Developing ESL Certification to Meet Local Needs: Lessons From the Field Webinar Transcript

Danny Torres:

Kate Wright:

Thank you, Danny. And we thank you all for joining us today. We know how busy you are, and we appreciate the time that you’re putting in to spend a little bit of it with us this morning or this afternoon, depending on where you are geographically. It is my pleasure to introduce to you today’s panelists. I will be serving as your moderator. And I am joined by Wanda Gonzalez-Crespo, who is the assistant superintendent for Reading School District in Pennsylvania, as well as Angel Zimmerman, who is the director of ESL for Reading School District. I’m also joined by Leslie Hamburger who will be starting us off this morning. She is the vice president for K-12 systems here at WestEd, as well as Lyn Westergard who is a program associate at WestEd and was a partner with Reading School District in this initiative.

We recognize that we have a variety of roles that are being represented in our audience today. We wanna let you know that we’ve worked hard to present content that will meet the needs of the information that you’re hoping to gain from today’s webinar. But as Danny mentioned at the beginning, please use the chat and the question and answer features in today’s webinar to reach out to us and ask questions or ask for clarification based on your role to make sure that you’re receiving the information that you are hoping to learn from today’s webinar. We will be covering a national landscape to get us started, and then we will be spotlighting a local program who is using a different approach to teacher certification.

We will talk a little bit about their program development and their design, as well as what it looks like for them for implementation. And I think most importantly today, we’re gonna be talking about how this certification program is serving to transform mindsets and practices in the classrooms at Reading School District. And then again, as Danny mentioned, we’ll have time at the end for questions and answers. And it is now my pleasure to pass the mic to Leslie Hamburger who will be the one who shares a little bit about the rationale and the national landscape related to this topic today. Thank you, Leslie.

Leslie Hamburger:

Thank you, Kate, and good morning or good afternoon to our participants It’s a great pleasure to be here with you today. So I want you to envision a classroom where students’ voices echo in Spanish, in Mandarin, in Arabic, in Vietnamese, given our current time of the year. And this is the current reality in our schools for pretty much all educators. So according to the National Center for Education Statistics, NCES, in 2021, English learners comprised 10.6% of all public school students, totaling over 5.3 million children. This marks an increase from 9.4% that we had in 2011, reflecting the growing linguistic diversity in our classrooms.

Well, I wanna see those classrooms be a vibrant, engaging, learning space for all learners. And the key to realizing that vision is a well-prepared and effective educator who believes all students can achieve and who feels well-equipped to support rigorous content and language learning for this multilingual population. Multilingual students come to us with immense potential. They possess valuable resources, worldviews, and knowledge, knowledge especially of their home languages and cultures. We need to offer them powerful learning opportunities.

Opportunities characterized by vibrant, intellectual push, by amplification, not simplification, and really a proleptic, future-oriented pedagogy that views students as immensely capable and our role as educators as one of ripening that potential. Yet, as our student population becomes more multilingual, our teaching workforce struggles to keep pace. Often this is a story really of scarcity, of scarcity of quality learning opportunities offered to multilingual learners, a story of schools and districts facing a scarcity of teachers willing and able to work with multilingual learners, and a story of scarcity of quality professional learning offered teachers to ensure their efficacy and success. In the 2017-2018 school year, nearly 65% of all public school teachers, so over 2 million educators, reported having at least one English learner in their classroom.

While the number of English learners continues to grow, the number of teachers equipped to offer them quality learning opportunities continues to lag. The majority of school teachers report teaching English learners, and yet only about 5% of all educators have some form of EL certification. And the number of certified teachers is decreasing. Nationwide, we will need an additional 76,443 English learner educators in the next five years, according to OELA, at a time when teaching shortages continue to grow and when the teaching profession continues to be as challenging as can be and people are leaving our profession. ESL and bilingual education jobs, in particular, where among the top three teaching positions with the highest vacancy rates in recent school years.

Data from NCES indicates that only 75% of ESL or bilingual education teaching vacancies were filled with fully certified teachers before the beginning of the 24-25 school year. This shortage is even more pronounced in schools that serve predominantly students of color and those in high-poverty areas, as we will hear from our partners in the Reading School District. The impact of this gap is profound. When students don’t have access to qualified educators who understand their linguistic and cultural backgrounds, their academic achievement and engagement suffer. Moreover, the burden often falls on under-prepared teachers, leading to burnout and high turnover rates.

