become a part of your CV or whatnot, but that really planted the seed for me. And when I then observed how I was going through the BA program and then through my master’s program, this is a world renowned program, the SLS department, second language studies department at the University of Hawaii Mānoa, very well known throughout the world.

It produces great research, great thinkers, but it doesn’t produce a lot of DLE educators. Very few. And I wondered why, because I wanted to be a teacher and this program was training me to be a researcher. And I just observed this for many years going through this program. And I also was shocked to [00:40:00] realize before I graduated that.

In the College of Education, which is the main pathway for training DOE teachers in general throughout our state, you don’t even get into a classroom until your fourth year. At the university, you just work on your general education credits. And once you get to your 60 credits, then you can declare your major as education.

And I thought that they were, and I still think that they’re missing out on a major opportunity to work with these freshmen students to get them hooked on teaching. I think that it’s too late, and we have a major problem with teacher retention in this state. And part of the reason, I can point my finger at it, and even give examples if I were pressed, of teachers who go through the whole teacher training [00:41:00] program, and don’t have that real classroom experience.

But then when they do enter the classroom, they’re completely shocked at how the real world is in our daily classrooms. Oftentimes new teachers are placed in more remote locations, schools that may not have the resources that other schools in the city center might have. They are blown away with the demands of a teacher.

Part of the reason why they experience this is because The education program waited until the end of their program to start getting them in the classroom. Now, the College of Education in the last 20 years, since I was working on my graduate degree, has changed a bit. But still, they don’t provide opportunities for students to go into classrooms.

As a lower division student, you don’t start doing that until you’re upper division. That I think is a [00:42:00] big problem within our U. S. education system. I sometimes work with educators from Japan and Korea and in those universities. When a student enters the university, they’re declaring their major and they’re on a track to become a teacher within four years, including their license.

And they’re working in their first semester already. They’re working on theory and practical application. That’s how Korean and Japanese education programs are usually structured. We don’t structure them like that in the U. S. system. I had the opportunity at the community college to do something really radical and say, you know what, I’m going to I’m going to throw them in the classroom immediately.

And if you don’t want to be a teacher, you need to figure that out early. Don’t waste your time. Don’t waste your money, your family’s resources, our nation’s resources, or by training somebody to do something that they’re not prepared for. Right. I think I’m maybe [00:43:00] drifting away from your question a little bit, but that is to me, a major thing that we need to be doing.

We need to get teachers to start applying. immediately and get them to think that they are a teacher, that they own this, that they’re responsible and that they can make a difference. I think that’s really what motivates teachers anyway, right? And if the student knows early on, I’m a teacher, I can do this.

Then they’re going to be willing to stick with it. 

Justin Hewett: I think the goal is to give them the experience that you had, right? Ultimately you, we want to get them in a classroom with students where the rubber meets the road, so they can see what it’s like, they can touch it, feel it, smell it, see how this thing’s going to go and understand, is this really what I want to sign up for, or do I need to hurry and go switch my major?

And I think you’re exactly right. It reminds me a lot of. Where we’ve gotten away from it the last, I don’t know, a hundred years or something like that, 150 years. But for so many years, [00:44:00] people would apprentice, right, in the trade that they wanted to get into. And so you got in there, you were touching it, feeling it, you were doing all the dirty work right out the gate.

Which allowed you to understand if it was a work you wanted to do. If it was something that, resonated with you. Not everybody had the opportunity back then to be a deliberate or intentional with the work that they were going to do or that they were going to apprentice in. I think of Benjamin Franklin and some of his apprenticeship, and he ended up running away and getting to Philadelphia and finding a new apprentice or apprenticeship.

And anyways, I think there’s a lot of what you’re saying here that really resonates with me of let’s get people hands on as fast as possible so they can see if this really is, if it really resonates with them. Mandi, when you first got in the classroom, how did that impact you? Was that your first exposure getting in there?

What was that like for you as, as Shawn’s describing here? 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, I didn’t have a, an undergrad in, my BA was not in, elementary [00:45:00] education or K 12 education. My BA was in TESOL. So I knew I wanted to teach English language learners. And I saw the elementary ed teachers and I felt like they were just always doing bulletin boards.

