Welcome to Cultural Connections Lab. I'm your host Dr. Kelly Forbes. We are here to talk with educational professionals around the world to impact and influence the education system as we focus on cultural connections and the education of multilingual diverse students.
We're excited to have you join us today. We sincerely hope that you enjoy the show.
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Welcome to another episode of Cultural Connections Lab with myself, your host, Dr. Kelly Forbes. I'm so excited to be with two of my all-time heroes in the field of bilingual and multilingual education.
Here I have with me Drs. Thomas and as well Dr. Collier. Dr. Regina Collier is Professor Emerita of Bilingual Multicultural ESL Education at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, located in the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C.
She is best known for her work with senior researcher Dr. Wayne Thomas on school effectiveness for linguistically and culturally diverse students, working with many school districts in all regions of the U.S. since 1985.
Spotlighted by the national and international media, their award-winning national research studies have had a substantial impact on school policies throughout the world.
Since 1988, Drs. Thomas and Collier have been regularly interviewed by the popular media, Cultural Connections Lab being one, with 215 published newspaper articles and interviews on television and radio in the U.S. and abroad, reporting on their research findings.
Drs. Collier and Thomas have given 268-plus keynote speeches and 530-plus presentations at international, national, and state conferences.
They have also conducted education leadership training for superintendents, principals, and education policymakers in 33 U.S. states and 16 different countries.
Drs. Collier and Thomas are authors of five books that summarize all their research, Educating English Learners for a Transformed World, Dual Language Education for a Transformed World, Creating Dual Language Schools for a Transformed World, Administrators Speak, with 24 other collaborative authors, Why Dual Language Schooling and Transforming Secondary Education, Middle and High School Dual Language Programs, with 19 collaborative authors.
All five books in this series are published in print and electronic form by Dual Language Education of New Mexico, Winfrey Press. A shout out to them.
These books present a readable synthesis of research in our field written for all educators and policymakers, including an overview of the Thomas and Collier research findings with their research figures for staff developers to use.
The first, second, and fourth books have been translated into Spanish and are available in electronic form.
In addition, Dr. Collier has 84 other publications in the field of language education.
In 1989, Dr. Collier received the Distinguished Faculty Award from George Mason University for Excellence in Teaching, Scholarship, and Service.
Proficient in Spanish and English, having lived in Central America during part of her childhood, she has served the field of bilingual ESL education for 53 years as parent, teacher, researcher, teacher educator, and doctoral mentor.
In 2005 to 2006, Dr. Collier and Thomas served as visiting scholars at the University of Texas El Paso, the University of Texas Pan America, now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and Texas A&M University Corpus Christi.
Our other guest with us, Dr. Wayne Thomas is Professor Emeritus of Evaluation and Research Methodology in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.
His PhD training and primary professional experience are in program evaluation methodology and social science research methods.
He also has extensive experience in designing large scale databases and developing computer software for purposes of student testing, program evaluation, and educational data management.
His research and publications focus on the evaluation of school effectiveness for linguistically and culturally diverse students and Title I students and the evaluation of educational technology applications.
He is a former computer programmer and analyst, high school math and physics teacher, and school system central office administrator in school planning, testing, and program evaluation.
He teaches doctoral courses in program evaluation, advanced quantitative research methods, and instructional technology, advises doctoral students on program evaluation and research methods issues, and directs doctoral dissertations.
He has formerly served as director of the University Center for Interactive Educational Technology and as head of the graduate program and instructional technology.
Since 1985, he has collaborated with Dr. Virginia Collier in work on school effectiveness for linguistically and culturally diverse students.
Currently, he is a senior author with Dr. Collier of the largest studies ever conducted to investigate long term school success for English learners.
Their award winning joint research has been utilized by many school systems in the US, including myself, and abroad to reform the education of linguistically and culturally diverse students and to promote school improvement for both native English speakers and English learners.
You can find more information about them at www.thomasandcollier.com.
We will have that link in our podcast. A big welcome and a huge thank you to Drs. Thomas and Collier. Thank you so much for being with us today. It's truly an honor to have you.
Thank you, Kelly.
Thank you so much.
Well, I am just so thrilled to be able to learn more from you and to have our listeners to be able to have the opportunity to, you know, partake and engage in this conversation with us considering dual language bilingual multilingual education today, and the role that culture plays in that and I know that you all have
a past and a history I was able, I believe that the last time I actually saw you all was in my living room on my screen you don't know that we've been friends for a long time since 2008 whenever I began my first master's degree.
That's whenever I first met you but you hadn't met me yet.
And then just a few years ago I believe it was maybe two years ago, you all were keynote speakers for the California Association for bilingual education, and I was able to listen to your to your keynote and learn a little bit about how not only you two met but also how you met and
they got into this research.
Could you share with us a little bit about
how you guys started.
Well we first met at George Mason University as brand new freshly credentialed faculty members assistant professors in, let's see, fall of 1980 right seems like a long time ago, because it was a long time ago anyway we first met her and ginger and I were had number of conversations
about what we were both interested in professionally inside and outside of faculty meetings and so it soon became apparent to me that she was most vitally interested in issues involving English learners and students who are not classified as English learners but who come from a non English
background. And that was basically it's for seemed to me her entire focus. And as I've said in other contexts I had did not have that focus I went from very monolingual central Virginia.
And so, I didn't know what she was talking about to a large extent although I do have, I'm an experienced educator I work for school district, as your introduction indicated so I knew in general what she was talking about but I had no familiarity at all with
English learners and my first route of the box impression was, you know, she's, she's, yeah, she's a little weird.
Okay.
Yeah, I thought she was a had a few screws loose frankly, and.
But it was because I didn't really at that time at all understand the context in the situation that English learners find themselves in, in the, these United States of America, and gradually over time, she began to make a good enough case that I was actually
willing to move past my initial I don't think so to a more open posture, and then we have in particular I was just shouting out that bilingual education is the most important thing for these kids, and Wayne felt well shouldn't they learn English first and so he
was a good old monolingual English speaker who'd had a lot of courses in foreign languages but but no, no, I've studied three languages but I have not mastered any of them really to a native speaker level certainly.
So it isn't that I didn't think that languages are good idea they are.
But I really didn't understand the situation of English learners in this country I really didn't. And she of course had lived in Central America, her father was a professor of Central American history and so they were very thoroughly immersed in the long and
extensive cultural backgrounds of several Central American countries, I had none of that I was, I was a experienced American Virginia educator who had no clue about English learners, but gradually I was able to learn.
And finally I said all right.
We need to find out what's going on here so let's. I don't know what the answer is, you may be right, you may be crazy like I initially thought, but we can solve this by analyzing data that's what I do.
That's what I specialize in.
I was a data scientist before the term data science was invented. Okay, we'll put it that way I was a data scientist in the 70s, and in the 80s and later. Now my alma mater the University of Virginia and Charlottesville Virginia has an entire school of data
science. So that's how far things have come.
