Daniel Yip: We’re getting to interface with a lot of folks that have never considered the power of the language in their content area and how if you know it, you can wield it effectively. If you don’t, then you get left in the dust. And this approach allows the teachers to provide explicit instruction to teach our multilingual learners how to use it so they can better express themselves. 

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. I’m Mandi Morris, your host. Our guests today are from a large school district in Maryland serving almost 30,000 English learners, and they are doing huge work. Michelle, Daniel and Dr. Lu unpack the teaching and learning cycle that they are rolling out in their school district.

I was in their session at WIDA this past fall and was just really impressed of the systematic approach they’re taking to really hard work. I mean, training teachers across the school district that big takes vision. It takes follow through and it takes time, and they talk about that work in our podcast today.

[00:01:00] It’s very different from some of the school districts we’ve talked to that are smaller, can turn the ship quicker. So I think you’ll enjoy this different conversation for a really, really big school district. Let’s go. 

Daniel Yip is a K-12 English Language Development supervisor in Maryland, serving a district of more than 26,000 multilingual learners with 19 years in education. He focuses on strengthening collaboration between ML specialists and content teachers. Including innovative work connecting the WIDA framework and ai.

Michelle Hunsberger is an English language development instructional specialist in Maryland as well. With nearly two decades of experience, she partners with middle and high school teachers to ensure multilingual learners have access to rigorous. Grade level instruction while making academic language visible and accessible.

Dr. Luciana de Oliveira is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a nationally recognized leader in TESOL with over 30 years in the field, [00:02:00] she has authored or edited 35 books and served as president of TESOL International Association. Dr. Oliveira will be honored with the 2026. TESOL, international Association’s highest award, the James ELAs Award for service.

Welcome everyone to the ML Chat Podcast. This is gonna be a great conversation about the amazing work that you’re doing in your school district. Thank you for being here. So let’s get to know your school district. I would love Daniel to give us a breakdown. Tell us about your students, your teachers. What is it like working where you work in Maryland?

Daniel Yip: Great. So we come from one of the larger school districts in Maryland, very diverse. We have about 156,641 students, give or take a few across the entire county, but 30,000 of them, roughly are multilingual learners, and we serve them K through 12. We’ve got about 162 languages and we’ve got a fairly large geographic area.

We go from super urban to super rural pretty quickly within the [00:03:00] same school district, which makes things really interesting for how we’re making a cohesive model for the entire district. 

Mandi Morris: Wow. And I can imagine in a school district with this many English learners, you have every model. Imaginable. I would imagine like you, like students are getting English services in a lot of different models and I, so I was in your session at WIDA in 2025 and it was fantastic.

I came up to you afterwards. Could you please come on the podcast? It was so cool to hear about a school district that as big as your school district serving. So many English learners that you’re trying to really work through a systematic framework for everyone to have consistency throughout your school district of how English learners are being served.

This is such a big undertaking. I’m so excited about the conversation so that anyone who wasn’t in that very big, very packed room, I can learn more about the work that you’re doing. So I, let’s dive in to that and learn about, what was your presentation about at wida? 

Daniel Yip: Of course. So it was really a response [00:04:00] to a dilemma that we had been faced with about two years prior, and it’s been a long case of us trying to shift from this sort of self-contained model of providing ELD instruction in a course delivered by an ELD teacher to actually moving into the leader framework more truly in terms of collaboration, which means we needed to get all the other content teachers on board.

The issue that we’ve always had is figuring out how do we get content teachers to. Own that language development piece versus just focusing on the content that they’re working on. And because our district is so large, we’re talking about 20,000 or so teachers that we would need to provide professional learning on, and our small team of five at the time.

We need to figure out a systemic way to do this so that we could roll it out in a way that was palatable for everyone. And this work, I was actually a little late to the party for it, actually been started in earnest by the director above me and before me and Michelle who’s on the call in Dr. Lou as well, about two years back.

And I guess they can take it from there. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. So I just wanna point out, you said [00:05:00] 20,000 teachers and five people in your department. I am not a math person, but that those numbers don’t match. That is a huge undertaking. Michelle, take us back in time then a little bit, and who in a meeting is like that audacious that says we need to get 20,000 teachers trained and on the same page of how we’re serving our English learners.

Michelle Hunsberger: Our old director for sure. So she actually met Dr. Liu, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that she met Dr. Liu at the wait a conference. So that making a lot of connections for us. And Dr. Liu was presenting about the teaching and learning cycle and our director said, this is amazing. This is what our district needs.

So we partnered with Dr. Liu and we planned countywide professional learning for the summer of 2024, and what we decided to do is we are going to train every single ILT. Daniel helped me with what [00:06:00] l. Instructional 

Daniel Yip: Leadership Team. 

Michelle Hunsberger: Instructional Leadership Team. Thank you. 

Mandi Morris: All the different acronyms in our field, 

Michelle Hunsberger: all of ’em.