I’m like, do they just take all these classes to build bulletin boards? Like I don’t, I’m not good at that. And my BA was a lot of theory, a lot of applied linguistics, language courses, and I absolutely loved it. And I had a teacher who was really a mentor of mine during my BA. I want it to do some teaching and it wasn’t actually built into our program so much like you’re talking about.

It’s like, you’d get your BA in TESOL and it was like, okay, good luck. I guess you’re going overseas. You’ll figure it out in some classroom somewhere. So he had this group of students that had come from South Korea. There were like maybe 10 or 12 students. And he said, I’ve got this group of students.

You’ve been really wanting to do something hands on. I just need somebody to have a class with them a couple of times a week. I’m like, yeah, I’ll [00:46:00] do it. Great. What do I do? We have a closet full of books. Just figure out what books you want to do. I’ll be your mentor teacher. Check in with me once a week and we’ll figure it out.

So I, I’ve got to be students. They’re college age students. They’re my same age and they don’t speak any English. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m like, okay. And I think we have to go on field trips, because I don’t know what to do in this classroom and it’s freaking me out. So I got my friends to help me carpool everybody.

And we went to see all these places in central Virginia. Several students ended up coming to Thanksgiving at my parents house. Anyway, it was, Such a cool experience, but I wasn’t prepared for my first year of teaching. That was a wild, weird, extreme tutoring experience, but I graduated college. I took a sixth grade teaching position because it’s what I was offered.

So I was an ELA science teacher. And for sixth graders, I had no idea what I was doing. And if it hadn’t been [00:47:00] for incredible colleagues who just held me up that entire school year and kept encouraging me and telling me you can do it. Stick with it. Don’t give up but it’s so much of what you were talking about Shawn just resonated a lot with me because I definitely had The version of the BA that you’re not recommending, where you don’t really know what you’re doing when you graduate.

Shawn Ford: Mandi, your experience is regular. It’s normal. I think many EL teachers have gone through that same process because that’s how universities structure their programs, right? They need to give us all the theory. And we spend so much time playing with the theory and talking about theory, but we don’t spend enough time applying it.

And it’s left up to students as they’re going through these programs to figure out how to apply it. Because I had been a tutor. In the ESOL program, it could be a money community [00:48:00] college. I did a classroom tutor. I had seen how the theory is being applied. I think that I had this intuition more than anything.

I don’t know if it was a conscious awareness, but I knew I’ve got to keep doing this. I continued in my BA program to try to tutor. I had private clients. I would tutor. I did all kinds of things. I, had my campus job, like most students do. That had nothing to do with my field, but I would try to get myself into these situations.

When I was working on my master’s then, I was very quickly, because I had a This experience tutoring, and I had done so much. I was very quickly appointed as the writing coordinator for our graduate programs, AL practice labs. We, the university of Hawaii Mānoa has a, an English language institute [00:49:00] that is coordinated by the master’s and PhD program.

The SLS department. So I was very quickly able to get actually a graduate student, a job, and that was my apprenticeship and really a classroom of my own, but I had to work for that, I had to position myself for that. Now. Going back now to our current second language teaching program that could be ALANI, many of my students have gone on that same path, have followed my advice, and eventually got into the master’s program and assumed those same roles within the ELI that I did.

And that’s always my advice for students. If you want to continue in this field, here’s how you do it. We have a great program. It’s going to teach you theory, but you’ve got to apply it. And here are some things that you can do to apply it as you’re going through this program, that there is a BA student [00:50:00] finishing up your BA or going on to graduate school.

And I’m very proud of that. I’m an alumni. That’s my alma mater. And I want to make sure that I’m preparing really good, prepared students for their, I think we succeed very well. Now, some of those. Students go on to work in the DOE, some of them go on to, to go to international. I wish more went into the DOE, to be honest, but that’s the nature, I think, of higher education, especially TESOL.

Like you were saying, Mandeep, that’s the goal, I think, or the assumption of many professors is that you’re going to get your degree and then you’re going to go teach in Korea. You’re going to go teach in Japan or teach overseas somewhere. You’re not going to stay here and work in the local space here.

I think that’s a thing that I try to get my students to be considering early on. 

