John Parker: [00:00:00] My heart, I was like, well, I think I know why we’re taking shortcuts with this group of children. It’s obvious, once you put the two things side by side, that we had a different set of expectations for these ELLs and what they might do with their futures and what our expectations were of them than than the other children. 

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. My name is Mandi Morris, and I’m your host. Today we have a very different episode for you today. You are going to love it so much. We have four guests, one white paper, a controversy, and a school district that will not accept even one student not being able to read. You are going to have to listen to this podcast to see where it goes.

I promise that it is a true delight. Let’s go.

Today on the podcast we are joined by four very special guests. Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield Isl, title three Coordinator, [00:01:00] Dr. Tabatha Tierce K four literacy coach, and John Parker, assistant Superintendent of Floyd County Schools. They’re also joined by Dr. David Chiesa, assistant professor of Language and Literacy education at the University of Georgia.

You might ask, what has prompted us to have a group on the podcast today? Good question. It all started when Floyd County’s ESL and ELA, specialists, doctors, Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield, and Tabatha Tierce were collaborating to implement Georgia’s dyslexia law. I. And they uncovered some critical problems in their ESL programs, alignment with the science of reading.

Over the next few months, the team would study this potential problem on a much deeper level, picking up passionate supporters along the way, like Dr. David Chiesa of the University of Georgia, and they co-authored a white paper calling for action from wida. Assistant Superintendent of Floyd County Schools, Mr.

John Parker has provided a powerful voice and support of this work. We are so excited to dive into this [00:02:00] today on the ML Chat podcast. Thank you for being here. This is gonna be a lot of fun. We just wanna start with an overview. So our guests are coming today to hear about what did you uncover, tell us about this mystery, Dr.

Jennifer. Can we, uh, pass it over to you? Give us an overview of. Of where this all started. 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: Well, sure. A year or so ago, Georgia passed the dyslexia law, SB 48, and Dr. Tierce approached me and said, we, we need to look at universally screening our multilingual learners and make sure that we’re doing that in a fair way.

That we’re looking at their developmental progress with early earning literacy, learning literacy, and making sure that we’re not. Looking at a test score and identifying that as dyslexia, when really they’re just developmentally exactly where they’re supposed to be in second language learning. So the conversation started there.

We came up with a process. After many conversations with many people, we came up with a process to fairly screen those students here in Floyd [00:03:00] County. And then Dr. Tierce looked at me and said, okay, so if we identify that a multilingual learner. Does have tendencies like dyslexia. What can the ESOL program do to support them in a different way and.

I’ve heard Dr. Tierce describe this as there was just a pause. That’s the, that is that moment of it was an intense moment of silence because, and after 20 years in esol, I’m very familiar with our ESOL standards and assessments. We are a WI estate, and so I didn’t need to pull the standards or the assessments to know that we start at the word level.

So in Aida State, we teach language words. And then we teach students to use those words and sentences, and then we teach them to use those words in discourse. And those are the wis uh, Rita’s dimensions of language. So when you look at addressing a student who might have needs similar to [00:04:00] dyslexia, a lot of that work happens smaller than a word.

And because we were simultaneously going through literacy training together, that stood out as a bigger problem to me. So, not just to me, but obviously to Tabatha first. We had sketched out on this big board in my office, a Scarborough’s reading rope and the areas of literacy skills that students need in order to become a skilled reader.

And when I looked at that, all that work that we had done, everything for dyslexia, it fell all over the rope. But everything for WIDA fell only under those comprehension strands. And there was nothing at the word level and. Before that, if that training hadn’t been happening at the same time, I’m not sure we would have.

We would’ve arrived at the same place, but immediately I knew this is not just a disservice to students who might have tendencies of dyslexia, but what is happening with [00:05:00] the reading domain in our ESOL program? And really that’s where all this started. And we did, we had several conversations with several people.

We picked up Dr. Kiza. He was so supportive and he immediately said, let’s act. We, we brought him on board. We all dove in and did the, we ended up publishing a white paper. Initially. We were gonna publish here locally, but it picked up some traction. This conversation did and Language Magazine ended up publishing our white paper with Worlds Collide, bridging Rita and ESOL programs.

We’d done the Science of Reading. Excuse me. So that published in Language Magazine in October of last year. 

Mandi Morris: You started to, through this process, uncover some learnings and then you had the immediate, I feel like educators were like, okay, let’s solve for this thing. And then this long pause of, wait a second, we have a, maybe a bigger problem here, and we don’t know how to solve for this thing yet.

So you know, Dr. Tabatha, your literacy. C [00:06:00] expert for K through four. So from your perspective, what did this look like? Jennifer’s walked us through it, but what are you thinking in your head? What’s going through your head in this process? 