And that includes the principal. It includes like department leaders, so like the math leader, the social studies leader, everybody, because we wanted to make a shift from the ELD teachers or the teachers of language to everybody’s a teacher of language and here’s how you can do it. So again, we partnered with Dr.

Lou and she came out and trained us. In central office. And then she also trained trainers. She did like a trainer of trainer models. So we had teachers and leaders who were the facilitators of this learning. ’cause as you can imagine, with every single middle school and high school, it was a lot of groups that we needed to train.

So we did did that. And Dr. Liu, do you wanna add anything to that? 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: And then I went in July for a conference, that mini conference. So I presented the [00:07:00] keynote for the conference. But that initial beginning with meeting the then director in October, 2023 really got us started with this collaboration, multi-year collaboration, which is so critical.

To have the vision of a school district, a large school district, to think about, okay, we need to do this for all teachers, not just our ELD teachers. And in addition to that, really have the this collaborative nature of we’re gonna bring in somebody, but it’s not going to be a one and done what we call one and done situation.

It’s going to be a multi-year. Collaboration where we’re going to have different phases. And that’s really what this work has entailed, different phases of collaboration. 

Mandi Morris: I’m wondering from your perspective, do teachers feel supported [00:08:00] knowing that this is a district-wide initiative, or does it feel more like resistance?

Okay, the district is saying, we have to do this. Everybody has to this, we have to participate. Maybe it’s a mix. I do feel like sometimes there’s a directive from the school district and then teachers are left to figure it out on their own, and it just feels impossible because it’s classroom to classroom and sometimes that support can feel really good.

Like we actually wanna be on the same page, and this feels good to have the support across an entire district. I’m not trying to like. Win this battle on my own in my classroom, and I’m the only one on my campus doing it. Just for anybody listening, that can be a challenge when you’re trying to do something from the district.

So any insight you have of how it was received with your teachers, how you went around framing it to have a positive response would be really interesting to hear. 

Michelle Hunsberger: I think, like you said, it was a mix. I do think the structure of how we had the professional learning that summer was very powerful because we [00:09:00] purposefully invited the leadership teams again, like the principal and the ELD lead, lead teacher or lead person was only one out of probably 15 people who was there.

So it took a lot of the pressure off of a person, and I think from the ELD teachers and leaders’ perspective, they were so. Appreciative that we’re making this shift from, they are the language teachers to, everybody’s a language teacher and in fact we have the hashtag shared accountability. So it is, everyone in the school is accountable for our students, not, again, not just the ELD teacher.

So I think there is a lot of relief. I think that it started to shift mindset a little bit to, oh, okay, this is also my responsibility. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. Daniel, anything that you would add there from your perspective? 

Daniel Yip: Yeah, and so that was the first summer that I came in and I got to witness firsthand how the prior director, Michelle and Dr.

Liu had laid all this out. And I thought it was brilliant in [00:10:00] that we had the ELD representation there, who traditionally is like the stand in for everything, ELD, and they’re expected to speak to the test, they’re speaking to the results, they’re speaking to, uh, language areas of strength, and they’re also doing all the scaffolds instruction for every student at every grade level.

We needed them to finally start to, no pun intended, to speak the same language around what ELD instruction is. And it’s actually beyond just the, the designated ELD courses that the ELD teachers were leading. And part of that work was sharing with them the data. Our data is probably fairly common data where you’ve got a large group of students who tend to be stuck for one reason or another at the, the mid to upper intermediate proficiency levels of the WIDA access assessment.

The question that people often give us, and leadership teams included saying, why are they stuck there? We shared with them what the expectations were actually at that level three language and it’s, it was shocking for them because it was very academic. You would not be able to discern that student as a multilingual [00:11:00] learner in a classroom because they sound like everyone else.

But what was missing was the content teacher’s expertise to drive the language and keep it going beyond what the ELD teacher was able to do in their ELD coursework. That’s where Dr. Luke came in with TLC thinking about, now let’s figure out what’s actually going on in this deep content learning. And that was a piece that we were looking for some sort of structure to share with the leaders so that they had something to latch onto because otherwise they were just throwing their hands up in the air.

Mandi Morris: And then everyone’s doing something different from classroom to classroom building to building, and. There can even be some really great work happening. But then you’ll see across the school district, these pockets of exceptional teachers, exceptional leadership that’s making an impact, having change and momentum in their building, but having a structured model is something that you can roll out district-wide.

I’d love to go there. Dr. Luke, can you talk with us about. What is the teaching and learning cycle and how did it really meet the need that the [00:12:00] school district had? 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: So I want to actually, before I talk about the teaching and learning cycle, is to talk about an approach that I developed for content instruction, which I think really resonates with teachers who are content teachers and perhaps.

Don’t have a lot of experience with multilingual learners, or they have not had a lot of preparation to work with multilingual learners. And so I developed what I call a language based approach to content instruction, or what we call Lacy and around the six C, what I call six Cs of support for scaffolding content instruction.