We are back now and analyzing our first study and I'll give you the short version my first reaction when I saw what very advanced these students were English learners but they were in a very advantage to English only instructional context, well trained teachers,
superior curriculum, everything you would ever want from the, you know, the enabling things that school districts put together to provide quality education, it was all their small class size, everything large, large number of Asian students in this, in this initial
middle class Asian students. So we were saying okay if this, this is a good place to find out whether bilingual programs really matter or not. And I looked at the results and I can't tell you exactly what I said but it was, this is a,
the name was rated G, I'm sure, but I said, oh my, you know inside a different world. Oh yeah, these students are at the 19th percentile when compared to native speaker, native English speakers who are on average at the 50th percentile,
and that's after they've been here seven, ten years. Yeah. On the test in English. They did fine in math. Even more disturbing they were doing well in school when they measured by their grades. All A's on their report cards, the teachers loved them.
How can this be? And then the realization hit me. I said it again, oh my, this is true throughout the United States in all 50 states, isn't it?
Yes, it is. Yes, and eight million student records later.
We have shown that in in data set after data set. Yep. But that official, I mean that initial study, the results of that really focused my attention on, oh, she's not crazy at all. In fact, if anything, she has understated the case and we have, we had a hundred and what
was it, 80,000 students in that first data set. This was not a study of 12 kids over here in the corner somewhere. Okay, this is a big school nationwide. One of the largest school districts in the country, I think number 10 at that time.
And so it was a lot of oh my, oh, oh my, you know that kind of thing.
And then I got him committed to our field. Woohoo. Yeah, way to go, you won them over.
Anyway, yes, I did essentially decide that this group of English learners is greatly in need. It's greatly underfunded. It's a very large group currently, and we can say note in passing that there are now 10% of American students in all the states, roughly.
And so not only that, they are the fastest growing group in US schools. Okay, so they're already a major presence in our schools in a state like California, there's even more than 10%.
50%. Yeah, that's the nationwide average 10%. Not only that, but 20% of American students, even in a state like Virginia and state, may I say it in Oklahoma, are hearing a language and speaking another language, other than English at home.
That's where we are in 2023.
That's a group that should not be ignored.
In fact, you the states ignore this group and serve them.
Let it, you know, not fully at their peril. If you want to enter your statewide programs your statewide test scores, you cannot ignore this group you need to knock yourselves out as a state and doing what's really most effective for that group and
what cut to that is we have made I think conclusive findings that dual language programs are the most powerful thing you can do.
English only does not work at all. It works, but it's only half or at best half as effective. It's going to get them to half closing the achievement gap, but not all.
And the kids are the kids who are graduating from bilingual dual language programs are outscoring kids who are monolingual native English speakers.
Yes, they are. That's really an impressive.
So, becoming bilingual developing your, your, your primary language your native language and adding English to that is a powerful tool for being prepared for the 21st century.
So just, we are in, we are inclined towards abusing ourselves professionally so to speak, we actually analyzed every data from all the students in the state of North Carolina genders, which you consider as her home state.
They asked us to do that.
And Wayne Ginger, come on down here we need to have you to, you know, look at our data, and we did. And that's where 5 million student records came from because there were 1.1 million students in each of five years consecutively.
And, and everything we've ever looked at has only confirmed that original study back in the late 80s whenever whatever year that was.
Yeah. And the data from North Carolina is powerful because the governor and the state board committed to doing dual language in every single school district in the state, which astonished me as a kid growing up in what was then a very discriminatory context
but now they welcome Latinos and other groups in there and they have a Cherokee school in Western North Carolina and Cherokee English. Yeah, so it's a it's a total turnaround and very exciting.
They're one of five states that require every school district to do dual language schooling and at least one school if not more.
So they're in fast forward to the present era we've been saying these things, at least with the initial study in the late 80s we've been saying them with increasingly focused and sometimes assertive voices, as each new data set was analyzed each you large data set.
But people really started to listen around the turn of this beginning of the 21st century.
Things are changing.
Things have really started to change. Moms and dads walking down the street will now walk up to you and say I want my child in a dual language program, and we're talking about English learner parents as well as native English speaker parents, because it's good for those kids
too. I want my child to do a language program. What are you in the school districts going to do about it.
Do it now. I mean they're getting that kind of demand, and the basis for that demand started with our research but we don't play in total all results here. We've had a lot of confirmatory studies from very large and very knowledgeable researchers
since our major works in the late 80s and up to about 2002 since 2002. Other researchers have grabbed hold of this and have really run with it, and they're now. There's an absolutely no doubt in the research community whatsoever, and I speak as a member of that
community.
You are think that English only is the best way to go for English learners you haven't been looking at the research at all, and you're really out of it.
And I hate to say it that way because it sounds like I'm in your face and I'm not. I want you, all of you, you know everybody listening I want you to look at what the research is actually saying and if you don't feel that you can read the original
research then read some good summary articles.
I would say, you know, and so and I want to solve interest reader of books we knocked ourselves out to try to put all those in five books. And so, you know, if you don't read someone else's you know we're not here to sell books we're here to point you folks towards
the data, and what the data is saying, and it's for the good of the United States of America, just like our current US Secretary of the US Department of Education is not only a former administrator but a graduate I understand of dual language
programs, and he understands he's the first government official at the federal level that high that I know of who's really gets it. And so, we hope that we can, we can take this and run with it before you and I decided to fade into the sunset or whatever you know.
It's a powerful movement, they're now almost 5000 dual language programs in US school districts, according to our friends at dual language schools.org, and it's growing every day the school districts are looking at their own data as well as we're working with school districts
now who are looking over their shoulders saying, we're going to help you analyze your data. I'm not necessarily volunteering to analyze any more data I've done my part there but
but but if you want me to look over us to look over your shoulder will help you and we've done a couple of those recently, and the results keep coming out the same they confirm our initial findings.
25 years ago and all of the findings of other researchers who have also come along since then it's really tight.
There's no basic argument that if you don't think this is the truth, you're not looking at the data you're looking at politics, you're looking at bias, you're looking at other stuff other than what the data says the database conclusions are airtight.
The school districts that we've been working with recently have been doing dual language for a long time now, and they're looking at kids who are graduated from high school, and what are they doing now and they're, they're finding that the graduates of dual
language are just empowered, they're, they're so excited about life, and they're ready to do many different things and they're, they're doing great.
When we talk to state legislatures and we've done that a number of times over the years, they really, they look like they're initially bored but when you tell them the high school graduation rate for English learners who came from a dual language program
was 95%. You know what it was before dual language, about 50%.
And so, we did that in Oregon I mean you could visibly see legislators go like this in their chair they set up that started paying attention to even if they were bored before that they weren't bored after that because they've been working on that as a statewide goal for years, and a lot of the other states are now Washington, California.
This is all started to happen after 20 after the year 2000. We've noticed it really picking up steam in the last decade. There was a lot of bilingual schooling for English learners before then but, but it was more remedial in focus, and the enrichment
models have really taken off now, where kids are, you know, we keep on preaching that dual language is just the mainstream, it's for everybody, you know, it is, it is, it is just plain old regular schooling.
It just happens to be through two languages so you're receiving all your math your science your social studies and language arts through, not just one but two languages, that's powerful, really powerful.
Now I don't know with anybody in Oklahoma ever tells you this or not but we hear from other states of course that from time to time that what would these kids need to learn English first, and we'll let them enter these dual language programs.
Don't do that.