Dr. Tabatha Tierce: So in the beginning, it was really difficult for me to even understand that she wasn’t where I was.

This is a learning progression that we both had to walk through. And so I’m waiting for her response because I’m thinking surely there’s an answer, and she’s just choosing the correct words to use to describe this. To me, but I’m thinking we’ve gotta figure this out because these are our students and we both have the same goal, and without this collaboration, we are working really against each other.

So I guess at that point, I was just trying to figure out how we were gonna make this work for Floyd County because we had students that we saw were struggling and we continued by looking at data at our district level. And then in one of our work sessions. We had this bright idea of, oh my, so I wonder if it’s just us.

Maybe it’s just [00:07:00] us. And then we started looking at things at the state level and we realized that maybe this issue is bigger than just our students in our district. That’s an overwhelming I. That’s an overwhelming thought, and we’re both just looking at each other. We just discovered something brand new and we’re not sure what to do with it.

And so Dave helped us to figure out, we’ve gotta get the word out. He grounded us more in research and less in our feelings, and that was something that was really important. We had growing to do. And in order for us to grow, we had to get the right information in order to get the word out. We had to get the right information.

So I learned an awful lot about WIDA and the ESOL world. So we were growing together in different ways, but I really have to credit the collaboration of our group because it took each of us bringing what we knew to the table. And from my literacy background, the most important thing to me is. Hey, these kids have gotta read, and I don’t know what it’s gonna take or what you’re gonna have to do, but we’re not stopping until we get there.

And that I didn’t realize [00:08:00] that there were people in our school system that could be so pivotal in helping, but really didn’t know how to be a part of that, and really weren’t aware of the fact that they were missing. That opportunity. So I guess the next part for us was just working on what we can do here so that we could get the impact for our students within our classroom.

And we drug in our assistant superintendent, Mr. Parker, and he was like, oh my, we are all about kids reading employee county school, so let’s definitely figure this out. So it became really a problem that I couldn’t ignore. I don’t think any of us felt like we could ignore. Ignore, and that it was bigger than just our students.

So that opened things up to, uh, more work and a more meaningful process 

Mandi Morris: really. So I wanna lean for a moment on how did Dr. David, how did you get involved and the how did, what was the connection made? How did you get immediately involved? They needed more research and a connection, but how did you learn about the work that they were doing [00:09:00] together?

Dr. David Chiesa: Yeah. First of all, Mandi, thank you very much for having us here today. We really appreciate you taking time and space for us. 

Mandi Morris: Thank you for being here. 

Dr. David Chiesa: All of you, Jennifer and I are Dr. Pendergrass and I actually are really good friends. And so one day she goes, Dave, we can, we have a conversation, please.

We, me and my a colleague, we actually have a PowerPoint for you. I go, oh, okay, let’s, okay, share with me. So we scheduled a time. We met and as they were talking through their PowerPoint, AKA, what we just heard, I kept saying, Uhhuh and what about this Uhhuh? And so I was almost thinking three steps ahead of what they’re gonna say.

And they kept saying, stop, just stop. Let me, let us just get through this presentation. I’m like, I agree with you. I see where you’re going because I understand the flaws. But then we just, theoretical framework. And they’re like, what? I go basically. WIDA comes from a systemic, functional linguistics perspective, and if you look clearly at the theory and match what they actually do, there’s a disconnect between them.

And so from that disconnect, we all agree, oh, now we see it. Now we can come together and we can actually [00:10:00] move forward and try to support not only teachers in different spaces within the community, teaching community, but also the academic area. And now we can make those bigger connections there. I. So that’s how I came in.

It’s, Hey, we have a, can you just listen to us to, oh my gosh, let’s work together. 

Mandi Morris: I love it. That’s fantastic. And I wanna go deeper about what you had just said about the theory versus the application with wida. But before we go there, we just need to hear from Mr. Parker. It’s so cool to have a superintendent, one here and two really involved.

This level of collaboration is just incredible and I feel sometimes. Coming from a background in IL myself, you feel like, is anybody listening out there? And the collaboration between the literacy department and East, and I love Dr. Tierce said, we talked to Mr. Parker and he was like, okay, yeah, kids gotta read.

Let’s go. Let’s do it. So tell me, Mr. Parker, how did you get [00:11:00] involved? What were you thinking? What was your response when you’re hearing from your colleagues? 

John Parker: Both of these brilliant minds are all my academic team and they’ve been working together. For years. And you would think, okay, naturally their paths would cross and these theories would have bubbled to the surface.

But they didn’t really un until the dyslexia law was passed and we realized, oh, wait a minute, there’s a real chance that when we start this diagnostic testing that all of our ELLs are gonna be flagged as dyslexic. And that was the light bulb, I think. And then. Of course they, they eventually started working together to, to figure that out.