For multilingual learners who are in content classrooms. And so the six Cs are, okay, I’m gonna rephrase. So the six Cs we have connection, culture, code, breaking challenge, community and collaboration, and classroom [00:13:00] interactions. Really thinking about planning for instruction with the sixes of support in mind.

That’s really where the teaching and learning cycle comes in. The teaching and learning cycle is a way for you to implement this place. Framework is the sixes of support in the classroom, and it’s based on a theory of language called systemic functional linguistics. From that theory of language, we have what we call a functional approach to language development, which is one of WI a’s big ideas so that the WIDA 2020 English Language Development Standards framework has this functional approach as a core.

Big idea, which I think was super excited when it came out, when the framework came out, because we could really see a big change in thinking about language development in more [00:14:00] functional ways versus more traditional ways of language development. 

Mandi Morris: Give us an example of that shift. Could you, 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: yeah. There are several different elements, but one key one is.

Thinking about language as a set of rules to be learned versus thinking of language in functional ways, as ways of meaning making, really focusing on meaning making. And one critical part of it is. Meaning making in the different content area connected to what we call disciplinary language. So each content area, each discipline uses language in unique and specific ways.

And so thinking about a functional approach and implementing a functional approach allows us to really look at disciplinary language, look at how the language of math is different from the language of science, the language of social studies, language of ELA, English language arts. And also [00:15:00] think about what’s common across.

So more think about it as transdisciplinary in transdisciplinary kinds of ways as well, which is what I’ve been focusing on lately in my work. But really this functional approach allows us to move beyond isolated words and sentences to more whole text. How can you think about. Meaning making at the level of text, both oral and written.

And so we move away from pre-teaching vocabulary to doing vocabulary development in the context of texts. As students engage with the language, we build what we call high challenge, high support classrooms. So instead of simplifying things for students, and so this simplification is problematic. So what we want to do is.

As [00:16:00] we’ve been using in, in the world of systemic functional linguistics, we want to amplify opportunities instead of simplify the tasks and texts that students engage in. Those are some key elements, and that’s where really the teaching and learning cycle comes in because it’s a way for you to implement a language based approach to content instruction within this functional approach.

In the classroom. 

Mandi Morris: So I’m curious as you’re talking through this, the English specialist in me is, oh, I love this. I love talking about this. And I can imagine a math teacher, a high school science teacher is just like, this is not what I signed up for. Like I am a content expert. I can do all of the math.

Science things in high school kids need to do. You are now talking about something that is way outside of what I came here for. How have you crossed that [00:17:00] bridge? Um, I, to me it makes so much sense. It’s very simple. Try teaching math without teaching math language, without using math language. Try teaching science without using science language.

Like these things you cannot separate. But I would love to hear you. And then we’ve gotta go to the teaching learning cycle. But before we go there, I’d love to hear you talk in a very practical way. How do you overcome that resistance in your school district? Michelle Daniel, when content teachers are like, this is not my thing.

Michelle Hunsberger: We have this year specifically, we have created some language amplifications for different content areas. So as our department worked with the math department, for example, and created language amplifications for algebra. So we went through the algebra curriculum with the math content spec, content specialist and instructional specialist, and pulled out language that kids have to have and just in a very structured way, so teachers could just go to [00:18:00] our language amplification document and.

Click on the resource and the links and the explanation and start to implement that language in their classroom. Our district is also big on math language routines, and so that is very helpful. But you can have a math language routine, but if you’re not specifically talking about what kind of language the students need in order to meet the rigor of a math language routine, then that’s I think where students miss out.

So I think the language amplifications helps, like with that gap. We also have ’em for social studies, for science and for ELA. 

Mandi Morris: And I have a follow up question here. I’m just very curious when. We talk about discipline vocabulary. Sometimes we put all of the emphasis on words that are like, so clearly math vocabulary, so clearly science vocabulary.

But there’s also all of the words that happen around those content vocabulary words. The students have to understand these [00:19:00] prepositions, these introductory clauses and these content areas in order to even make sense or use of. The very science word, the very math word. So I’m wondering in your amplification work that you’re doing, if you’re parsing that out for teachers, and also thinking about the proficiency levels, you spoke earlier to your experienced language learners, the language learners that have been in the program for five, seven plus years, depending on how you define that in your area.

But I’m wondering more broadly how, what does the amplifications look like for your content teachers around all of the language in that content? And then also. For various proficiency levels. 

Daniel Yip: I could speak to that. So the goal for these language applications were to be an intended micro PD for the teachers when we couldn’t get access to them directly.

They’ve actually learned to be able to spot these things, almost like mini text deconstruction, TLCs, Dr. Luke, within the content curricula. So presuming that you go into a math class, there’s certain things that a kid has to say in terms of a [00:20:00] functional language for a Algebra one classroom, let’s say. So with the math content specialists and also our ELD specialists and Michelle was on some of those teams, they actually sat down with the WIDA key language uses, identified what are some things that we’re definitely seeing our must dos in terms of language in order for them to be successful on the Algebra one content assessments and the curriculum.