The shortages are real, they’re growing across the nation, and we have a gap or a disconnect between the needs of the students we have in classrooms and the preparation we are offering teachers. Teachers that are in the profession report really very limited opportunities for professional learning and definitely less opportunities for achieving sort of additional certifications or endorsements to work with multilingual learners. So one would say, why should a school district take the lead in preparing and certifying teachers for multilingual classrooms? I would say that local programs offer a different kind of preparation that can really meet the challenges that we are facing at the local level.

And so some of the things that I would highlight would be the idea that a local program can be tailored to the unique needs of specific communities, ensuring that teachers are really well prepared and culturally responsive to effectively serve the students they have. Local programs offer a greater opportunity for a more job-embedded and hands-on learning, ensuring that teachers have deeper preparation, more practical and applicable opportunities to practice, to learn, to develop their craft, ensuring that their teaching practices are meeting the expectations of their students in their communities. Local programs can really foster a sense of community and belonging, making teachers more likely to stay in the area and continue their careers.

Educators trained within their districts are more likely to remain in their positions, really fostering stability and continuity for students. And that retention is particularly critical for our multilingual learners who benefit from consistent and experienced instruction. Finally, I would say that local programs promote innovation because they’re able to adjust more quickly to changing conditions. So a school district, for example, gets a huge influx over a school year of recent immigrants or refugees from a particular community. The school district can adapt to the conditions on the ground in a quick way, ensuring that they are implementing more innovative practices and quickly adjusting to the shifting conditions.

So I think really local programs benefit learners and communities in a variety of ways, and I will highlight a few that are on the screen right now. So on the one hand, district-based certification programs enable teachers to receive professional learning and development that is really aligned not just to the local demographics of students as I mentioned before, but most importantly to district policies and instructional priorities. And that alignment, that pedagogical coherence, really fosters improvements in instructional practice in student outcomes. English learners benefit from culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, but the localized approach in particular ensures that teachers are equipped with the relevant knowledge, beliefs, and practices to support their students’ success.

Another thing that I think is an important aspect of local programs is that district-run programs can address persistent shortages of qualified teachers by creating more pathways for school-based personnel to gain certification. And sort of grow your own teacher programs tend to produce educators who are more likely to remain long-term in the school districts, especially when there are other support structures in place. So this not only addresses the shortages, but it also promotes workforce diversity. And another point that I would recommend is that the local programs can ensure greater program alignment with not just state and federal requirements, but the local requirements around instructional initiatives and priorities, accountability frameworks.

So local programs are better able to streamline and integrate while remaining so compliant with federal and state requirements, and therefore, ensuring greater success for students. And the final point I would highlight is that locally developed programs are really uniquely positioned to incorporate the linguistic, cultural, and sort of historical background of their communities, ensuring that we sort of value the assets that students bring, but that we also engage in sustaining cultural assets and community resources. So district programs can embed those frameworks in that context in teacher preparation in ways that are really meaningful and sustained and very relevant.

So the growing number of English learners in our schools is both a challenge, but it’s an opportunity. And by proactively developing district-led certification programs, we can ensure that students receive high-quality education that they deserve. And so we really, I encourage us to empower our educators to meet the needs of our multilingual future, and let’s partner with our local communities to best meet their needs.

Kate Wright:

Thank you, Leslie. With that context, now we’ll take a moment or a few moments to learn about a local spotlight, a district who did just this. So Wanda, I invite you now to talk a little bit about what makes Reading School District unique and why was a local, in-district program for certification essential, including talk a little bit about what was the process, what were the steps you took, and what were your hopes in putting the time and effort into developing such a program at the district level.

Wanda Gonzalez-Crespo:

Thank you, Kate. Just to kind of provide some background and some context on our district, Reading School District, the Reading School District proudly serves the city of Reading in Reading, Pennsylvania, which is about 45 minutes west of Philadelphia. We are the urban hub of Berks County, Pennsylvania, but our community varies very drastically from the rest of the county in its ethnic diversity and its socioeconomic status. In 2011, Reading was identified as the poorest city in the country with a poverty rate of 41.3%, which was higher than any other city with a population of 65,000 or more residents at that time. So we are quite different from the surrounding suburban areas which are much more affluent and much less diverse in its overall ethnic diversity.

As a result, all of our 19 schools are Title I schoolwide projects through the Community Eligibility Provision. And as you can see on this slide, the makeup of our district is mostly 81% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch and 34% of our students are multilingual learners, which is a substantial population when you consider that the national rate is 10% multilingual learners across the the nation. We are at 34.15% at this time. 26% of our students are special needs. And of course, as in many other districts, there are students who are duly identified as both ELL and special needs as well.