And wizards with PowerPoint presentations and they know, Hey, Mr. Parker, like he’s got a lot of things he’s in charge of. He’s the expert generalist, but he doesn’t know. He’s never done a deep dive on wida, so we gotta make him some pictures. And they made some great pictures in their PowerPoints. They really did.

[00:12:00] It’s very convincing. And there’s one slide in particular that was, Um, Uh, just extremely powerful. It’s kinda like a trap door you fall through in the middle. I don’t know if they planned it that way, but it was, and so once I realized, okay, we’re, we are asking these children to make sounds that they’ve never heard before, I was like, huh, that is not good.

Like we, we are really off base here with what we’re trying to do, and. I then got a deeper understanding of wida, and if you do a little digging on wida, you, you look at the origins of it. It was a response to No Child Left Behind, no Child Left Behind was a response to the big account of Billy movements in the nineties.

All of those things came together and it asked educators and systems, you need to have some results and you need to do it really fast. [00:13:00] And that’s carried on for a couple of decades. And balanced literacy was born out of that. You can get some pretty quick results with balanced literacy in the early grades, but then you hit a wall when you get to about the second grade and you got a multi-syllabic words or befuddling these children.

And I really just, I wanted to know why. In my heart I was like, I think I know why we’re taking shortcuts with this group of children. It’s obvious once you put the two things side by side that we had. A different set of expectations for these ELLs and what they might do with their futures and what our expectations were of them than than the other children.

And when we got to the end of the PowerPoint, I think their question was, how far do you want us to go with this? And I was like, you take it as far as we can take it. I know Jennifer knows just about everybody in the ELL world and she [00:14:00] immediately. Along with Tabatha’s help, just started putting this in the faces of people who could help us.

That’s my involvement in a nutshell on the beginning. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. I really appreciate you calling out the systemic differences in expectations and that this was really about addressing that. But I think what a lot of people are gonna walk away from is that if you want something from your superintendent, you need a really good PowerPoint.

John Parker: Oh, without a doubt. 

Mandi Morris: Pictures. Pictures. Gotta highlight that. 

John Parker: Pictures, graphs always help. 

Mandi Morris: Always. Oh, so good. Dr. David, I wanna go back to you and talk with us a little bit more. Unpack. We know a lot of teachers that have gotten into this space of ML education have potentially crossed over from, I was a second grade teacher and I fell in love with my English learners and I just wanted to switch paths and now I’m an SL teacher.

Or a lot of educators have come in non-traditional routes to the world of education in the last years. [00:15:00] Some people are coming with theory around language learning, language acquisition, if you will, and some teachers are coming at it because they had a really big heart for those students. Haven’t done the theory work.

So could you talk a little bit about the theory that wida, the approach behind WIDA and then the application? 

Dr. David Chiesa: When you said, Uh, the heart is the main word here, and when I think about ecel educators in Georgia, in the nation around the world, I call it the bleeding heart profession because we really do value our relationships with our learners and those different spaces.

And so I completely understand where you’re coming from. And wida bless their hearts, as we say in the South, they have done a great job, not gonna lie. They’ve done a great job integrating what’s called systemic functional linguistics. And according to shear. I’m gonna quote something here In this theoretical tradition, language is defined as a resource for making meaning rather than as a set of rules for ordering isolated grammatical structures.

[00:16:00] Language offers a dynamic set of tools that could be used in the service of learning disciplinary concepts and practices. And the theoretical perspective assumes that we, that we use language for particular purposes with particular audiences, in particular social cultural context. And that is beautiful.

The issue is it comes from S-F-L-S-F-L says, we take the structure of language, meaning phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, all those wonderful things we learned in linguistics 1 0 1. And it’s connected to the context, right? Makes sense. Language, context, culture. It all is integrated. But if you look closely at Holliday’s stratify model of SFL, if you look really closely at the very bottom, it has what’s called phonies and graph.

Makes sense, huh? However, in WI a’s standards and assessments, there’s nothing below the word my friend. So they do not talk about phone names. They do [00:17:00] not talk about graphemes. They talk about from the word and above. So they actually don’t connect the full theory, and this is at the heart of what we’re trying to get at.

Mandi Morris: Any thoughts about why that is? I’ve 

Dr. David Chiesa: been trying to think about this for a long time because in my mind it’s common sense. I’ve been all over the world in many different spaces. I’ve learned multiple languages, and whenever I learn new language, I always think about the sound system of language. And for me, the sound system or a C right, has a connection to reading and writing it.