So in a way it took some of the, it was kinda scaffolding for the teachers. They had the things that they should pay attention to because they were course content critical. But also it was called out to them so they could focus on it and provide explicit language around it. Now, for the long term MLS we’ve had in the county for a long time.

They may not have had that explicit instruction because of teachers. Oh, they sound like they’re a fluent English speaker at this point. I don’t really need to explain to them how to, in social studies formulate a claim. Formulating a claim is a very specific type of disciplinary practices Dr. Lou mentioned that needs to be explicitly taught, especially for the kids who can get by and fly under the radar of our content teachers because they [00:21:00] sound fluent.

’cause you sound fluent, doesn’t mean that you can. Write evidence statements, claim statements like they have to do in social studies all the time effectively to where the content rubric is expecting you to perform at. And so that’s something that was a bit different because we finally had a venue in which to sort provide indirect PD to content teachers because typically we don’t provide PD to the content teachers from our division.

And that’s usually in the vein of the other content areas. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, that’s, and I think pointing out the, I love the term you used like that micro PD or micro training, I’m hearing from more and more districts now, like we don’t have the funds to pull teachers for a half day, or the subs to pull people all together.

So I think there’s a lot of power in approaching the work. In the way you were describing Michelle. 

Michelle Hunsberger: I was just gonna add to that, in these language amplifications, like Daniel said, we use specific language from the WIDA framework, the language features, and functions for. Particular standard. So standard for, sorry, language for a map, for [00:22:00] example, and it’s probably one of the first times that the content area teachers have seen those.

They don’t on a regular basis work with the standards, but because we embedded the standards and the language functions that features write in the language amplifications document, it becomes really clear what language they need. In order to be able to show their understanding of whatever the specific content task is.

Mandi Morris: I love that you’re just making it very clear and very accessible. That’s such great work, and I think often content teachers, when they have that bridge and somebody making some of those connections, it. Feels just like students. We have scaffolds. Adults need scaffolds too. So you created scaffolds for your content teachers in high school to say, here’s a language, here’s what you should be looking for, and it makes that work feel like they can feel empowered to do the work for their students.

Dr. Liu, let’s go back now, can we to the teaching and learning cycle? Are we ready? We covered the six Cs. We talked some about the amplification [00:23:00] work in your school district. Let’s dive in. 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of the teaching and learning cycle, we have different, what we call phases of activity. So what, what Michelle and Daniel presented at the WIDA conference.

They actually used the teaching and learning cycle. The WIDA have available on their website and they’ve been using for their professional learning sessions. But my teaching and learning cycle is a little bit different because I really wanted to place. Emphasis on reading and sustained reading, which is something I know that the school district has also really emphasized, especially this past fall.

But, so there are different phases. We start with what we call building shared knowledge of the topic. Well, there’s a lot of student discussion for shared understanding. Teachers design activities to build knowledge on the topics through reading research experiences. So those are the kinds of things that [00:24:00] teachers often already do, but that building share knowledge is very important.

Then we go to, and I’m gonna go as the cycle goes, but depending on where you are in terms of thinking about the genre that your students are going to produce, you can enter the cycle in in different phases. So I just wanted to preface from that. Then we have what we call sustained rating. That’s when students are learning about language.

They’re reading carefully selected texts. They’re exploring the language of the text. And this is really where this functional approach and my Lacy framework comes in. We can look at these different carefully selected tech. They can be short through three angles. So presenting content, figuring out like what is happening in the text.

Tool or the people and things involved. Then we go into what we call enacting relationships. You look at evaluation the rules and relationships by [00:25:00] participants, things like that. Then constructing a cohesive message is the third angle. So we look at how is the text organized and a structure, how is the language used?

So that can really happen in any phase, but really thinking about. Sustained reading in honing in into the three areas of meaning. So presenting content, enacting relationships, and constructing a cohesive message. So teachers plan activities to focus students on key paragraphs and explore language patterns.

Then we go in what we call deconstruction. So there’s a lot of modeling. So there’s teacher modeling. Student learning about the language of the text. So teachers really guide students in reading and talking to learn about the language of the text. And deconstruction has to be in the same genre that students are going to write sustained reading.

Students can read. Passages, texts in any genre, but deconstruction has to be really in the genre that [00:26:00] students are going to produce. Then after deconstruction, we have what we call joint construction, and that is talked about in the literature as the most critical phase of the teaching and learning cycle, and that’s where the teacher and students are building a text together as a class.

So they were writing together and they discussed language choices needed. So it’s guided practice, and so the teacher is in front of the room guiding the writing, but everybody is contributing, is writing. There’s a lot of preparation actually that goes before you go into joint construction. So. Joint construction is really critical.