If you want your child your English learner or your native English speaker to acquire superior English.
We can show you 8 million reasons why the way to do that is through dual language programs. And see that's that's kind of counter intuitive, because you look at the test scores and you say, you're telling me that native English speakers in dual language programs
are the native English speakers in the regular curriculum. Yes they do. You're telling me that English learners and dual language programs way outscore English learners in traditional English only programs.
Yes they do.
Right. So if you if all you really care about is I want these kids to learn English you want them in a dual language program just as fast as you can get them there, because that's what's going to do them the most good and be most efficient at bringing them forward the way you want them to go in their mastery of the curriculum
and their mastery of English. So more time in English is not the key. No, no. Instead it's cognitive development and stimulating, exciting schooling and.
And the magic happens. We actually did a little analysis on this you more English is helpful up to the point where there's 50% of the instruction in English and 50% in the other language.
Where have you heard that that's a dual language program at least a 50 50.
Okay, by on 50% in English, there's actually diminishing returns.
And the more achievement goes down the more you pound on English, the more the more time in more time. Yeah. And so our good friends in Arizona.
What can I say, they're still our good friends but and I know not this is the policy makers they are simply really need to wake up and smell the coffee as the and Landers used to say, so sad.
What's happening to the kids there.
I'll date myself with that saying so certainly.
You are incredibly right, and I really appreciate you being so frank about that because it gets to the point where whenever we know better we have to do better, and we can't keep on having a conversation around things that we know are not the best practices
are the best pedagogical practices of that, nor are they even culturally responsive for our emergent bilingual and multilingual students, as well as you know, people like me I was, you know, a little Kelly from Tulsa, Oklahoma that had no reason to ever learn another
language or anything and it was, it wasn't through a dual language program but it was in high school and had an amazing Spanish teachers and you're the advocates who really got me interested in the language and the culture that changed my life breath.
And so now you've got support to where I am today and having looked at research and so many different researchers in our field, and truly especially the, the two of you I have all of your books I read them I look at your website to look at your publications.
The, the infamous graph is in presentations all the time and discuss everywhere.
But it's true though you know the more that we understand the research and what language acquisition looks like in multiple different languages really understanding that cultural responsiveness as well and how it helps everyone with our cognitive pegs that we have on our
language and we hang information on these pegs right and so it's the quality and the quantity of education and that first native language that really helps us with that acquisition in English and having that cognitive academic language proficiency in both languages
which is so important.
And you all had to go ahead, I thought you were going to say something I was going to point out that the major impact from dual language programs our research would indicate there are actually two of them but the biggie is cognitive development.
Learning through two languages a neuroscientist will tell you is more cognitively stimulating than learning through one language and you can pick the languages.
Okay. That's why native English speakers do better in dual language instructed in two languages than they do in only being instructed in English.
Cognitive stimulation is the biggie that people tend to focus on well they're learning another language and yeah and they're being more proficient in their second language than Wayne is from years of studying French and German and other languages like that.
Yeah. Okay, that's true, but it goes beyond proficiency cognitive stimulation helps everything. It helps your man curriculum and helps your mastery of English and helps your mastery of all the things that you want to master.
It's a multiplier, as the Defense Department would call it a multiplier of things you're already trying to do.
And the second major impact of dual language programs that doesn't get nearly enough focus I think and it's related to your point about English dual language programs being stimulating is that the students in dual language, we when we studied this by working with teachers
and observing classrooms, the students in dual language programs where they use enrichment instructional strategies rather than dumbed down and remedial strategies.
The students in those programs are much more engaged with the instruction that good teaching that is going on in classrooms, we have good teaching going on out there but the kids are bored out of their minds in remedial English learners.
You're sitting there looking out the window and holding your heads and dual language programs are stimulating, they are interesting so you've got something that's one enormously helping them over time to develop their cognitive skills their cognitive development is greatly enhanced
and number two is helping them focus on what's going on in the classroom rather than looking out the window. That's an unbeatable combination. And it's almost unique to dual language, I'm sure there are some other bilingual programs who can manage that.
I'm not saying that you'd never see that anywhere else, and there are probably some ESL programs really well implemented, who can do some of that as well, but dual language excels at those two biggies.
So it's way more than just language proficiency and it's way more than just your, you know, the things that people tend to talk about in newspaper articles and ESL is a part of dual language.
It's not something that's, it's not, you know, it's not like you don't do ESL. ESL, English as a second language is a crucial part of the whole program.
After all you want at least 50% of their instruction to be in English, right? Yep. And that's how you do it. Yep. ESL.
So I wanted to bring in another aspect of the cognitive development that takes place and this is the cultural, the cross-cultural aspect of it for the kids. This is part of her area of specialization.
I'm going to recede here.
And I'm going to use this as an example, a variety of Indian contexts, Indian, not from, not the country of India, but Indian within the United States, American Indian groups. Native peoples, yes.
And so indigenous groups in Alaska, we visited quite a bit. That was one of our research sites and we worked with the Yupik and the Klingit and mainly those two groups anyway.
And the Yupik taught us so much. They, when, when we first went there, they, they didn't, we knew we were supposed to speak, but they didn't let us speak.
They said, we have to teach you first. And the first week we were there, they taught us. And there was a lot to learn too. Yes.
And so you step out of Western perspectives, Western cultural perspectives when you, when you just immerse yourself in whatever the context, the cultural context is that you're in.
And what they showed us was that teaching is best done by, by doing it, by, by learning through doing. And, and that's a very important concept in a lot of indigenous cultures that the elders teach the children, not by talking away about something, but by actually doing it physically.
And so in, in the Yupik context, for example, they had, they were in a section where if by chance the planes stopped coming for some reason, whatever climate, you know, dangerous situation, Earth got in, and they could no longer receive goods through being, through flights that got there.
They had to survive and they knew that they couldn't survive if they didn't keep the knowledge of their ancestors. And you teach that knowledge through the native language because English doesn't have all the different words that, that are within their environmental context.
And so they, they found that even the teachers, the bilingual teachers, Yupik speaking bilingual teachers who were in their 50s had lost how to cut the salmon in just the right way so that it would be preserved over the whole winter and they had enough food to eat.
I want you to know that I still remember how to do that too.
Yeah, they took us to fish.
They took us to fish and taught us how to cut the salmon the right way so that they could smoke it and preserve it and it would, and it would, it wouldn't get spoiled over the winter.
So the 70 and 80 year old elders were teaching the bilingual teachers how to do this so that they could teach the children so that they could re learn what they know they need and if for survival, you know, so things like that.
And the cultural knowledge is still priceless.
How to, how to sew the seam so that there would be no air that would get into a pocket of their clothing and then they would get their skin completely destroyed by the cold and things like that.
I mean, it's just, it went on and on and they changed their whole curriculum to reflect the cultural needs that they had within their community.
And many of those same issues transport well to other indigenous groups within the continental US.
We have groups here in Virginia that have been here for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
The medicinal knowledge, knowing the plants of that region and how to, how to grow them and take care of them and nourish them.
And on and on, I mean every aspect of life. You have to know your environment and how to survive there and the indigenous groups have known that and and must pass it on to their children.