Justin Hewett: That is so fantastic. I have to say, Shawn, I cannot believe we’re almost at the hour mark. What a wonderful conversation. And I feel like we have, we are learning so much [00:51:00] from about your approach. One of the things that we’d love to do is do just a quick lightning round where we’ll do shorter answer type thing.

So a couple of questions. And so we’ve got a few questions we want to give you just with a kind of a short and sweet answer. If you don’t mind, we’ll rock through those. The first one I wanted to ask is just. If you could only give one piece of advice, what is that one piece of advice you would give to one of your students that is going to go out and go be a teacher as they’re graduating?

What’s that one piece of advice that you would give them? 

Shawn Ford: You said earlier, do no harm. Someone mentioned, do no harm. That was a phrase that I was told in my time at Kadiulani. When you’re working with students, Make sure that you have their interests, do no harm, think about what their needs are think about how you can contribute to the, to helping them with their needs.

So the mixture of that, right? If you have your student front and center, you’re thinking about their needs. In our space, it’s language. Your students [00:52:00] need language. They need support. So I’ll be satisfied that need without doing any harm. 

Mandi Morris: And we’re going to move on to the next question. What is one practice that you see that you would like to see more of?

You would hope to see your students when they leave you, whether you’re talking about your students that are Just starting out or your students who come to you, they’re getting those certification hours. What’s a practice that you would like to see implemented more? 

Shawn Ford: Formative assessment. I think that teachers in general don’t formatively assess their students enough.

I think as a part of formative assessment. is an umbrella. You have an understanding of the student, you have patience for the student, and you have an understanding of how language develops, right? We know that language doesn’t develop immediately. Language takes time. Formative assessment, I think, is crucial for any of that.

If we’re going to be patient and give time to our [00:53:00] students and we’re, Part of that umbrella under that umbrella is putting aside that stress of your pacing guides and that whole stress of teachers, I think, in many cases, place it on themselves, right? They hear how pacing is important. I’ve got to get through my content.

No, we’ve got to slow down. Less is more. Let’s help our ELs develop over time. Drew forward to the assessment. 

Justin Hewett: For maybe our last question here. I just want to ask you going back to what we were thinking about earlier, as far as sometimes the best practices of 20 years ago are definitely not what we’re looking at today as far as best practices.

So have you had a light bulb moment or experience or aha around language development that has changed your approach as an educator or as an educator of educators? Thanks. 

Shawn Ford: Yes, I believe what has been the most influential in my [00:54:00] pedagogy over the last 20 years and is still a major part of my pedagogy is the notion of extended reading.

What that is, extended time with the same concepts over an extended period of time instead of leaping from one concept to the next concept, which is often the case in a content classroom even in. An ESL classroom, pick up any ESL textbook and you go from chapter to chapter and you just go from one idea to a radically different idea.

And when you’re doing that, students don’t have the opportunity to reuse language and recycle ideas and further develop those ideas. I’m a major fan of extended reading. You may have heard of extensive reading. And that is that’s a research theory that many people [00:55:00] follow, that pedagogy where students just read a variety of lots and lots of material, extensive, right?

But I like extending, let’s stretch out the learning over an extended period of time. Keep recycling the same language, keep recycling the same ideas. I think that helps me with focusing on specifics of language that they need to work on, and it helps me to formatively assess them better. I think that it’s a little more challenging to formatively assess students when you’re skipping around every week to a totally new topic.

And when I talk with content teachers. That resonates with them because they often forget underlying that language of a high school signing class is a set of vocabulary, a set of structures that keep being repeated, even though the content may change. The language is quite consistent, right? And I try to [00:56:00] do that in all of my classes.

Classes, including my teacher and class. 

Justin Hewett: That’s so wonderful. So fantastic. And, and I can see why that has informed your work so much. And Shawn, we really appreciate you being on here. If folks have would like to reach out to you, is there a specific way that they should reach out to go find you on the.

Kapi’olani Community College website, or is it, what’s the best way for them to get in touch? 

Shawn Ford: The best way to get in touch would be to look for the second language teaching program on the Kapi’olani website, or contact me directly at my UH email address. That would be sford, 

Justin Hewett: s f o r d at hawaii. edu.

Fantastic. Shawn, what an amazing and wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being here and being a guest on the ML Chat Podcast.