Then an added phase that I included in my teaching and learning cycle is what we call collaborative construction or shared practice. That’s where students can work in pairs or groups to collaboratively write together. That’s, that doesn’t have. This phase is was added. I’ve worked a lot at the elementary school [00:27:00] level, so going from joint construction to independent construction sometimes at the elementary school level could be challenging for students.

And so I added that as. It’s a bridge. Then we finally go into what we call independent construction, and that’s when students write on their own, they write independently. There’s still teacher supports on targeted language features and all of that. But in a nutshell, that’s what the TLC is with all of the phases that I mentioned.

Mandi Morris: I’d love to talk for a moment about sustained reading. Sustained reading is a challenge for all learners, not just English learners. And I am old enough now to say like school has changed a lot, even in the 19 years that I’ve been in education. The school looks really different than it did in 2006 when I started teaching and students’ expectations around sustained anything has shifted.

And then COVID [00:28:00] was really interesting in, in our world, in the world of education. I would love to hear Daniel Michelle sustained reading. How are you like. Get into the nitty gritty. How are you doing it? How are you convincing teachers this is worth the work because it’s work in the classroom to get students to buy into sustained reading?

Michelle Hunsberger: I can, I have an exciting story to tell about this actually. So we did, we focused on sustained reading fall. So we had Dr. Lou came out in November to do another session with our middle school teachers. Middle school and high school teachers. And in the, in September our department did one. So we realized that when we go to classes, kids aren’t really in text.

Kids are not grappling with a complex text. It’s being read aloud to them or provided in whatever different ways. So we really focus on sustained reading and we talked about different ways that can look so [00:29:00] regardless or regardless of a student’s language proficiency level or time. US schools, every kid can interact with text.

It’s just gonna look a little different. So we talked about choral reading and partner reading and a purposeful read aloud as like an on-ramp. And I was, we were went into a middle school classroom last week to record, and they were partner reading and the, it was a co-taught classroom, so it was an ELD teacher and an ELA teacher.

And I went up to the ELA teacher and I was like, every single kid in this class is engaging in their text. They had, it was clearly a routine that kids knew. The teachers purposefully partnered the students, so the students part, the partnerships were up on the screen so kids knew. And the ELA teacher said, yeah, the ELD teacher was really pushing me to do this partner reading, and I didn’t want to.

And, but we did it. And now look. And it was just the most beautiful [00:30:00] thing to see. Again, every single kid had their book open and you could just see they were either reading out loud. They were listening and engaging in the text. 

Mandi Morris: That makes me wonder what was the text for every kid in the class to be engaged.

But it’s okay if you don’t remember the exact text, but I’m, I imagine the teacher in that scenario is doing a pretty good job of finding text that her classroom, which might not be the same as every, you’ve got a huge school district, that text in that classroom might not. Need to be the same as somewhere else, but she or he must be doing a pretty good job of choosing texts that is engaging.

Michelle Hunsberger: It was actually, it was JE and Hyde and the teacher framed it beautifully, and the first step of the teaching learning cycle is building shared knowledge. She clearly did that. The kids were ready to dive into the text and they’re ready to read it. We have a new curriculum for middle school this year and new [00:31:00] ELA curriculum, and so every student, every teacher actually is being asked to teach the same text, but I think the teachers are masterful in making whatever the text is, meet the needs of their kids.

Mandi Morris: Yeah. I’ll share a story here. My son was in reading intervention in first grade, second grade. Third grade COVID happened and I was just so concerned. Like he was already, and my husband and I are both in education. We’re both in the classroom at that point. We’re like, oh my gosh. Like how we read every night, like how, what are we doing wrong?

We’re both teachers. And it was like he loved being read to. Zero interest in reading. And it did not matter if he got to go to Barnes and Noble and pick out the books, like there was nothing that interested him. And we just really leaned into audio books and we thought, you know what? That we model reading at home.

We read every single night with him and if he loves audio books, and he got. So into the Harry Potter series and just, but through [00:32:00] audio books and I’m so happy to report that as an eighth grader, my son scored in like the 99th percentile in reading on his state exam and he is an avid reader, a middle school boy who was like, we were, was just like, if you can fail first grade reading right?

Was like, so I mean, I say that only to point out that reading can look. Really different, and it’s hard as a classroom teacher because you have so much pressure. I’ve got this one year and I have the joy of having that long journey with my son and his journey with reading. It’s a long journey. It’s not one year where he had those teachers as far as second, third, fourth.

They’re just so concerned. But I think there really is power in student interest. There’s power in. I’m gonna force you to do this thing that you hate, or, hey, you love audio books, like we are gonna buy you audio books, so we’re gonna rent audio books for the library. And when it caught on for him, it caught on.

And I just say that to [00:33:00] say that sometimes as teachers, we have to also give ourselves grace as students find their passion for reading in different ways. It can look different like the classroom, Michelle, that you were talking about. 

Daniel Yip: And I think that’s something that might be especially imperative for our secondary content folks because.