Our district is overwhelmingly Hispanic Latino at 87%, with the majority of our families coming in from places like Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and many other countries. Our school district is comprised of 19 schools over several campuses. So when you look at the graphic here, we have 13 elementary schools, five middle schools, and then we have one giant mega high school of about 4,500 kids that’s spread across four different campuses. We also run a virtual academy for students who prefer remote learning. Just to give you some more context about Reading School District and our ESL program specifically, we are currently serving about 5,720 multilingual learners in the Reading School District.

Most of our students are in the early stages of language proficiency. Our program serves students from many different countries, and as you can see here from the list of languages listed, I’ll mention that Haitian is listed twice, but there are about 17 languages represented, but overwhelmingly, Spanish at 97% is our highest spoken language, our highest incidence language in our program. The next most spoken language is Haitian Creole at 2%. Now, many folks who are familiar with Pennsylvania assume that our really big school districts, like Philadelphia, and I know we have some friends from Philadelphia on this webinar, most folks assume that Philadelphia would have the highest concentration of English learners.

And while they are first in Pennsylvania in the overall enrollment of multilingual students, with about 22,000 from our last count, Reading School District has the highest concentration of multilingual learners at 34% compared to Philadelphia, which is roughly about 20% overall. So our context in Reading School District is very different than a lot of the other local school districts in this area. Next slide. There we go. All right. So given our context, as you might imagine, the Reading School district has long struggled to improve academic performance. However, when COVID-19 hit, the pandemic made everything so much worse, as it did for so many other school districts.

When we returned from the pandemic, our district became hyper-focused on mental health, behaviors, and social services, and as a result, we created many wonderful programs, significantly increasing number of social workers in the district, school counselors, and other social service and mental health programs within our district. However, our overall proficiency rates were in the single digits in math and at about 20% in English language arts and science. Our outcomes for multilingual learners were even worse. And while we knew we had to Maslow before we could Bloom, it soon became clear that we had lost our focus on our academic programs.

So as a result, we reached out to our colleagues at WestEd. WestEd has been working with the Reading School District in many different capacities, from the high school and Reading Apprenticeship implementation to the ESL Department working on QTEL training with our teachers. We have a strong, trusted relationship, a long-standing relationship with WestEd. We invited our friends from WestEd to come in to help us redefine what quality instruction would look like in the Reading School District, and that resulted in the instructional framework that you see in front of you. The instructional framework in the Reading School District centers on the idea that the most important thing that we can achieve is student engagement and increased learning for kids.

With that in mind, we identified several practices that we call pillars that are evidence-based practices proven to work with kids in a context like the Reading School District. So you’ll see within this graphic that we’ve been highly focused on providing every student a safe learning environment. We expect our teachers to take the time to intentionally plan lessons that are based on high expectations for all students, focused on the assets kids bring to the table, making sure that we provide kids quality interaction opportunities, and also checking in and keeping track of the impact of our instruction through formative assessment. This focus on classroom instruction has really made a huge difference in the outcomes for kids in Reading School District.

Next slide, please. Here we go. So with that in mind, we started to take a closer look at our ESL population and the way that we support our teachers in working with our population. As I said earlier, our context is very different here in Reading. The surrounding school districts do have language learners and multilingual learners, but not anywhere near the concentration that we have here in Reading. As a result, our teachers require a lot more in terms of very contextualized professional development. What we had found here in Reading School District is that we had many teachers who were ESL-endorsed. In the state of Pennsylvania, we don’t have a stand-alone ESL certification, we have what we call an ESL endorsement, and that endorsement is an add-on.

With that, we had many teachers that had that endorsement, but who were still struggling to teach the students that they had in front of them. We had had multiple conversations with folks at the Department of Education and there had been a suggestion that we look at the work that was being done in Pittsburgh-area schools. Pittsburgh School District had created their own ESL certification program that was contextualized by their curriculum and by the needs of their local population. So with that, we reached out to the Department of Education to ask for more information on how to apply to become an alternative ESL certification provider, and that allowed us to focus on what happens in our classrooms and really provide our teachers an educational experience that focused on the relevant context of their classroom and their curriculum.

So that led us to ask some questions. What can we do? Can we offer graduate-level courses? Well, it turns out we could. In coordination with our local IU, we’re able to offer teachers all kinds of different credits, continuing education credits, but we also have a relationship with the Ana G Mendez system in Puerto Rico, which was one of multiple universities that we had reached out to looking to partner with. Ana G Mendez is actually accepting our credits and offering teachers opportunities to then enroll into their master’s program, so it has led for us to create a program that really has become really robust.