It’s all connected, right? For them, I think. Maybe, again, I’m hypothesizing that if we focus on the sounds in a certain way, we’re disregarding their cultural backgrounds, their own sound systems themselves in those different spaces. So I think they’re coming at it from, [00:18:00] we have to respect the learner’s background knowledge we have to respect the learner’s phonetics and phenology morphology.

Again. So for me it’s still a little bit iffy, but I think they feel that there’s not that connection that it’s separated, but I think it’s actually more connected. 

Mandi Morris: Dr. Tiner, anything to follow up on that? 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: Um, I’ll say this, when Tabatha and I early on started having these conversations with colleagues. One of the first things that teachers and coordinators pushed back with was, it’s the ESOL teacher’s job to teach language, but it’s the classroom teacher’s job to teach literacy, to teach reading.

And the ESOL role is then to have students understand the word so that when the classroom teacher teaches them to read them, they can make meaning. The problem with that is when Tabatha and I pulled the Georgia ELA standards, [00:19:00] it’s obvious that if a student immigrates to the US and enrolls in kindergarten at the beginning of the year, then even though they’re not yet familiar with all the English sounds, that’s their best shot at actually receiving explicit instruction and foundational skills if they enroll in first grade.

They only are exposed to explicit instruction in half of those phonological awareness skills and no concepts of print. And if they enroll in second grade, they get only phonics and fluency. No phonological awareness, only half of the phonics or three fourths of the phonics standards. Now listen, a student who immigrates after second grade never sees those critical foundational literacy standards in the classroom.

So I think the assumption has been, you know, I’m teaching the meanings of words and someone else is teaching students to read. And that very [00:20:00] well may not be. And one of the things that Science of Reading movement is adamant about is that explicit instruction is necessary. 

Mandi Morris: And we all know what happens when students enroll in secondary.

Exactly. 

Dr. David Chiesa: Done. Done. 

Mandi Morris: A lot of my experience in the classroom was secondary, and when we have students that are coming, especially. Siphon life. Students who might not have literacy in L one in their home language, teachers are truly at a loss of what to do and talk to a high school teacher about teaching literacy.

They’re just, they don’t know where to start because they haven’t been trained. They don’t have the tools and not resourced to be able to do that work. So I think that what. You’re talking about on the early elementary school and in an elementary school is felt so intensely in the secondary level. And I wonder how much y’all have explored that.

That’s one 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: of the things that we have been concerned about, especially because, Um, [00:21:00] some people will say, isn’t it the problem of the school or the interventionist to then bridge the gap and kind of fill in those spaces. But here’s the problem with that. Students, K 12 are expected to learn to read as one of those domains in wida, listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

And actually a couple of weeks after we published the white paper, Tim Bowles, the, at least then executive, I can’t remember now that I can’t remember his title, but one of the leaders of wida, one of the co-creators of wida, he did rebuttal and he said, we are actually not planning on. Adding any sort of foundational skills or literacy skills to additional literacy skills to the standards.

But that assessment does require those skills and what he had. What we have now that is published is an admission that, at least for Georgia, the test we use to exit [00:22:00] students from the ESOL program requires skills. That we do not teach in the EELL program and that we WIDA doesn’t have any plan of integrating into the program.

Dave, 

Dr. David Chiesa: can I please, I wanna read what he wrote. 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: Yes, please. 

Dr. David Chiesa: He wrote the reading domain of the access test, so the reading domain assessed as part of access for ELLs does not measure multilingual learners reading skills in the content area of language arts, but rather their language proficiency to engage with reading materials.

Hmm. 

Mandi Morris: How do you interpret that? Interpret that for our listeners. 

Dr. David Chiesa: So what he’s basically saying is that we’re actually measuring engagement, not reading. So reading is not a part of what they’re measuring, but it’s a language proficiency. Test. Proficiency is accuracy, fluency, and complexity of language. It within the four domains, rewriting, listening, speaking, but he’s saying that it’s not part of it.

So I think he’s not as straightforward as he, he says he is. 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: And [00:23:00] honestly what he said is that I believed for most of my career in esol, I earned my ESOL endorsement in a WIDA state. And we started right at that word level and it was always reading as someone else’s job. Who’s I didn’t question Ours is not to question why it, this awakening has been heavy.

But honestly, back to your question of middle school and high school, that’s where you get the most pushback of ESOL teachers or ESOL program coordinators saying, this is really not an ESOL issue. This is a school issue. If those students are not able to exit the program without that skill, this is an ESOL issue.

So that rebuttal was, although not exactly what we had hoped on behalf of the students, it was great for this conversation. Because it’s way to admitting, Hey, this is a problem, basically, 

Mandi Morris: and I know for myself and my own experience, I’m curious to hear [00:24:00] feedback from your perspectives. ELD curriculum doesn’t teach phonics.