We have social studies teachers who are reading these very dense biographies and historical texts, primary texts. And then we also have the science folks who are reading some very technical manuals. And then of course we’ve got ELAs reading like Jekyll and Hyde. We needed some kind of system that was consistent that could be used in a fairly structured and similar way, no matter the content area.

And so our target is starting to shift towards, we gotta give them a chance to mess around with the complex text if we don’t give ’em a chance to mess around with the complex text. They won’t acquire the skill and elementary, we’ve got a little bit more time to provide that instruction, but they need to access the complex text now.

Yes, absolutely. We can find lots of different ways to give access to them, and also we need to provide them with that explicit instruction. Post COVID, A lot of folks were caught off [00:34:00] guard by the number of non-readers that were coming up as secondary ages that just weren’t prepared to interact with grade level complex text, and they needed something.

To provide that court of a sort of explicit instruction for literacy development, myself included, I came from a secondary background. Literacy development was not my forte. I needed to like actually spend some time in an elementary classroom watching a kindergarten teacher work her magic before I could start to understand what was going on here.

And I’m eternally grateful because that helped me understand what’s going on. Perhaps at the secondary level. 

Mandi Morris: Daniel, I love that you’re calling out. The students need the opportunity to mess around with complex. Text, and I wonder sometimes that as a teacher. You don’t want to fail, even if it’s in front of students, and it as a teacher can be very uncomfortable for students to work in complex text because you yourself might not have all of the tools and scaffolds in order to support students through that experience.

[00:35:00] And what I’m hearing from you is that having this model, having this framework. In some ways it creates, uh, like a soft landing for everyone, teachers and students alike, that we have this systematic way that we approach sustained reading, which we can all acknowledge is hard work and that it is worth the hard work for students to be able to engage with these rigorous texts.

Could anybody speak a little bit more to how that has felt for teachers from the teacher perspective? 

Michelle Hunsberger: I think it’s been a challenge there and teachers are. On both sides of the gamut, right? Some teachers are just like, I’m not ready for that. And some teachers, like the teachers that I had the pleasure of filming the other day that had all their kids reading, they were willing to take risks.

I think when teachers don’t want to give the complex text to their kids, they’re worried about like stressing them. We don’t want, we don’t want to get, this is too hard for our kids, but there’s a lot [00:36:00] that we’ve learned recently about. It’s, they have to exactly what Daniel said, like they have to engage.

They have to struggle, and that’s how you learn productively. So they have to struggle and we have to provide the support that they need. Dr. Lee was talking about high rigor, high support, and that’s what we’re trying to do with the teaching and learning cycle. Like here is the support for them. Here is how you can.

A teacher, a student, how to read. I learned this from Dr. Liu and I said it at the WIDA conference that often we assign rating. We don’t often teach writing, and this is a way to teach writing. We have to explicitly teach it because how else are students gonna know how to do it? 

Mandi Morris: That’s right. And the language for, as you mentioned earlier, Dr.

Liu, the different genres, and you said like the deconstruction has to be the genre for students construction, like when they’re producing that material. I think that’s so powerful because the language [00:37:00] required in those different skill sets. It changes, it shifts that. If you wanna speak to that more, Dr.

Lu, I’d love to hear you unpack that a bit more. 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: When you were thinking about genres, you were thinking about the purposes for that particular text and helping students understand that if you just name introduction, body conclusion, that’s not enough. That’s a very structural way of thinking about writing and with a functional approach.

We have different ways that we name the different parts of the text, or we call them stages, right? So different stages. Uh, there are genre frameworks called the moves. So. Those stages will be different depending on the genre that you are working with. And so helping students understand the nuances is very important.

And I think [00:38:00] Daniel has something he would like to say and then I’ll go back. 

Daniel Yip: No, that’s awesome. That’s exactly the point of our work with shifting the district in this role, realizing that we need a lot of buy-in from the content teachers. And one area that they’ve been looking for is like. We have students who are coming in who are limited in their development of their writing skills, their reading skills, the way they make sense in comprehend texts.

We need a structure for them to be able to do this in all the classes. So we saw Dr. Lou’s work as a way of beefing up our tier one instruction, much more explicit writing instruction, much more explicit reading instruction at the secondary level, because we have a lot of students who don’t have those foundations on the way in.

The teachers are feeling frustrated that I don’t have a means in which to get them caught up, aside from describing introduction, paragraph, body paragraph, and conclusion paragraph. I need something more than that. And so once again, common language for them to talk about. How do you teach reading, sustained reading in social studies classes or [00:39:00] deconstruct text with a student in algebra classes or in science classes is a structure we’re hoping to see.

So that. Really, every kid can benefit, but most importantly, our multilingual learners would have that explicit language instruction in two domains at least. 

Mandi Morris: Dr. Ra did you wanna follow up? 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: Thank you, Daniel, for mentioning that. I think that’s really critical to think about. How you name things does matter.