Our teachers are able to take their classes for free, their classes count towards their movement on the pay scale, and every one of our teachers who’s gone through the program has had nothing but positive things to say about the fact that it is focused on working in the Reading School District. Next slide. So the steps that we had to take to make this happen was first we had to engage our stakeholders to find out if there was an interest. Overwhelmingly here in the Reading School District, teachers were 100% on board with getting their ESL endorsement. However, there were financial constraints on their end that made it difficult for them to pursue that despite the fact that we have a very robust tuition reimbursement program.

So we decided to create a program that we would then fund. Teachers take these courses for free. We reached out to the State Department about the application process. We worked about a year to complete that application, it is not an easy process. Those of you who work in higher education know that when you create a new program or a new course, it’s a very rigorous process. So it took us about a year to complete the application, and we engaged in expert partners to assist in the completion of the application and in the design of the program. WestEd has been essential in designing the actual content of all of our courses. So all of our courses are rooted in evidence and in research.

And then once we submitted that application, all we had to do was sit back and wait. It took a few months until they reviewed and we had some back and forth between the Department of Education and the district. And then ultimately, we did receive approval, which led to us running this really amazing program that we’ll share with you today. Ultimately, at the end of all of this, we decided that we needed to have a goal for the number of teachers that we wanted to see certified in the Reading School District. So what we decided was that the percentage of teachers who hold an ESL program certificate will match or exceed the percentage of multilingual learners enrolled in every school in the Reading School District.

So here you see a snapshot of a list of our buildings, the number of students that they had enrolled in their school, the number of ELs enrolled in their building, and then the percentage of staff in each building who are already ESL-certified. And then you’ll also notice that we have the difference calculated in terms of the number that are there and the number we would like to see. By the end of June, 2026, you see the number or the percentage of teachers that we would like to see certified in each building. So our goal is to increase the number of teachers who are certified and prepared to work with our multilingual learners.

Kate Wright:

Thank you, Wanda. Appreciate this background, and we’re gonna come back to you to talk about impact in just a little bit. I’m now going to ask Lyn to join us. She is one of the co-partners from WestEd who helped to support the development and the design of the program in Reading. Lyn, if you could talk a little bit about the foundational components of designing and developing this kind of in-district certification project.

Lyn Westergard:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Kate. So when co-designing this program and the courses, we really grounded our approach in Reading’s instructional framework, as Wanda just outlined, which is very asset-oriented and is focused on high expectations and quality learning for all students and particularly for multilingual learners. So we paired this with the domains of teacher expertise, first outlined by Shulman and later expanded by Aida Walqui. And we know that preparing educators to serve multilingual learners requires more than just strategies. Quality teaching and learning are really grounded in multiple interconnected domains of expertise.

And so as outlined in the framework, we really wanted to invite educators at Reading to think critically about their vision, their core beliefs about students and language and equity, and their motivation for being an educator in general and also for enrolling into this credential program. And so that exploration of beliefs is what will shift mindsets, which is a goal of the program, really to change classroom practice. So we emphasize building this strong knowledge of language development, of disciplinary content and language, and pedagogy.

And so, of course, that knowledge then needs to be translated into practice, so we designed a program where teachers were continuously implementing new practices in their classroom, learning new things, trying them out, reporting back, and we created a space for that deep reflection on their own experiences, their instructional choices, and how that impacted student outcomes. And so on this next slide, we designed these four courses or these five courses to really reflect each of those elements of teacher expertise. So we started with a foundations course that invited teachers to explore the realities of multilingual learners in their classroom and in Reading School District.

The next course is a focus on language development, really digs into the theories and approaches of language development and what it means to think and learn in multiple languages. This is followed by the culturally responsive teaching course and what that looks like in all disciplines. What is culturally sustaining practices? What is culturally responsive teaching? And what does that mean for a high school math teacher? Next we focused on a course around disciplinary language and learning and literacy, the language of and for math and science and social studies, and why does understanding the language of your discipline matter.

And then the final course is the instruction and assessment course that’s really focused on designing, implementing, and reflecting on instructional practices that promote excellence for multilingual learners. And so the program in general on the next slide really consists of the elements that support the intentional weaving and spiraling of those core ideas that Wanda outlined within the instructional framework and also those domains of teacher expertise. So the program includes five courses that are going to meet in person. There’s also a PLC component that’s really grounded in students and classroom practice. There’s also field experiences where teachers are going into the field, into other classrooms, they’re collaborating with other departments and families in the district to gain a holistic picture of the larger system.