Just to to live. And so all that is just so important to connect to our cultural roots, our ancestral roots. So your point is dual language instruction naturally offers an opportunity to capture this cultural knowledge in the context of ordinary instruction in curriculum oriented instruction in two languages.
And that's true for every dual language program, you know, to enter, enter, include in the curriculum, everything that has to do with the cross cultural issues that that are really important across math, science, social studies, not just, you know, a Western curriculum.
But just teaching all this stuff that is not relevant necessarily relevant to. So for the rest of us who are not so are not members of a cultural group like that.
I would say that even for someone like me, my ancestors are Scottish, Scots Irish.
I came to Virginia in what do we say last night 1635, the year 1635 and the rest of them showed up to about 1730 so between 1635 and 1730 all the folks who are on both sides of my family were already here in Virginia.
Remember Virginia is the oldest of the English colonies. So, what do I have any sense of my cultural heritage.
I don't. And I discovered that right in my face when the first time we visited Scotland and Ireland.
I didn't know the music. I didn't know the cultural customs, I didn't know anything.
I was devoid of all of that stuff and I really felt the loss for the first time the cultural loss of growing up in central Virginia, even though genetically I am very much related to those folks in places like Oban and the olive mall and whatever.
I don't share their culture anymore and that's a great loss tragic loss for me, and for all of my family that I hadn't even realized I had already experienced.
Heritage is very, very important. So for Vietnamese students whose families came here in the 70s after the Vietnam War. For other search groups, you don't have to have been here since 1635 to experience this.
It's something that I think all Americans can potentially benefit from more information more identification with their cultural backgrounds. We all have one.
I think it's really exciting that Vietnamese parents now have third generation immigrants are demanding dual language programs in Vietnamese all across the western states, especially in Washington.
Well, California.
California too.
So much so that dual language leaders who have gotten good solid Spanish English programs in place are having to meet together and say, okay, what do we do now to get the Vietnamese.
And the first the first groups that came, you know, like when the boat people came in the 1970s from Vietnam said, we don't want anything to do with our with with Vietnam. We don't ever, you know, they had suffered through so much. We're Americans.
You know, but the third generation is now saying, we want to reconnect. We want our kids to connect. We want them to know how to speak Vietnamese and to connect to our culture and to keep those roots heritage.
We are Americans, but we want to be informed about our culture. I think all of us have a right to that.
I think so for sure. I have a salsa partner from Colombia, Palmera Valle, Colombia. Se llama Marty. And she is always so proud to represent Colombia.
And she's always joking that she's a mad up to come along. She's the doctor to me also to be with her. And so I love to get to share that culture, but it really does enrich not just, you know, her own life getting to share her passion of her culture and where she's from.
And the same for our students, but enriches my life. I get to learn so much more and to have that global citizen mindset and to understand that what happens right here on this side of the planet affects this side of the planet as well on the complete opposite side.
Having that whole understanding.
I mean, I've done some obvious, a lot of research on this, but according to you two, why is that so important to have that connection to culture?
I mean, why do you feel, for example, Dr. Thomas, like, why do you feel that you've missed out on something? I have some experience in that from my grandmother's side, having a German ancestry and background and her having been raised with German around in the German culture, but having that faded out.
My grandfather just celebrated his 91st birthday. My grandmother will celebrate her 91st in December. So we've been having some conversations about this. And so being born in 1932 and having access to your grandmother speaking German and sharing that German heritage culture with you to now today not having any of it anymore.
We've had some conversations about that. But what is that importance in that connection to you, Dr. Thomas, specifically that you were just speaking of? There was an emotion and a feeling that obviously you had to have had.
Ginger's probably more qualified to talk about this, but I'll say that for me, I didn't really have a good notion of where I came from. I knew about my parents and my grandparents, but they were all English speakers.
I didn't know about any of the folks who had spoken Gaelic and Gaelic and Scots and the other languages, which are, I'm sure, part of my family's history.
I also didn't fully understand the experiences those folks went through in the 17 and 1800s when they were still considered immigrants from somewhere else and thus mistreated.
You remember the early 20th century, the signs in the front of the store said, no Irish need apply. The Irish were highly persecuted, especially the Scots Irish.
They were even persecuted in their home country and in both Scotland and Ireland as they moved around. So those folks are the ones who came to Virginia and the Appalachians and have been here for hundreds of years.
And I know and still know not enough, but I still some of them fighting each other to this may explain a lot.
They fought each other in the Klan Wars, both in the Highlands and in the Lowlands of Scotland, and they brought a lot of the stuff to Ireland and from there to the U.S.
to the Appalachian areas of Virginia and North Carolina and Tennessee. A lot of stuff going on now in current events can be at least indirectly traced to those kinds of cultural influences.
And people like me have been totally ignorant of that up to the very recent. I now understand where some of this stuff is coming from.
When you read national news headlines about white nationalists and other such groups that you don't necessarily want to identify with, some of the roots are in those cultural roots.
And I'm not saying I'm not advertising that or promoting it at all, but I'm saying there are underlying relationships that I now appreciate more than I used to.
And so what the role that dual language programs serve is to help students heal and to help the world heal because we're working on we're now very much a global society.
I mean, the whole world is interconnected through the Internet.
It's so powerful the way that we're all connecting together and the more that we get together and show love and respect and honor each other across cultural groups, across language groups, and dual language does that too because there's always a mix of kids within each class.
But we're also working long term on healing, healing the planet, healing the things that have kept us apart.
So that instead of always being thought of as that we're separate, and we always have to go through pain and suffering and everything.
We don't have to do that anymore. We can, across cultures, cultures we can honor and celebrate the beautiful different ways of living life that we all have.
Understanding your cultural history and background and that of others is not an anti-American thing. It should be a very pro-American thing.
It's something that enhances the quality of citizenship, enhances the quality of being an American. We are a nation of immigrants.
If you go back far enough, even the native peoples are immigrants. If you go back 20,000 years, I mean, that's, we're all, there's no native human, if you go back 20,000 years, occupation of North America, it was devoid of humans.
Earlier on, really earlier on. So we've all come here and we all need to know, in our opinion, culturally where we've come from, how we can better interact with each other.
And the more we understand about each other's cultures, we don't have to necessarily approve of every aspect.
But you understand where people are coming from and why they are motivated, some of them to act the way they do, can only help reduce the enormous amount of divisiveness, which is obvious to us all in this country right now.
I'm thinking of an example of a classroom that we visited in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was an eighth grade social studies class taught by a teacher from Spain.
And the whole class was in Spanish. There were about half were native English speakers and half were native Spanish speakers, roughly. It was a big class.
They were discussing World War II. And I mean, it was like a college class, university study.
I thought I'd gotten in the wrong classroom.
It was incredible what they were talking about. And what they were doing was they had, the kids were doing most of the talking, but the teacher was facilitating it and they were connecting to whenever they wanted to check on anything they needed to check.
They go to the Internet and very quickly tap on the computer and have the answer.
But they also had maps that they were using. And what they were doing was they were showing how, for example, the Chinese, when an event was happening, maybe in Europe, they were showing what that was doing to the Chinese at that time.
And then they were, in other words, they were going around the world and looking at other perspectives from other countries of how people experienced what was going on during that time.
And it was phenomenal. And there was some art and some music that got brought into the thing and maps and economics.