And so using the more functional, what we call metal language, right? So the functional metal language of the genres, how you name the different genres, how you name the different stages does make a difference because all of that is connected to their function, right? So the stages have functions within tech.

So if you are, for example, doing a personal recount, so that’s within the narrate key language user or what I call genre family, right? So you start with an orientation if you are [00:40:00] doing like an imaginative recount, right? So you’re engaging readers in a problem. Some kind of complication and then you are resolving that complication.

So if you think about an imaginative recount, you have what we call the stages or orientation, complication and resolution. Now, if you say you have an introduction, what, what this, what is the function of the introduction? It’s very structural, but when you say, I’m orienting my reader towards this. Problem complication that I’m now going to introduce, and you can actually see how the language shifts from stage to stage and then from the complication on complication takes a little bit longer in an imaginative count.

Then you find a resolution, and then there’s some markers. In the language, in the text that you can also find when you see that resolution stage. So naming using [00:41:00] these different names, again, this functional meta language is really important for kids because. You don’t just have introduction, body conclusion, right?

I think that’s a really critical part of the implementation of the teaching and learning cycle and this genre based approach. 

Mandi Morris: Absolutely. And what I’m hearing from you is you’re giving students a really clear blueprint. That they can use in a systemic way in order to accomplish the specific type of genre writing that they are being asked to do.

And I remember being a student and my ELE experience was very like, memorize the, this grammar, memorize the, this mechanics. There wasn’t like a more of that like whole experience make meaning of it. As you said earlier, Dr. Lou. But something clicked at some point when I realized, oh, these are formulas.

It’s just an introductory clause is five words. You put a comma, then you go, oh, a complex sentence. [00:42:00] You, and there’s some of those that formulaic way of thinking about grammar and mechanics. I, I found those things like it, they’re. It’s like having this little superpower and you can just memorize some of these.

This is a pattern that you can see and you can replicate. It takes some of the mystery away from writing and writing can feel so laborious and so convoluted. And what I’m hearing from you is really intentional work where you are trying to take away the mystery, call out the explicit with real. Clear, functional approach to instruction so that both teachers and students can feel empowered to do this.

Very important and really complex work. 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: Exactly, and I think that, yeah, it takes time and it takes vision from a school district, what we’re featuring here, it’s not happening everywhere in the United States for sure, but it does take vision from a school [00:43:00] district. To say, we need to bring in this person who has expertise, who has done this work, who’s going to train our trainers, we’re all going to be prepared to do this work with the school district, with the teachers.

So that was the initial, and I’m still collaborating with them and I’m now working with teachers. I actually have a meeting this afternoon with two of the secondary teachers who went. To my workshop in November. Actually, one of them also attended the year before and got really excited and so we’ve been collaborating now since November and we’re doing, doing coaching a little bit of, they’re working with an existing curriculum for ELA, and then we are really thinking about how do you then add the phases of the teaching and learning cycle, so.

The curriculum may have, let’s say, reading activities, but then they may not have the deconstruct, the deconstruction [00:44:00] phase, like really explicit. They may provide some models, but how do you actually then work with students to deconstruct text and add the joint construction? Very often you are not going to find deconstruction of joint construction in curriculum.

That’s. In curricula, I should say, that are available out there. So how do you then, as teachers, you take a look at the curriculum that you are using and then think about, okay, now I know about. The teaching and learning cycle, I know about the different genres that I want my students to, to really use and be able to, to get access to.

So how do I build in those opportunities with my existing curriculum, which I think is really critical because you’re not just doing it, you’re not reinventing the wheel and doing things from scratch. You have a curriculum that the school district has chosen. For the teachers to implement. Now, how do I go [00:45:00] in with a critical lens and think about what I’ve learned about the teaching and learning cycle and change a few things to meet the needs of the multilingual learners I have in my class.

So that’s like the next phase of our work together is me really working with teachers and we put in a couple of proposals for the WIDA conference. For this year. So hopefully they will be accepted with the instructional team, who they’ve been doing amazing work with teachers, coaching teachers themselves, and so we’ll have, I think a lot more to present on to write about.

So I’m really excited about this next phase that we are going into. For this work. 

Mandi Morris: That’s awesome. And I’m excited. I will look for you guys and St. Louis this year for the WIDA Conference. I would love to hear Michelle and Daniel from your lens, from your work, what are you feeling really excited about that’s on the Verizon for you?

Daniel Yip: I feel really [00:46:00] excited that our work with our multilingual learners is starting to go beyond just the language of surviving in school. It’s actually now moving more into the true domain of wida, which is the academic languages that they’re. Intending to be using across all the different content areas.

And so we’re getting to interface with a lot of folks that have never considered the power of the language in their content area. And how if you know it, you can wield it effectively. If you don’t, then you get left in the dust. And this approach allows the teachers to provide explicit instruction to teach our multilingual learners how to use it so they can better express themselves.