Maybe there are some out there, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find an ELD curriculum, especially at the secondary level that is acknowledging. The phonemic and phonological level of language learning. So what are teachers supposed to do about that piece? When you’d me mentioned Dr. Jennifer, that for much of your career.

That’s how you thought it was supposed to be done. And then you have this awakening and, but when you as a teacher, these are always the resources you’ve been given, it creates a pattern that, I guess this is where it starts because this is where my textbook started. Dr. Tierce, what are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Tabatha Tierce: I love that you brought that up because the classroom frustration is real. And not just for the ESOL teacher, but for the gen ed teacher. Imagine that we’re both working with the same goal of the student in mind, and I have just now given this assessment to [00:25:00] students, and I have X number of students that need intervention, I have.

Limited time that I can spend on that, and I’m speaking more at below grade six, but I’m looking for help from my ESOL teacher. They’re looking, we each think the other’s taking care of what’s supposed to happen, and that’s really hard for me to work with as a literacy coach. Teachers are asking me those same questions.

What am I to do? How do I do this? The ESOL teacher says they can’t help me. I’ve had all of those things happen, and also the frustration of ESOL teachers working with these students for a segment of time because that’s part of the service that they receive. But I really need them to be working on this part and portion because all the skills they’re working on are very important, but the foundational piece of that is not there.

And so I’ve gotta try to find an additional time to do that. So that is even, and I say this often. I have lots of sayings that people laugh at and enjoy, but the further a student gets away from grades K and one, the less likely they are to come in contact with anyone that could teach them to read. And that is [00:26:00] exponentially true.

So the F, if you’re talking about a middle schooler, a high schooler, we have the same issue and that someone needs to help them. No one has time. This doesn’t fit into my schedule. And Jennifer and I just couldn’t turn our backs to that when in our district, our people were asking for help. And you have to ground, listen, the student, from my perspective, I have a teacher here that wants to provide a service.

They know the student needs this help and there are so many demands on them that this is only one of them. And so to I, I understand the frustration of ESOL teacher, you’re coming in to help me. I’m so excited. But when I ask you for help with this, you’re not sure what to offer. But what’s been interesting about that is Jennifer’s had a lot of conversations.

We’ve worked collaboratively with our ELA teachers and our ES l teachers, and their willingness has been unbelievable. It’s, oh, you’re okay. I’m here to help you. How can we make this better? But the result of that is I’ve got to learn it myself, and I can’t imagine. And that primary and the primary grades, you’re surrounded with it in Tierce one all [00:27:00] day.

So there’s a lot of resources for an ESOL teacher to go to for that help. Can you help me with this? How do you teach that? But I can’t imagine being a middle or high school teacher in as an ESOL teacher and trying to find resources, whether it be like you’re mentioning a curriculum or someone else even in the building, that I could go to and ask those questions.

And I’m very passionate about that because that’s my job. I’m coaching people up on how could we make literacy a bigger part of your day. And so we work on a problem and we find another one, and that’s a huge one that Jennifer’s done some great work in our district to try to provide those resources, what she can find for those teachers.

Mandi Morris: Dr. Jennifer, tell us some about the resources that you found. People are gonna wanna know. What are you doing? How are you tackling this problem in your school district? 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: We certainly have tried to attack that problem this year, but I wanna be vulnerable and let you know that. The entire EOL team was not like, oh, good.

We get to do structured literacy training and spend a lot of time learning something [00:28:00] that’s only a portion of one of our domains. Yes, it actually did take some vulnerable conversations with them and talking about. Uh, we invited, actually invited Tabatha in and we just shared, we shared all the work and in that, those first weeks, it felt so heavy.

It felt heavy. I was able to say to them, I have been where you are. I have gone to classroom teachers with an access score report and said, I wanna talk to you about this student you’re about to have in your classroom. Now the reading score, he’s a non-reader, so we’re gonna take that one with a grain of salt and talk about the other three.

And then I spent that entire year, ugh, not teaching the student to read because I never even considered that could be my role. It’s not what, how I was trained. It was not part of our program. Absolutely, Mr. Parker. 

John Parker: I was just gonna say, just in thinking about [00:29:00] resources, like the greatest resources that we have are people like Tabatha and Jennifer.

Like there are not a lot of school systems, at least medium sized school systems, where we have about 9,000 students that have a person coordinating programs for English language learners. And I would say we probably would not either. If Jennifer just wasn’t so fantastic at her job and she was going out of her way to help train other ESOL teachers, and we were just like, she needs to be doing this all the time.