And this is just in one hour, about 45 minutes, in an eighth grade social studies, bilingual class, being taught all in Spanish.
We were just blown away.
But the kids were so just clever at figuring out how to think about it from a different point of view instead of just only from the U.S. point of view. It was world history taught in a totally different perspective.
Wow.
And that teacher really must have been able to facilitate that curiosity inside of you.
Really good.
And through that, yeah, through that dual language program, though, that's where we open up our minds and ourselves to be able to explore the cultures and the points of views of others, which is so in the classroom.
Yeah.
So that's what you want to see in a really great, you know, dual language program.
Yeah, it's not only possible. I should do that. Americans should be doing that, in our opinion. All of us should be. I should be. You should be. Everybody should know a lot more than we probably are.
I share your opinion. Where we came from and because that influences where we're going and what we want to do with our lives and all of those kinds of things. That's an important part or should be an important part of everyone's education.
It's not all about central American history, although that's no doubt important. But I want to learn more about where I came from and why my family did what they did when they did it.
And they were instrumental in the early part of the country. They fought at Valley Forge. They fought at Yorktown. They did all those things that were in the Civil War.
I had people on both sides of the Civil War. That's important that you know that what your family has done, what your personal history has been as a result of cultural influences that came before you.
I really can't say enough how important I think that is. And then finding resolution to it because that's what the kids, that's what we're all about is preparing leaders for the future.
And so the kids that graduate from dual language have an expanded mindset. Yes they do. They have a bigger picture about how to resolve some of these things that humans have not resolved for centuries.
It greatly enhances their problem solving skills not only inside the classroom but outside the classroom.
One that's really important is the one outside the classroom because that's where we all live most of our lives.
And you can almost, when you go to a conference like our favorite conference, like the Sechin, and they have high school students there, you can almost look and listen to them and pick, that's a dual language student.
This is a dual language student. That one, okay, it's not a dual language student but you can tell because what the interest they project, the understandings, the events are much more enhanced than the ones from traditionally educated students, both native English speakers and English learners.
You can really tell the difference. Do your listeners know about La Cosecha?
Yes, they do. And we will be at La Cosecha this year as well in presenting. I was able to speak with Leslie as well. So yeah, we're really excited about it and our listeners, we definitely promote La Cosecha.
It is one of my top favorite conferences to be able to attend. And I'm so thankful that we get to go back. You know, you really hit on what I believe to be a super important piece of this as well.
And I was able to have the privilege to be able to study a lot of this in my research, though, but you're talking about that cultural proficiency journey, how it starts with you.
That is so important and I thank you for highlighting that in this conversation, because it is true, like we have to start that journey in ourselves to understand ourselves before we can start to try to understand and make sense of this world around us.
And whenever I'm helping school districts implement dual language education programs and having these conversations around the why behind that, one of the great points that I always like to bring up is that we create an environment in this school that looks totally different from what we see on the news every day.
Because it goes back to your point, we are living the majority of our lives outside in this world, and to create this possibility and this space for social cultural competence and to be able to have this interconnectedness between all of our cultures and not just being
multilingual or multicultural, but also being at that level of wanting to learn more and becoming more curious about it as we learn more about ourselves in that process.
And I think it's so important. So I really appreciate you highlighting that, because that's where it starts. That's with us.
Yeah, exactly.
Do you, go ahead, Dr. Colleen.
I was going to ask you, you know, having known you since 2008, on this side of the screen, looking through research, etc. But also knowing about your studies, and not just your studies but also your experiences in Central America, Latin America, and even learning a little bit about your father from your website,
and then connecting that to an experience that I have when it comes to just traveling and leaving the United States and going to other countries and not to an all inclusive resort.
I'm talking about going and living and being in someone's home and eating their meals and truly being part of that family and that culture, etc. I really consider what it was like.
I remember when I was in high school, whenever I had my newcomer class, when I first began teaching, I had a degree in Spanish and I was a dancing guy on Royal Caribbean Cruise Line and had no interest in getting into education.
I was going to be a dancing bilingual veterinarian was my overall goal in life. And then there was a whole different destiny that took me to where I was.
I had a classroom that represented sixth through eighth graders, seven countries in eight different languages, these newcomer students and they were my best teachers and my best professors that I ever had.
And so whenever I consider what my background and my experiences were in traveling, and then living with families, and then how that impacted what was happening in the classroom.
I think it's very important, Dr. Collier, that your experiences outside of the United States was definitely maybe one of those catalysts to getting you into wanting to understand and learn more about how all this would work.
Would I be correct in that? And if so, what was that experience like?
I had had so many rich experiences in Central America and this was in the 1950s, 1940s and 1950s.
So it's a time when it was very innocent. It's before some of the really rough stuff that's happening now because of so many things are happening now in Central America.
It's so painful for me to watch.
What I knew was very, very different. The people were so, so loving and no matter where we went and whatever circumstances of poverty that the people were in, they were always there to help, no matter what.
They just gave and gave and gave love to us everywhere that we went. And we were driving down there before there were very many roads. And so my dad just loved to, he had to always go wherever there might be a road and we'd get lost.
And our car broke down a lot. So wherever we were, we always took a very old car so that they could fix it. And they always did wherever we were in isolated areas.
It was just so, so beautiful. Now I'm forgetting, what did you ask originally?
Well, I'm sure that those experiences though, just having experiences outside of the United States really impacted your thought process about not just dual language education, but the role that culture plays in education.
Right. Right. Yeah, it made me, I really, I wanted to be a Latina. I was very angry that I had grown up Anglo. And so I kind of adopted Latino customs. I still come late to meetings.
Wayne hates that.
There's a cultural difference for you.
We get along just fine, Dr. Collier.
Everybody a great big abrazo that's really strong. And some people are like, oh, that's hard. You know, you're giving, you're hugging me too hard. Anyway.
But the, interestingly, when I became a young mother in my early 20s and my two kids, I didn't think about raising them bilingually. I had picked up Spanish, you know, in my childhood.
And then it just didn't occur to me to do that. And we just happened to be living in Washington, D.C. when my oldest daughter was going, moving into first grade.
And, and our school was chosen as one of the first bilingual schools in D.C. public schools.
And so I might we had the opportunity to do that. And my daughter then said, after she had been in school, Spanish English program for a while with a fabulous teacher, she said, Mom, why didn't you raise me in Spanish?
You know, and I said, I don't know.
Spanish ending.
Yeah, Spanish. And so I had to think hard about that and realized, oh, I missed a huge opportunity. But then both girls got to get access to Spanish through the school.
And but the my daughter's teacher was a from Chile. Eliana Roman is her name. She's she's now deceased, but she was the most fabulous teacher I have ever met in my life.
And she had been schooled in education classes by.
Oh, dear. I'm not going to be able to. No, no.
A woman poet who in Chile, and I can't think her name right now, but but it was all about the whole child and and helping the children flower and, you know, an understanding reflecting what they what they bring to the classroom.
And and it was all hands on discovery learning, you know, and I couldn't stay out of the classroom as a parent.
I just I visited that class over and over and over again.
And I finally decided this is for the whole world. We have to make sure that all classes are like this.