And of course, there are readings and learning experiences that teachers are participating in throughout the program and multiple assessments along the way. And the next slide really zooms into a single course. All of the courses are 90 hours, this is all aligned with the State Department. So each course is about a semester long. It includes 24 hours of in-person learning and an additional 10 hours of an in-person PLC where that work is really student and classroom-focused. There’s between 5 and 20 hours of field experience per course that are aligned with the goals of the individual course.

And then, of course, a large chunk of the course are asynchronous work hours where educators are completing readings, they’re doing lesson planning, working on assignments and in projects. And then finally, to make sure that we were successful in our program design, we used an iterative development model where a team of course designers at WestEd met with program directors and course facilitators at the school district. We would co-develop every single section of the course, everything from deciding on the readings for each unit, the learning experiences, the assignments that teachers would complete.

And then we would meet again to reiterate on these ideas, build and flesh out the ideas. Course facilitators would then teach the course, provide feedback to the team. They would collect data, both formal and informal data, from course participants. And then we would revise and that work continues. This continuous improvement cycle is ongoing as these courses are meant to be dynamic so that they do stay meaningful and relevant to the local Reading School District context.

Kate Wright:

Thank you, Lyn. I’m now gonna talk a little bit. I am not. I’m now going to invite Angel to talk a little bit about implementation. Angel, you led this work at the Reading School District, which was an enormous project and undertaking as far as actually taking it from concept to a real thing happening within your district with your teachers and within classrooms. Could you describe the process? And then I think what might even be most helpful for our participants today, could you talk a little bit about what you learned along this journey?

Angel Zimmerman:

Sure, thank you, Kate. And hello, everyone. We were the lucky ones who got to implement the program, so we got the fun part. So in terms of that, there definitely are a lot of logistics, and some of the logistics we had thought of through the planning process, and there was other things that came up along the way that we hadn’t thought about, and we have to constantly be refining and adjusting. In terms of educator recruitment, that has been fairly easy for us, and we really haven’t done too many creative recruitment efforts. We’re basically at this point pushing out messaging through district email, through our website, through our ESL Department website or our portal I should say, and just word of mouth between teachers that are in the program and the supervisors that go to their schools that can talk to different teachers about joining the program.

And principals as well, they also talk to their teachers about the program that we have. In terms of facilitator identification, we are very blessed to have a very large central office ESL Department. So in addition to myself, we have seven other ESL supervisor positions, and this kind of work is the work that all of us love the most. So currently I saw someone had a question about who’s teaching the courses. Currently it’s all of our supervisors teaching the courses. And then we do have several administrators throughout the district, principals and assistant principals who are ESL-certified, so they are able to teach courses if they would like and if we need help with that, but primarily it is our ESL supervisors that are teaching the courses.

In terms of funding, we are using Impact Aid funds that our district received after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Our ESL Department was allocated a large portion of that money, and so that was what we were using to get this started and up and running. And as that money is spent down, then we will hopefully continue the program with federal funds, hopefully, including Title III funding. Wanda already talked about this a little bit. One of the things that we thought about is, how can we extend our program? We can award Act 48, which is our continual education hours, to our students, but some of our teachers are holding Instructional I certificates and they might need to convert them to Instructional IIs.

So we needed a way that we could do that. So we had to go through a separate application process with the state to allow our local intermediate unit to award CPE credit for our courses so that they can get those towards the needed credits for their level two certificates. We also partnered with the UAGM in case our teachers wanted to pursue this further and go into a master’s program. And so UAGM was very gracious in accepting our courses into their program at no cost to the teachers. Currently we have our first cohort. They were started in September of 2023. I saw the question about how often do they take the courses.

The best progression that we have found is spring, fall, I’m sorry, fall, spring, summer, fall, spring, so they get the program done in two school years. And so cohort one started last fall and they just finished up this spring. We have cohort two that’s going to be finishing up next year, as well as cohort three. And then we just started recruiting for cohort four, and I think we’re already up to 18 applications for that cohort. So as you can see on those numbers, each cohort is usually around 20 teachers and/or administrators, ’cause we have had some administrators join as well, and 20 seems to be a nice number to have in each course. Lessons that we’ve learned along the way. Collaboration can be challenging.