We need someone with her level of expertise on point leading this. This mission, just like any other program that we have. And the same thing for Tabatha. People are the greatest and most expensive resource, and I don’t know how other school systems are getting it [00:30:00] done because we are very financially stable here.

We’ve done a great job managing our money, and this time of year when we start the budget process, I know that I go in. And the first thing that I’m gonna fight for in the budget are my experts, right? I’m gonna fight for Jennifer and Tabatha and some other things will probably be let go. Like I’m, you know, there, there’s curriculum that we won’t buy.

There’s things that are not as important as having people like Jennifer Tabatha. 

Mandi Morris: That’s really beautiful. Thank you, Mr. Parker, for sharing that with us 

John Parker: anytime. 

Mandi Morris: I know. Yes, 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: please. You can put that in my evaluation for this year too, Mr. Parker. This.

John Parker: I hear merit raise. 

Dr. Tabatha Tierce: Yeah. Make sure you recorded that part. It’s really important that we get that on record. Yes. 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: But Mandi, Mr. Parker has been a huge part of that too. But he said here we had HB 5 38, which [00:31:00] required K three teachers to complete structured literacy training. And we asked Mr. Parker, can we extend that requirement just in our district so that if you are an ECEL teacher, K 12, that’s a requirement for our team.

And he was on board with that. And all the teachers have completed it. We have a couple of people who were in that last module, but most of the teachers are already done. But it they’re, we did the Georgia Lawrence online modules and they were actually beautiful, but they were online modules. So we paired that with a group journal where we asynchronously, which, by the way, I got that idea from Dr.

Kiza at a conference several years ago. But that was beautiful because as our teachers across the district were completing that training, they would complete module one and then go to actually have a conversation with other people. When they completed module one, our high school teachers were talking with our elementary school teachers and comparing notes.

And then we also met with [00:32:00] our consultant for Science of Reading and multilingual learners. And she met with us once in the summer and then several times over the course of the year, and we would talk about what we’re learning in those modules and ask questions about what that means for multilingual learners and those conversations.

Started out maybe a little nervous, quiet, unsure, and lots of doubtful questions. So when I say I’m being vulnerable, this is where we started. Lots of teachers saying, I have a student who needs foundational literacy skills, but I serve them in a 10th grade push-in biology class. How am I supposed to do that and that, how am I supposed to do that in August?

Felt impossible. And we just had our last meeting with is Dr. Linda Cavazos was our consultant. I don’t know if I said that, but we had our last meeting with Dr. Cavazos just a couple weeks ago, and we talked about what’s actually happening in that classroom and. The willingness to consider that as an ES L [00:33:00] teacher.

When you go into a 10th grade biology classroom, our role is to give access to the language, to instruct about the language that’s happening in the classroom and to make sure students have access to it. If you have a student who cannot decode the word photosynthesis. Part of giving access to that language is absolutely teaching something smaller than a word.

So it’s been a series of conversations, a series of leaning on each other and trusting the process. But we’ve made such, such a huge changes in our program. We brought in with our LIEP through title three. We brought in some resources for those high school resource classrooms. We had some online. Literacy Foundational literacy that’s designed for secondary students programs.

And then we also brought on some hands on phon graphene cards and that kind of thing, so that once we know which skill students need, teachers could just grab those and knowing as part of the battle. So we also added a [00:34:00] literacy screener for students who we deemed reading critical in middle and high school, because what we can see from access is that students are either not making progress in reading.

Or they’re not reading able to read the test, so their score’s just bouncing year after year, up, down, up, down, up, down. And so for those students, we administered that literacy screener and the reporting of that screener actually told those secondary a lot of our middle school and high school. Long-term ELs.

Now we finally know, oh, this is the set of skills. It’s, oh, it’s dip thongs that’s throwing the student off here. Oh, it’s the R controlled vowels that she doesn’t get. How that changes, and then they have the resources to pull them out. There’s been no mandate for how they have to do it, but we’ve met together in PLCs and discussed and made plans, and it’s been a beautiful growing experience for our team.

Mandi Morris: Something that I feel like we hear [00:35:00] almost as a theme from directors that we’ve had on the podcast that seem to have a lot of success with the shift. Either a paradigm shift, a shift in thinking, a movement within their school district, if you will, is that it feels organic and it feels, let’s start where we can and let’s grow more believers in this process and this shift and this change.

Less like it’s a mandate you have to. To do it. So what I’m hearing from you is a lot of that, it sounds like you started small, you’re starting in PLCs, you’re giving people the access to training and then allowing for the conversation, the collaborative learning, collaborative growth. I’m so glad that you brought up content because we know, especially in the secondary space, K 12 really, but in secondary, we hear a lot about language through content.