You know, we had half of the time in Spanish, half the time in English and and two teachers.
They were teaming together. And so I decided, OK, I'm going to make sure that this gets to the whole world.
And so by the time I met her in 1980, this was busting out all over everything she was said and did had to do with that particular orientation, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. But she didn't have the database reasons to believe that.
Yeah. If I hadn't met Wayne and he decided to analyze some data on this issue, I don't think we would have spread to the world.
But the vision that I had from Eliana Roman, this blessed bilingual teacher,
your vision was based on theory and experience and other international research that had come before we you and I got together.
Yeah. And then we knew how to do great big data sets, longitudinal data.
And it was the it was looking at longitudinal data where you're seeing how are the kids doing from first grade through eighth grade, you know, all the way through as long as you can.
Now we have data sets from all the way through high school.
But that's where you see the power, because you know, now that everybody knows it's not that it takes poor kids.
They just don't do well in school. Come on. It's that it takes it takes a long time to acquire the school curriculum through your second language.
And that's true for the native English speakers as well in the dual language classes.
So we say it takes on average around six years, five, five to seven years.
Jim Cummins said, and we agree it's an average of six years. It takes to get to grade level in your second language.
That's not to learn English as a language, but it's to get to grade level where you can show off what you know in your second language in math, science, social studies, all the tests, whatever it is tests you're given and do as well as a native speaker of that language would do.
But once you get there, then you go beyond that and you're and you're higher in achievement than all the other kids who have just gotten schooling through one language.
I think one of the biggest insights that we have brought to the field is that the field before 2000 was almost exclusively focused on short term studies.
And it's quite possible to take to give kids a test that's full of fairly low level items.
And then you go into the classroom and you immediately beat on those items.
Okay, you emphasize those items and those short term objectives, the easier stuff in the curriculum, you emphasize that.
And then you look at your test scores a year or two later and okay, they've increased because the test at that time, especially we're really only measuring the short term objectives and the low level cognitive stuff.
You can produce a short term effect with a highly emphasized on English curriculum, but it doesn't last.
And so the importance of longitudinal research is when you look beyond two, maybe three years up to four and five years, you see those a lot of short term impacts go away.
And you know what? The only evidence for English only instruction is short term.
All of the long term evidence supports long term cognitive development, long term acquisition of the curriculum.
And it's somewhat counterintuitive, but we always like to tell school boards, you're not going to see results here.
This is not a miracle. This is something you do over four, five, six years. You're going to have to wait that long.
School board members don't want to hear that. I know.
I tell them anyhow. Their term on office is two years. They want to see results in no more than two years while they're still in office before somebody throws them out.
And so that you have to acknowledge that this is a program that provides a little bit of an achievement each and every year.
And the important thing is that it's cumulative. Each year builds upon the previous year.
Well, from the research community for years, all of the researchers were emphasizing what I used to somewhat pejoratively call rat goosing studies where you would, you know, a laboratory oriented study where you run rats through a maze and you examine something for six weeks and that's it.
That won't work in education. Education is a slight to moderate impact sustained over a long period of time.
Anything that's not a long term study, I would recommend to all of you is just don't pay any attention to that.
Only look at the long term studies. Education is a long term process. They don't, the kids don't disappear after two years in school.
We want them to go all the way to the end and graduate. And so we really need to get beyond the quick returns short term emphasis that has pervaded education for so long.
And if I may say so, I think we've made a little progress in that area. People now understand that the long term results are completely different than the short term results.
And you want to know about the long term results. Okay. So look for the long term research, no matter who's doing it. Look for the long term research.
By long term, I mean at least four, five, six years. It's incredible because you two have truly paved the way for individuals like me to be able to continue in this research and this longitudinal research.
And so I just want to say thank you again on a personal level for that, because it's allowed me to become a better educator.
And so it's really also allowed space for me to be able to understand more about asset based pedagogy, what that looks like and that role of cultural proficiency and how dual language programs really do create an environment within the school that celebrates the identities of students.
And so it's allowed me, like I said, to have really good conversations with administrators, with board members, with I said, administrators, like from the administration building cabinet, for example, and then also site based administrators.
And it's changed the conversation so much that fortunately because of you two and your work and what you've done and what you've gifted to me without even knowing it through all of these years is I'm able to now have conversations that I can really speak to and articulate the rationale why we need to have a bilingual and multilingual education and dual language programs.
And here in Oklahoma being an English only state, and I'm currently the past president of OLAB, the Oklahoma Association for Bilingual Education, but we're able to be working with other school districts and there are districts now implementing and one just this year has begun this year in their pre K and K starting dual language education programming.
And we will be right back.
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And now back to the show.
Truly again, just to continue what I was, I don't know how much you heard, but it's the research that you all have provided that allowed an individual like me in a place like Oklahoma and beyond, but really to be able to support the efforts in creating space in our education systems for dual language education programs.
And I think that the conversation that I've been able to have with other leaders in our state and talking about asset based pedagogical practices and realizing that our students come with so many amazing funds of knowledge from their home, from their culture, from their language.
And I always use the example.
First of all, I've never gone to a job interview and they said, you know what, Kelly, we'd love to hire you, but you're my legal.
That's never ever happened. Right.
And then I always like to bring up the point that whenever I was taking the GRE for admittance into the doctoral program, I remember I was reading through one of the passages and it said something about something that said castigate and I didn't know that word.
What is that? I've never even heard of that word in English.
And so I was sitting there and I was like, well, in the context, I think it might mean and then it clicked in my head. I go, I castigate, castigate, to punish it, to discipline. I said, okay. And I thought, and then I had this whole epiphany moment where I thought, here I am trying to get into a doctoral program using my second language to help me with my first language so I can understand what I'm doing.
And I thought that was just, it was such an awesome experience for me and it really brought to life what the research shows and what the research says. Yeah.
It was, it was incredible.
One of the things that happens with when we're in a lot of bilingual contexts where they're Spanish speakers and they just assume that both of us speak and understand it and Wayne doesn't. But every so often I'll say, did you get that? And he'll say, yeah, I followed about at least half of it.
And it's because he studied Latin.
I studied Latin for five years, French for three years, you know, a lot of stuff carries over.
And so it does, it all helps.
Yeah. I love it so much. I don't know if you were able to look through any of the previous podcasts or anything, but I had the privilege of interviewing someone who I believe that you know, Dr. Elisette Moret, who is one of the co-authors that you have in transforming secondary education, middle and high school dual language programs.
And we were also able to have a really great conversation centered around secondary dual language programs and the graduates that spoke up and talking about their experiences, the impact and the advice.
Yeah.
Thinking about that and then also considering other types of advice that you might have for our policymakers or for our leaders.
Is there anything that you would like to share that we've learned from our graduates in front of this program and how that advice can be used for our educational leaders to promote and continue to promote bilingual and multilingual education?
Well, the high school graduates are just astonishing.
And the main thing that they're doing is they're going into really, really new and different fields.
They're discovering that they're better at figuring out a range of possibilities for their life.
You know, in terms of they really know how to use the Internet and they really know technology and they're just full of ideas for doing things in a different way.
And so, I'm going to give this an anecdotal thing, but it's a good example of a young man in Far San Juan, Alamo,
which is a district in Texas right on the border with Mexico.