That’s something we always talk to our teachers about, how they should collaborate more with their grade-level teachers or their content teachers or even a teacher and an ESL teacher. But they always say the same thing to us, they don’t have enough time or maybe not enough opportunity, maybe they don’t have the same mindset of the person that they’re collaborating with. We are lucky that we had the same mindset as WestEd as we were collaborating on building these courses, but time was definitely challenging. We got into a good groove of meeting every two weeks to touch base on things, but if you’re interested in doing this, I would say definitely establish that time where you actually are reading all the material, looking at all the activities so that you can have a well-informed discussion when you’re meeting.

Clear expectations are crucial. You assume that when you’re going into something like this and you have your first cohort of teachers, you’re assuming that they all know that they’re gonna be coming to every class, and they’re gonna be doing all these assignments, and they’re not already enrolled in another program that’s on the same night. And then you get there and you realize, oh my gosh, we have to be really explicit about all of these things. I think the one main thing was just making teachers understand that this was not just additional PD, this was actually a graduate-level program, and so the expectations were very similar to what you would experience at a university. Again, lots of logistics to manage.

We do have a supervisor, or we did have a supervisor who had, one of her big tasks was being the program coordinator for this program. Unfortunately she moved on to another district in October, and so we’ve been each trying to pick up the pieces of that. But we definitely wanna get back to a dedicated program coordinator for next year. Revision is an ongoing process. Like Lyn said, sometimes you go and you teach something, and once you teach it, you come back and you say, this didn’t quite work, so we rework things and change things from time to time. But the most important thing is, what we all love in our department is just how much time and opportunity that we have had to be able to work with these teachers and focus on the instruction of English learners. So that has really been invaluable.

Kate Wright:

Thanks, Angel. I will say keep your camera on, and I’ll invite Wanda to join you. We’re gonna transition to talking about the outcomes, what you’ve experienced in regards to making headway towards transforming mindsets and practices. And so I’ll ask you to talk a little bit about, I think we start by talking a little bit about some of the assignments and how they’ve impacted teachers, and then really to some of these big kind of celebrations that you’ve been able to have most recently as you get to the end of your third cohort.

Angel Zimmerman:

Okay, so this first slide is just showing you one of the course projects. This comes out of the Second Language Development Course. So it’s a cultural autobiography that the students have to reflect on their own culture. And it might seem like an easy assignment at first, but as they start digging into it, they realize that they’ve never really thought about their own culture and how their culture impacts the way they think and the way they teach. And they really find that even though it’s sometimes easier to identify culture in people outside of your own group, it’s sometimes hard to really know what is my culture, and so they really have to dig deep into that. So the next slide just gives a takeaway from that assignment.

Wanda Gonzalez-Crespo:

And on this particular slide, that takeaway, specifically, “Writing my cultural autobiography made me realize how much my own experiences shape the way I teach. It pushed me to think differently about the assumptions I bring into the classroom.” If there’s anything that we have noticed with the teachers who’ve gone through this program is that there really has been a mindset shift in the way they talk about multilingual learners. Some of the teachers that were in this first cohort that just graduated, I’ve known for quite some time.

And it was interesting when they came together at the end to talk about their experiences going through this program, how all of a sudden they went from having an attitude as teachers of, this population is so hard to teach, or I can’t figure out how to teach this group of students, to, oh my goodness, I didn’t realize that it just took a little bit of tweaking to the work that I already do for me to really connect with my multilingual learners. The conversations went from being very deficit-oriented to being very asset-oriented and looking at the students for what they bring to the table, which has been a really impactful piece of evidence that we’ve noticed as we go through these courses.

Angel Zimmerman:

And so the second one, this was another course project, this was how they ended their whole program. On April 23rd, their last class, they had a learning symposium poster where they had to create a poster project of all the things that they felt that they learned throughout this program.

Wanda Gonzalez-Crespo:

In this first picture, up here on the top half of this slide, you see Dr. Tamara Smith who’s one of our assistant principals in one of our local middle schools. And she, along with a group of teachers, was also very interested in participating, and as an administrator felt that going through this program helped her learn how to better provide feedback to her teachers who were working with language learners in their classroom. So when I asked her, “Would you recommend this program to other administrators,” she said, “Hands down. This has been one of the most incredible experiences. I’ve learned so much, not just about working with multilingual learners, but about just generally good practices for the classroom.”