And language isn’t something that happens in isolation. Language should be taught through content and. Uh, my wondering in my mind was now we think of bridging right language and [00:36:00] content, but then you’re adding another layer here where the literacy layer and the example that you gave of the bio classroom, what a fantastic example of how it’s still language through content, but you’re adding in that piece of breaking apart the word below the word level so that students can really, truly access the academic language.

I wonder, Dr. Kiza, do you have anything to add there? What are your thoughts on that approach? 

Dr. David Chiesa: No, I completely agree 100%. The connection between language literacy and content is one of the things I want all educators to understand. Not just ESOL educators, but content teachers to that. They’re also language teachers and literacy teachers.

So I agree with you a hundred percent on that, Mandi. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. I love that. Language. Teachers and literacy teachers. That’s really powerful. So what are your next steps? Where do you go from here? You’ve, you submitted your paper, you’ve got your [00:37:00] response. Are you guys presenting at conferences? Where are you taking this work?

Are you building a literacy curriculum that everybody should know about? What’s happening next for this incredible team 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: we are presenting, we’ve been asked to present at the Reading League national conference in October in Chicago. So we are excited about that. There are some presentations. I heard Claude Goldenberg say this.

Actually, Tabatha and I were listening to one of his YouTube podcasts, but he said, when you have this conversation with an ELA group, I. They accept it much faster than when you have this conversation with an ESOL group because it challenges so much of what we’ve thought for so long. Presenting at the Reading League national Conference seems like that’s gonna be not a lot of opposition, but there’s some beauty in presenting in places where there’s opposition as well, because the conversation’s so important.

Mandi Morris: Okay, so you are coming up to a conference in October expecting not to get too much pushback. [00:38:00] So where are you guys inserting yourselves, your ideas? Or maybe there might be a little bit more friction, but like you say, some beauty outta those conversations as well. 

John Parker: I would just say that Tabatha and Jennifer, uh, they will strike up a conversation anywhere, anytime, anybody who’s willing to engage, even with our own state department, it’s just, uh.

Wherever it presents itself. But hey, we’re gonna go storm the reading lead and get them all. I feel like we’re like, like the Justice League, ’cause I’m a nerd and all the reading friends are gonna come together and solve this problem like Claude Goldenberg. 

Mandi Morris: I love that. I’m just envisioning you all wearing capes now while you do your presentation in October.

John Parker: We can do that. 

Mandi Morris: That’s wonderful. Okay, back to my, the second part of my question though, the resources, are you guys building out resources? Are, do you [00:39:00] have things, ideas to share? Somebody’s listening to this podcast and they’re like, okay, great. I’m on board. I believe in this work too. But then now where do I go?

How can you illuminate that path for others who are listening that don’t know where to get started and maybe don’t have a network like you have here to work with? 

Dr. Jennifer Pendergrass-Bennefield: I was actually at the KSU ESOL conference, a state ESOL conference here in Georgia just a few weeks ago, and I just presented what we’re doing.

I briefly talked about the problem, and then I just presented our work here and I named. Uh, vendors, this is what worked from this vendor. We’re concerned about this moving forward because it’s early. We haven’t found all the answers. We just know we’re making first steps in the right direction, or we hope that we are, we don’t have a schedule of first do this, then do this.

But the things that we’ve worked and tried, and honestly, if there have been lots of lessons for me along the way as a coordinator of our team, the screener, for example. [00:40:00] When we adopted that screener, it gave us beautiful answers to what skills students were missing, but it was time consuming. We had to open additional testing window.

Students were missing time out of the classroom. And then now that we’ve been through it, I can say, oh, do we not? That fluency is not important in middle and high school, but. That test takes a long time because you have to narrow down exactly what grade level of student’s reading at. Do those teachers need that information or how often do they need it?

Do they need it every three times a year in middle and high school, or is that excessive? So I think, and even with our structured literacy training, I was speaking with someone, Vanessa Cataldo from Carrollton. Nope. Carroll City. Carlton City the other day, and she said that they also made it a requirement for their ESOL teachers, K 12, to get structured literacy training, but only some of the modules so that it was more manageable for those secondary teachers, which I don’t feel like that’s a bad idea.

I think we’re all learning [00:41:00] as we go and sharing, but I would say reach out to us in Floyd County schools. Reach out to people who are doing similar things where you are. We do. We exist in the T-cell world too. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. Be flexible, right? Find a process that works for you. Be flexible to pivot. To adapt.

Learning something new and trying new things can be messy and hard. But it sounds like you’re going out there and you’re trying and you’re seeing what sticks. Dr. David. 

Dr. David Chiesa: Yeah, the thing that I wanted to say was I work with a lot of pre-service educators. In service teachers, literacy specialists. We have one of the only online literacy specialists, EDS degrees in the state of Georgia right now.