’cause they know this stuff. Many come from other literacies and other backgrounds that where they’ve learned these concepts. They’re just not sure how to do it in English, which is really short-changing our district because we can benefit from all these really diverse perspectives that could speak to it in different ways than we’re used to hearing, and we’re just not able to get out of them.

I’m also really excited as part of our immediate follow-up work. After running [00:47:00] that training from last summer, this past summer, we ran it with just the social studies teacher. Every high school social studies teacher had received explicit training in two day functional language approach crash course.

’cause it’s not a two day training, but we did our best to try to make it work in a two day training. But these are teachers, content teachers, social studies teachers who have never lived a language life and they’re not really thinking about these aspects of it. And we were hoping that they would find some concrete thing that they could latch on to saying, oh, this doesn’t seem that scary.

I recognize claim evidence from my content standards, and you’re gonna show me how to teach the kids how to do this effectively. Cool. So that’s our first group. And every summer following, we’re gonna try to. Hit another group, another grade level. We might change our approaches up a little bit because we’re just gonna shift more towards that micro PL type approach because we found a two day slog was a lot.

But we do have the benefit of some new folks, otherwise known as cross-functional team members. They are people who work directly under the directors over the principles. And [00:48:00] their whole job is to see how the ELD programming is rolling out at each individual school site. So we have 13 of them serving 211 schools.

Once again, not a great ratio. However, it’s better than what we had before. So they can actually lay eyes on are they using TLC in this ELA class? Are they trying to deconstruct in social studies and using the functional language approach? Do we have lots of teachers who are all contributing to talking about language in a meta linguistic way?

Our hope is we could extend that and just continue to try to plot along and train up all our teachers. Couple years or so. 

Mandi Morris: Michelle, what about you? 

Michelle Hunsberger: Yeah, and just to add to what Daniel said, I’m excited about everything he said. I do feel like we’re on a good trajectory. I think that the fact that we have the cross-functional team members helps us with impact.

So we can do as much professional learning as we want to, but if that professional learning doesn’t translate to the classroom or isn’t seen in planning an instruction. Then it’s not helping [00:49:00] kids or teachers, so the cross-functional team members can really help with the impact. I also am really excited because of the work we’ve been doing starting a couple years ago is there’s a huge shift of thinking and I don’t know really what like the switch was, but principals are much more interested in the welfare of their MLS in their school than I think they have been in the past.

And as a result, it’s improving things for the students, for the teachers and the students. And just that everyone, not everyone, but the county as a whole is definitely moving away from what we said earlier, like only the ELD teachers are in charge of language to everybody’s in charge of language. We’re definitely seeing that and we still have a long way to go, but change happens gradually.

Mandi Morris: Yeah, absolutely. And. The support that you have from the district being able to grow. Your team, as you said, is still a lot of schools for 13 people to be at and have [00:50:00] impact through this work. It sounds like you’ve been able to advocate for more people to support the work, which is very exciting. Dr. Lee, what about you?

You spoke a little bit to some things that you’re excited about. When you think about this project in particular, what’s something that you’re just really looking forward to in this next year? 

Dr. Luciana De Oliveira: So we haven’t really decided exactly what’s gonna happen this next year in terms of my involvement with the district, because there’s a lot going on, obviously, that they’re doing in like this micro teams.

Right. So that’s really exciting to me. But really just continuing to collaborate with the teachers. That I’m already collaborating with. As I mentioned, I have a meeting this afternoon with them really seeing how they’re implementing and changing their practices. Talking to me about what’s working, what’s not working so well, what they would like more support on.

And maybe we can do a presentation together in the future. Me and the team and maybe the teachers and the [00:51:00] instructional specialists who have been supporting the teachers on the ground, let’s say. That’s really, that’s really, I think, very relevant work and very important work. And I just signed a new book contract.

For the language based approach to content instruction at the secondary level. So really drawing on the work that I’m doing in Maryland, in Colorado with other teachers in South Carolina and other places around the country. So that late, what I call Lacey, so the Lacey Secondary book I will be writing in the summer and in the fall semester.

So I’m really excited about that and putting in writing some of the things that, some of the exciting things that we’re seeing in this work, not just in Maryland, but in other places as well. That’s all really, really relevant. 

Mandi Morris: Oh, that’s so exciting. It’s been amazing having you all on today. The work that you’re doing is really incredible and [00:52:00] it just, it takes a lot of courage to go and try to do something this big across a big school district, and I love that.

It seems like Michelle and Daniel, you’re so grounded and like it’s going to take time. And we knew that at the beginning and that’s okay. And also getting creative around how teachers approach. Professional learning and what feels accessible and sustainable and supportive. Not the one and done right, but something that you’ve got those cross discipline coaches, it sounds, and across your school district, and just thinking about it from the lens of both the teacher and student is so exciting to hear you unpack today.

This has been such a pleasure to have this conversation with you all. Thank you for being here.