And the teacher on the lower half, the pair of teachers on the lower half, if you notice the poster that’s being held, it says, “It’s not that deep.” And in that particular case, the teacher was very excited to reflect on her own practice and say, hey, apparently I’m already a really good teacher ’cause I’m doing really great things. And a lot of what we talked about resonated with me, but I also learned what it takes for me to be able to reach a student who’s a newcomer or what it takes for me to reach a student who’s struggling to develop their language on the higher ends of language proficiency. So it was really interesting to hear the connections that each one of our teachers during the symposium.

Angel Zimmerman:

I’ll just add here on these two pictures, the one on the right, you can see the topic of one of their presentations, empower yourself. So that’s what we talk a lot about to them. We really advertise our program that we’re not just doing this program to create more ESL-specific teachers, but that all content teachers need this knowledge to be able to reach their students. So this is a way that you can empower yourself. In these pictures, we also have reading specialists who have entered the program. And the picture on the left is one of our life skills teachers. So we take on teachers from all different content areas and departments. And then these are some of our high school teachers. We were initially targeting secondary teachers because that’s where we saw the most need. It’s been a little bit tougher to get them into the program, but this whole first cohort was all secondary teachers.

Wanda Gonzalez-Crespo:

What we found was there was a lot of reservation on the part of high school teachers because there was this idea that we would make them ESL teachers. But I think once they went through the program, they realized, as long as you have an EL in your classroom, you are a teacher of English learners. So being pulled out of their current program, whether they’re a science or a social studies teacher, and being told they have to be an ESL teacher, I think they quickly realized, oh wait, I already am, so there’s no moving me out of my department. Although, Angel, I do believe you also had some teachers who at the end of this were interested in transitioning into being formal ESL teachers, correct?

Angel Zimmerman:

Absolutely, Yes.

Kate Wright:

Thank you, Team RSD. Thank you, Wanda. Thank you, Angel. We’re gonna move and save the last 10 or so minutes of our time to answer questions. I see two questions about dual identified and dual immersion. Could you talk a little bit about how you might support students who are duly identified as both special education and English learners, and whether you address dual immersion or dual immersion language programs within the courses that your teachers are taking?

Angel Zimmerman:

I can start that answer, but maybe Wanda will add some to it. As far as duly identified students, that’s always the challenge, making sure that they’re receiving services from both departments. So we do a lot of work with that with our administrative staff and how we can schedule those students. And then, yes, during the classes, we do have different pieces that work on that. As far as where we are with dual immersion, I’ll pass that one on to Wanda, and she can address that one.

Wanda Gonzalez-Crespo:

So when we talk about dual immersion in Reading School District, our students are primarily taught in English, all of our courses are in English. We have been working on developing coursework, talking to our staff and our teachers about the possibility of introducing some more native language instruction in a more structured way, but we are not at that point right now. The majority of the teachers working in the Reading School District are monolingual English-speaking teachers, and the folks who are bilingual typically are in our paraprofessional groups. So we have to take a closer look at how we recruit some additional teachers who are indeed bilingual and looking at how we can create those programs for us here.

Kate Wright:

Thanks, Wanda. Something else that I see in the chat is logistics, so how many credits were each course and what was the structure where the courses were offered? So for example, Angel, those decisions that were made about spring and summer and fall, sort of how did you find were the best way to provide opportunities for the courses, particularly since they were in person, that worked with your teachers’ schedules?

Angel Zimmerman:

Sure. So in terms of the credits, four of the courses are three-credit courses and one class is a four-credit class. And then as far as the way we roll them out, we started in the fall, so we did fall, spring, summer, fall, spring. Our courses that are during the school year are 12 weeks long with 10 in-person sessions, so there are two weeks that they don’t meet for class. Usually that is a holiday week, or if the course instructor has another week that they need off, they pick those two dates ahead of time. Our summer course is a 10-week course, and it is eight sessions long. The first and last class of that one are in person and the other six are virtual.

We decided to go that route for the summer course, just knowing that, one, our teachers might be traveling pretty far to get to work each day. So during the summer when they don’t typically, obviously they’re not driving to work. So we wanted to keep that virtual. And then also to the best of our ability, sometimes people, we don’t know when everybody’s vacations and things are gonna be over the summer, so that at least it gives them the option to be able to log on to class from a location other than their home if they are away. The first year we decided we were gonna start the first cohort in fall, and then we started another one right away in spring.

We found that the spring start date is not very good because then it takes the whole program over the course of three school years because we only wanted to have that one class in the summer. So we decided we’re not gonna do any more spring starts anymore. So we will do fall each year, and if we would have enough candidates that want to join the program, we could potentially start two cohorts at the same time in the fall, but we are not gonna use the spring start.