And the major word I wanna say is awareness. And so with this word and having them be more aware of our work now their eyes are a little bit more open. So just as Jen, as Dr. Pendergrass said earlier, she’s, I was so unaware, but now, oh my gosh. And then she started crying. Right. [00:42:00] So now people are more aware and now they’re able to find the right resources themselves moving forward.

And it sparked a lot of conversation, not just in education, but also in linguistics field too. And so the, since the words gain out awareness is gained out, it’s spreading. This is the best resource possible in my mind. 

Mandi Morris: Dr. Tierce, what about you? What are your thoughts? 

Dr. Tabatha Tierce: I am game for writing a curriculum because we really need it.

However, my day job does not include that I have lots of lovely children and teachers to work with, but hey, if someone hears this and that opportunity, we, we need that. And I mentioned earlier, for every problem we feel like we are making progress on, we find another one. But that’s just digging deeper and that’s not giving up and that’s hey, you young student that you know might not be in high school yet.

There could be something that’s coming for you and for teacher too. So I think that Dave [00:43:00] is key when he says the openness and the willingness. It was, I joke with Jennifer a lot now about those moments when she was trying to quote unquote catch up with me. I would just sit there. I almost felt like I’ll just take a few minutes and read a book or whatever, because that was a big leap for her and I didn’t even realize that.

I didn’t realize because in my world, we’re all on board with this. Let’s go. And so I, it really has helped me to understand that it’s difficult to shift what we do. I would, I had to listen to a lot of things that she shared with me to help me grow in the way that we serve our ELs. And so it’s just.

Working together to solve these same problems are so important. And now teachers are hungry. You’ve told me this. I’m in that biology class. Now what? Give me something. And we just hope that we can continue to find problems then, and then good answers. 

Dr. David Chiesa: Can I jump on you, Tabatha? I want to expand a little bit by saying that I believe collaboration is even more [00:44:00] important now between content teacher, ELA, ESOL educator.

Everyone. Special education. We need more collaboration in schools because that will help uncover the variability that we’re seeing here. 

Dr. Tabatha Tierce: And I wanna share, this is something that I look at Jennifer oftentimes and say, because not everyone out there is cheering us on, this is really forcing some people to be uncomfortable in what they’ve always done and how they feel.

But it is always right to do what’s best for the kid. And we say that to each other often, and I’m with kids every day. And it is, there’s nothing more powerful than teaching a kid to read, in my opinion, in my world. And so it’s just not okay for it to not be okay. So we can’t give up. 

Mandi Morris: What really comes across in this conversation is the power of collaboration a hundred percent.

And understanding that we are each bringing something to the table and we all have something to learn from one another. And I love that literacy versus language perspective. And then [00:45:00] both Dr. Jennifer coming at that K 12, like very application and then seeking out Dr. David for the, the theory and how do we go to the next step?

How do we put words? To name the thing that we’re seeing, that we’re observing. It’s just, it’s such an incredible team effort and it’s encouraging to think that people are feeling alone in their school district. Sometimes you’re the only EL person in your school district. There are really incredible networks online.

There are people like you who are available to connect, and you never know, maybe, maybe you are the only ML person in your school district, but maybe the most powerful partner you have is the other only literacy. Specialist into your school district, and now there are two of you doing work together. So I, I love that.

I think it’s super encouraging for people listening. Mr. Parker, anything from your perspective before we wrap up today? 

John Parker: I think it’s just purely mindset. It’s, you evolve from awareness of the problem to, to advocacy, [00:46:00] and then you, you start fighting for the problem. And now I feel like we’re, we’ve advanced to this.

Okay, let’s win this. You know that that’s where we are now. It’s not, we’re not just fighting. We’re not just here to just fight the good fight. We’re here to win this and change the mindset about how we support these students. So 

Dr. David Chiesa: we fight strategically. Yes, that’s the point. And we understand that efficacy means that you have to learn how to lose.

We understand that. 

Mandi Morris: It’s so good to hear from all of you. You’re, this is just gonna resonate with so many people and I love that, Dr. Jennifer, you also calling out and just being really vulnerable that we don’t have all the answers. I don’t have, uh, steps one through three, do this thing and have everything fixed tomorrow, and that’s just being real.

And I love that you guys are showing up in that space because it’s a journey. It’s a journey for our language learners to learn [00:47:00] a language, to conquer literacy. It’s a learning journey for our educators in the classroom trying to figure out how to address this. But I love to hear from your district.

Level, position your thoughts like you are also on your journey, and that’s just really powerful. So thank you each so much for being here. This has been such an amazing conversation today. I’m so thankful that you took the time to be here.