And this young man had come to them in eighth grade.
And he was a dropout into criminal activity, we'll say, you know, gang stuff and all kinds of stuff.
And he was a real behavior problem for their school.
And the dual language director said, come to our dual language classes, you know, and he resisted at first.
And then he decided to join the and just see what it was like.
This kid turned around so fast in dual language once he caught on that he could do a lot of this stuff because it was in Spanish,
which was his strongest language, and just and he could accelerate his learning.
And he is now let's see what all is he doing.
He's won awards from the United Nations for his work in chemical engineering.
I don't know what all.
It just you know, there's so many kids who are empowered from the you know,
because the schooling is it just opens their possibilities and they know how to get what they need and they just take off and and do incredible things.
Your listeners might be tempted to say to themselves at this point.
Well, that's just one case. All right.
But we're here to tell you that this is not an end of one. This is an end of many hundreds of thousands of students.
We've just had been so privileged to see to visit all these school systems around the country to see this happening over and over again, not just with this particular case in that particular district.
This is a common occurrence. Students who were completely devoid of so-called success in school districts,
all of a sudden discovering themselves and what they wanted to do in dual language.
And then a few years came roaring back and really did great things to the enough to make any former high school principal principal trainee like me happy.
And so dual language programs at the secondary school, especially when they build on successful elementary dual language programs, can be can do wonderful things for these students.
You already mentioned one, the graduation rate for English learners doubles from 50 percent to almost 100 percent.
That's in terms of effect size. That's enormous. Incredible.
That's huge. Yeah.
John, how do you be OK with that?
It's not automatic. I want to get this point in before we break up today because it's not automatic.
You just don't change the name of the program from what you used to do to do a language.
You have to actually work on implementing dual language programs in their most efficient, most effective form using research that its strategies that have been listed by organizations like the Center for Applied Linguistics or Dual Language Education of New Mexico and other such organizations.
It's not an automatic process. It takes planning. It takes effort and it takes work.
And we wouldn't want to represent it any other way.
And it's very challenging teaching this exciting teaching, but it's very challenging because you have to think about so many different ways of bringing the kids all together.
And the higher you get in the grade levels, I truly believe that all of our secondary authors, the 19 who collaborated with us in writing that secondary book,
they say include all English learners in the program who are who are speakers of the of the language, the partner language.
So, for example, if you have Spanish speakers coming in who have never been to school before, they get included in the program.
So I show up in grade eight and I've never been to school. You're going to put me in the program right away.
And that's the best thing. Yep.
And what it does is that makes it very challenging for the teachers because then they've got an extremely heterogeneous class where you've got some kids who are right on grade level and they're in their academic work and others who have never been to school before.
And and maybe they're proficient in oral Spanish, but not written and on and on.
I mean, but when you include those kids and the kids teach each other, because that's one of the key characteristics of dual language is a lot of teaching co-teaching that goes on between the kids.
Much greater student to student interaction, much less teacher to student interaction.
Right. Right.
And the the mix that you get is phenomenal because you do get the kids who have never had these opportunities before, all of a sudden, accelerating their growth and making maybe two or three years progress in one year.
And it's really, really worth it. And for them to be able to get schooling where they get access to the subjects in the language that they are strongest in, even if it's only that they know it orally, that's still where they've got the advantage that they need to finally take off and actually be able to do school.
And that's from my opinion that this applies to at risk native English speakers as well. One of the more important findings, I think, of the last quarter century.
It's amazing we can say a word, say something like that. We've been working on this for more than a quarter century. But one of the most important findings is that not only do well implemented dual language programs do wonderful things for English learners, they're almost equally successful for at risk native
English speakers like Title One students that was huge for the great state, not the great state of North Carolina.
They have been trying to raise their African American achievement scores for 40 years and all of a sudden we come along with dual language programs and it happens.
Those kids, the African American students in dual language by eighth grade are scoring two grades ahead of their peers, not in dual language. That means they come to sixth grade, performing like eighth graders.
Now that has implications for secondary instruction, middle school instruction in particular. You can't treat these kids like sixth graders. They're operationally eighth graders.
And so you've got to meet them where they are and take them even further. That's what secondary program should be all about.
And is there a cultural component to that you believe?
Yeah. Yeah, it's the bilingual teachers are usually providing a lot of cross cultural rich stuff where they're helping the kids experience life in other contexts. And as the kids move through, they get a lot of the teaching staff.
And usually it is pretty diverse. You know, then they get they might get one teacher from Colombia and another one is from Puerto Rico and another one is from Mexico and so forth.
And, and they all all they're all the differences in how the languages is, you know, the vocabulary and grammatical and the pace of the language.
And then the Caribbean Spanish speaker, and it's very, very fast. And it's very calm and polite and quiet. So on and on. And so there's so many different things where they can, they exchange information and think about living life in, in, in new ways.
And I think, again, having that space where culture and our diversity is celebrated, just helps so much and wanting to be able to participate more. And in my experiences, teacher satisfaction is higher attendance is higher among students.
And I think that's a great turn over if any at all because people feel like they belong to the language program can create that sense of belonging and it's nothing better to lower one's effective filter to be able to let us acquire and learn to feel happy, safe, and excited and celebrated
and where you are and where you are.
Yeah, any good principle will tell you that school culture and family culture is important aspect of any type of high quality education, we just have to broaden our scope of that. It's not only about the culture that has been dominated in the past, it's about the culture of the students
who are now there in the classrooms, as opposed to who was there 50 years ago.
And that's an important thing to recognize.
I was just thinking about a novel that I've just started reading by one of my favorite authors, Isabella Yende.
Yes, originally from Chile.
Now, a Californiana.
And she, her latest book is,
I won't be able to remember the title.
The Wind Knows My Name, something like that. Anyway, that would be a great book for them to use in a Spanish English dual language program, or even a trilingual German Spanish English, because she has the two main characters, well there's several main characters but the major main characters.
One is German, who was a kid, who, whose parents were killed. He's Jewish, and his parents were killed in Austria, and he has to, he manages to, his mother sent him on a kinder train to England, and he escapes before their whole family is killed.
And so, this is this German kid who immigrates first to England and then eventually to the US, and connects with Latino families, who are also in in similar circumstances where they're immigrating to the US, to El Norte, from El Salvador.
And she's sharing all this stuff about recent arrivals, and all the things and her books are all in both Spanish and English so that would be it.
That just, you know, where bilingual teachers come up with that, let's do a, let's do this for a while, you know, and and that's, that's really rich because it's bringing together the narratives of.
Okay, people have experienced these things and the Salvadoran people are now experiencing them and just pulling it all together and thinking about the richness of coming together.
That intercultural connectivity.
Yeah, right.
With that again, and that book yes, again, to our listeners, and so, wind knows my name, or el viento conoce mi nombre in Spanish. Yes, so.
I read her books in Spanish first, and then and then they get translated into English.
And she's she's worldwide author.
I'd also like to point out especially for states like Virginia and Oklahoma that are chock full of white Anglo types like me that this is not only a politically nice thing to do.