Kate Wright:

Thanks, Angel. There’s a question in the chat around your PLCs, which I do think is a really unique feature of the program. Could you talk just a little bit about what is comprised of your PLC?

Angel Zimmerman:

The PLCs really are a deep piece to the program because it’s usually the last 45 minutes of class where we decide who’s gonna be in the PLC, usually based on content area or grade level. That way they get to work with people from across the district, people that they might not know because they’re not in the same school with them. So what we really noticed by the end of the program, not only are these teachers excited about what they’ve learned in terms of teaching English learners, but they also have created more than friendships with these people. They’ve spent a lot of Wednesdays with these people over the last three years, and so they really have grown to be good friends.

So those PLCs give them a time to work on things together and figure out how they can implement certain strategies or ideas into their classroom. And so sometimes there will be like a mini assignment that they have to do as a PLC, and then come back and report out to each other the following week.

Kate Wright:

Thanks, Angel. Something else I see in the chat relates to students and student outcomes. And maybe it’s a little early to talk about data, but I know we started our conversation today talking about centering the need for these programs around the students, right, and the diversity of the students in your classrooms. So, can you talk a little bit about any impact you’ve seen on the benefit to students to have this asset-based approach within the classrooms in Reading?

Angel Zimmerman:

Sure. It is a little bit too early till we get this next WIDA ACCESS scores back. So the last year for the WIDA 2024, we only had that first cohort who had one class, so that was really the only class that would’ve affected that data. But now once we get to the results of this past year’s WIDA ACCESS, we’re hoping to look at what are the outcomes on that specific test for students who were in classrooms of teachers who went through the program versus students who were in classrooms of teachers who did not go through our program. I always say that Leslie always said to me, “How are we going to monitor the effectiveness of this program? How are we gonna know that it’s making a difference?”

So that is our one data piece. We can also look at our state assessments, our PSSAs in Reading and our ELA and math. Then we are doing the piece with mindsets and giving teacher surveys to see what their mindsets were before they enter the program and as they leave. And then also the third piece is just monitoring instruction. We have like a whole walkthrough kind of process where we’re looking for specific things that we feel that we have taught throughout this program and seeing if instruction is changing.

Kate Wright:

Maybe it’s best to talk maybe a little bit about what are your next steps. You’ve got your program in place. Are there any other things that you’re looking towards in either sustaining or enhancing what you’ve started?

Angel Zimmerman:

In terms of enhancement, one of the things that I started doing, I had taught the first class of cohort one and cohort three, and then with Lyn being in and out on all of the program development, one thing that I felt for me, I just still felt I needed a bigger, better picture of the whole entire program. So after I was finished teaching cohort one, I decided I was gonna, I’m sorry, cohort three, this one that just started, I am following them through the program. So after they left me, now I attend class with them because I wanna experience it as a participant to see what are they learning, and then I take notes and then I meet with the course instructor and we talk about what went well, what should we do differently there. Because, again, I want the whole broad picture of what the whole program looks like.

This summer we have big hopes and big dreams of really going through everything again together, making sure we like the flow of the courses, and making sure that we’re really hitting everything that we wanna hit. I think we’ve reflected on, what I reflect on when I watch the courses is, are we presenting what needs to be presented so that they are then doing it in the classroom? So we’re always reflecting on that and thinking about that.

Kate Wright:

Thank you. Thank you, Wanda, and thank you, Angel, for giving us sort of this view into a pretty fabulous and amazing project that you’ve been able to complete in Reading. Much appreciated. As I’ve noticed that Danny put in the chat, we will be answering any questions we didn’t get to with a follow-up email, and there will be a survey to ask for your feedback or any additional needs that you have. I thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate your time, and we appreciate the partnership that we’ve had with Reading School District. It’s been an amazing two years. We’re incredibly proud of the work that they’ve done and the impact that they’ve had in their classrooms, and we thank you for taking time to be with us this morning to hear a little more about that. Have a wonderful rest of your Thursday.

Danny Torres:

Thank you, Kate, Wanda, Angel, Lyn, and Leslie for a great session today. And thank you to all our participants for joining us, we really appreciate you being here. For those of you interested in learning more about the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd, visit us online at qtel.WestEd.org. That’s Q-T-E-L.WestEd.org. Feel free to reach out to Kate and Leslie via email if you have any questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Kate at [email protected], and you can reach Leslie at [email protected]. And finally, you can sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at WestEd.org/subscribe. With that, thank you all very much for joining us. Have a good day.