People say well this is politically correct and this is all that this is an educationally effective thing to do. Okay, this has the kinds of effects that you were beginning to enumerate the improvement of student attitudes in school the improvement of all kinds of enabling
factors all of which come together in higher test scores higher achievement higher mastery. Okay, those are important outcomes but the cultural factors are educationally enabling they're not just politically correct.
It goes way beyond that. Sometimes people give this kind of argument short shrift because they feel well that's, that's too woke or whatever the current term is being abused these days.
That one is, is this is educationally effective, and we could show it.
You can tell people about that in your, and we hope you will.
I feel I feel like it is, it is a more than what am I trying to, it's, it's morally imperative.
I believe that we have a conversation around, I believe that that is.
I am very passionate about this topic I strongly believe in it. I'm a huge advocate and keep on pushing for this type of a gifted and talented program that goes way beyond just academics but it is changing someone's life.
And whenever we're speaking about the humans that we have in front of us every single day. It's nothing about the politics anymore. This is about what we know is the best, what touches people's brains, minds, hearts and souls, and literally changing their lives for the
better, while giving them huge academic gains and success at the same time. This is very much I always say if you want the quantitative you have to focus on that qualitative component as well.
There's character and there's content that we're teaching but there's also like I said, humans that are in front of us every single day, and so I took to recognize them to celebrate them to learn from them and to be one in this together.
I think it's one of the most powerful effects of a dual language education or bilingual multilingual program.
Yeah, we say in Virginia and I hope we hope you will mention this in Oklahoma as well that these programs are are such that they're very important not only for English learners but also for the native English speakers, and that's I think it's a very important point.
It's necessary to work on the implementation. It's you. One of the things we do a lot of these days is to look over school district shoulders and help them do what they call tweaking their program, which means they've got a program in flight but it's, it's still a little wobbly,
and it has no rate of potential for improvement so we try to help them out in doing that kind of over the shoulder looks and helping them decide what kinds of tax to take in their program improvement directions.
And it includes all the things we've talked about here today but there are always ways to improve anybody's program. When we looked at recently has been in play for what 1314 years.
We've experienced with it, and even they would say oh yeah we can still do this here's a possibility for improving your program making it even more efficacious and powerful that it already is.
And so, I think it's important for us, even if you're not looking working with us it's important for school districts in Oklahoma and Virginia and everywhere else to take note of what you are doing with English learners pick the most powerful program and it is doing language.
The best you possibly can know cursory versions. Okay, this has to be yet be serious about this and pick up all the things that should be part of a dual language program and do them well.
And when you do that, great things are going to happen. We're sure that if you don't, it's equally possible to not do very well at all, you can take a dual language program implemented poorly and you'll get results just like the ones you always got because it's still a weak
program you are implementing it very well.
That's an important point to some people say oh we're gonna do a dual language program starting this week, and we go.
Oh my god that's right.
Because it takes a lot of work to implement it you have to have a lot of fidelity and understanding and background knowledge yourself and what you're doing to ensure that you are creating a truly solid program that is really based on what we know in the research and so thank you again for
talking about because it's like you said about just swapping the name on something, and all of a sudden, there's change that happens, you have to understand this and it's going to be, it's going to be, it's a long term goal, and there's a lot of conversations that go
around that future family involvement it's people really being all together in this, and it's doing this with the community, not for anyone, but it's together with that community.
I've heard so much from you all for so many years, and I said it a million times I just can't believe that I've been able to be here and to talk to two of my, your stars to me.
You are your stars and you're famous and so this has been so wonderful and I can talk with you all day. Is there anything though that you would like to leave with our listeners.
Any thoughts, comments, thoughts, and ways to advocate anything you want to share.
I, at the always at the end I always say, see, la lucha.
You know,
being the old protester that I used to be in the 60s.
I really feel like we're in a place of great change that that there's a lot of change that's occurring now worldwide.
And it's not all positive.
You know there's some really rough stuff that we have to go through but there are enough young people who are stepping up now into leadership roles and trying to do new and different things.
So, we're in in education we're working on schooling, those kids who are going to be our future leaders.
And I do think that the more that we can do it through these masterful
mixing kids together across all cultural groups across all language groups and helping them acquire curriculum through at least more than one language, but that really is the key to creating these kids who are going to change our world right now we're moving into that now.
We're going to make it to.
I'm thankful for them as well.
Yeah, but I like to finish up with is the advice that I used to give. I still give school boards but I used to give my own school board is what we need to do here folks is to first find out what really works.
Okay, and then put our time, energy and resources into that.
And the answer is dual language really works, and let's put our time, energy and resources into that. And then it's just a matter of folks who are really serious about educational form, confirming those assertions for themselves and they are very conformable.
So, we hope that all of your listeners will take the trouble to look at our website, and to look at other sources.
Most of the stuff on their website we wrote for parents and teachers we didn't write it for research specialists like me okay they won't find a lot of stuff they don't already know there.
But for the average person interested in what's good for our children what's good for my personal children, and the neighbors children and all those, you'll find a lot of stuff on our website but hope you'll check it out.
And the, the book that it's not reversed right now but anyway, why do language schooling is the fourth book that we wrote. And that's really the best for school board members yeah yeah.
If you want one book that's the best. Yeah, for school board members and administrators who are not sure about this you know, and parents, we speak to parents to in that book so that's kind of the over.
Yes, and you, you had brought that up whenever you were at Cal Bay I remember that specifically. And so whenever I had this this is the book that I shared first with school leaders that we're going to be implemented doing which program I said read this one
first. Yeah, and then that way it'll give you a really really good perspective plus.
It's a great it's a great read. It definitely is. And so again, you can find, you can find these have a quick, I have a quick question. Yeah, do you guys have a specific link where they could go purchase the book.
Yeah, or do you sell a multiple outlets.
And what I know. Yeah, go answer. Sorry, go ahead. It's on our website website but the answer is okay cool d le le le n m dual language education of New Mexico.org is a publisher, and the last first press is our backup secondary publisher.
We have most of both have web. You can go. Yeah, look, look for them. Almost everything. Thank you. Exactly. So on a website. Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. And so just to get if you are interested listeners in any of the publications from doctors Thomas and coli air I do encourage you to go to Thomas and coli air.com.
They have reflections from the field publications and other resources as well as their contact information and again we will have that link Thomas and coli air.com in the description for this podcast.
And if you would like to visit the dual language education of New Mexico page and it's d le n m.org, and you can find their publications there, as well as the Alaska's press.com, the L A Z Q, U, E, Z, P, R, E, S, S.com.
And like I said, we will have all of those links available for you in our summary of this podcast today doctors Thomas and coli air heroes of mine and in the field of bilingual multilingual education.
I can't thank you enough for all of the things that you have done within the field that have impacted me on a personal level, as well as our overall education community. So thank you so much for being so dedicated in this work.
Thank you so much for helping other people like me learn from you, so we can continue this legacy in our field of education. Thank you so so much. A big shout out to our producer Mike overhaul, thank you for helping you today, and a big shout out as well to our sponsor
I appreciate being here I'm thankful for everyone, and I wish you all truly the best listeners. Keep on being culturally for finished provision as much as possible. Enjoy the rest of your time and your day and remember, we love you have a great rest of your day.
Thank you for joining us today. Don't forget to like, follow and subscribe.
Peace.