Bridge Event Webinar Transcript: Building Biliteracy Instruction, Programs, and Services July 27, 2015 Presenters: Suzie Coultress, State Director, Bilingual Education and Title III/ Migrant, Texas Education Agency Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Ed.D., Director, Valley Speech Language and Learning Center, and Associate Research Professor, University of Houston, Brownsville, Texas REL Southwest Facilitators: Vicki Dimock, Ph.D., Director, REL Southwest Linda Cavazos, Ph.D., Alliance Liaison, REL Southwest To view a video of this archived webinar: http://relsouthwest.sedl.org/bridge_events/2015-07-27_biliteracy/index.html Opening Remarks and Dr. Vicki Dimock: Slide 1: Good afternoon, everybody. So good to see you here. We have some colleagues who are joining us for our webinar. We have folks from 33 states and even some international guests joining us by webinar today. For those of you who are in the room, it s good to see your faces, and for those of you who are joining us remotely, we re glad that you re here. This particular workshop is around programs for English learners. We appreciate all those of you who have decided to present for us today to share what you know and your work with other people. Slide 2: Before we start that though, I need to give a shout out to the people who pay for this. The U.S. Department of Education, specifically the Institute of Education Sciences funds the program called the Regional Educational Laboratories Program. There are 10 RELs, as we like to call them, across the country. This particular workshop is in Texas, so it s part of the Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest work. This program has been in existence for a very long time, but we have a different way of approaching our work this time than we have in the past. Slide 3: Always the goal of the Regional Laboratories is to improve outcomes for students, for each and every student that we serve in public education. For this particular Lab contract, we do that by working with
states and school districts to use research data to make decisions about policy and practice. We do that by partnering with school districts, state departments of education, and other people to both conduct research and to build capacity. Slide 4: We have technical assistance. This is a form of technical assistance we re doing here today. We do provide assistance to folks to collect, analyze, and interpret data. Also, we want to connect researchers with practitioners in a way that is a collaboration and not maybe the older model of where the researchers are doing research and then giving it to practitioners. This is something that we want to build together. So this alliance here, the English Learner Alliance, as well as our New Mexico Achievement Gap Alliance, both requested this type of a workshop, and so we re working together to do that. Linda has worked really hard on getting this for us. Slide 5: Those groups, as I said, are called alliances and here are the eight alliances that we re working with in the Southwest region. I forgot to mention the Texas Hispanic STEM Alliance, Linda, I m sorry about that. We have that one, the English Learners, and the New Mexico Achievement Gap who all have been focused on issues around English learners in their research agendas. Slide 6: We want to connect with you, so after this is over, we invite you to ask questions. We have a service called Ask REL Southwest. Anyone can submit a question to us about research around a topic and we ll go and look for resources to help answer that question. You just go to our website, you click on that link, and a form will come up and you can tell us what your question is and your name and how we can get in touch with you so that we can answer that question. We also have Spotlight, an e-bulletin that we send out. And then this webinar, just like the other webinars and other workshops we ve done, are archived on our website. If there are people who weren t able to be here today, they could come back and look at this under events and resources. That s my commercial for the folks funding this. You ll find in your folders, there s going to be a stakeholder feedback survey. There s also going to be one for the folks who are on the webinar. We really need you to fill those out for us at the end of the day or the end of the presentation because that s how we get the government to keep giving us money to have these kinds of event. We will appreciate that very much. Slides 7 9: Our goal for today is to provide you, whether you re here or remotely participating, with information about some evidence-based instructional programs and services that have evidence that shows that 2
they support increased achievement among English language learners. Before I go any further, here s the outcome slide, my apologies. You re going to have, at the end of this time, an increased awareness of evidence-based programs and increased awareness of evidence-based services for English learners. I welcome all of you. Here s the stakeholder survey page, one more time. Slide 10: That s enough of my commercial. So let me introduce Suzie Coultress who is here. She s the state director of Bilingual Education and Title III Migrant Program at the Texas Education Agency. She s a bilingual educator, a children s advocate. She has more than 38 years of experience in bilingual ed. She started out when she was three. [Laughter] She s currently the state director for Bilingual/ESL/Title III/Migrant, and previously she s been a teacher in TEA. She s also been the assistant director of Bilingual/ESL and Division of Curriculum before becoming a director. A very wise and talented person that we have here to welcome you today. Thank you. Suzie Coultress: Good afternoon. This is Suzie Coultress and I oversee the Bilingual, ESL, Title III, and Migrant Programs at the Texas Education Agency. First of all, I d like to thank Linda for so graciously inviting me to be here to welcome you all. It s always wonderful when you receive a phone call and it s like, Suzie, we really would love for you to come and say a few words and welcome the people. Yes, it s a little bit more than 38 years. No, I didn t start when I was three. My wrinkles show it. [Laughter] But I have this passion for English language learners. Being an English language learner myself, it was one of those things that I felt like I thought I could change the world. We always think we can change the world when we become teachers. When I became director, I really thought I could change the world. Then I realized that there are a lot of things that we need to do to be able to accomplish what we want for English language learners, or ELLs. Today, as I give you a little welcome, also I want to give you a little bit of a background about Texas and ESL. I realize that there are so many individuals from other states. As I go to state directors meetings and we talk about what some people are doing in certain states and what we re doing in Texas and we compare our notes, I always feel so wonderful about the fact and confidence that what we re doing here is really going to help our ELLs. All of us have the same goals. All of us have the same passion. Some of us go about it in different manners, but at the end of the day, it s to ensure that our English language learners are successful. It s very pertinent that I share with you some of this information because we are designing intensive programs and services for English learners. 3
We talk about the fact in Texas that we have almost 950,000 English language learners. That is quite an increase from last year. Of those over 950,000, we have 533 that are in a bilingual program. Those bilingual programs are basically just from pre-kinder through fifth grade, and then in sixth grade if it s clustered with the elementary school. Then, we have almost of 398,000 students that are in ESL programs. The ESL programs run from pre-kinder through 12 th grade. So our mission that we meet the objectives that ensure that our ELLs are successful that s quite a number of students that we are responsible for. As I ve said, regardless what our titles are, regardless what we do, at the end of the day, we all have the same goal. It s to ensure that they are successful. In Texas, of those 949,000 plus students, we have 853 that are Spanish speakers. If people ask, for all the resources that you all have in Texas, they re mostly in Spanish. The reason is because 91 percent of our student population are Spanish speakers, and therefore we need to have the resources for them in their language. From there, from 850-some thousand, jumps to the second language of 16,089 Vietnamese. Yes, that s a large number, but it s such a small percentage compared to the number that we have of English language learners that speak the Spanish language. Then, we have Arabic, Urdu, Mandarin Chinese, and Burmese. Burmese is almost 3,300 students that we have. Our ELLs represent about 18 percent of our total student population in Texas. Every year, that number is increasing. What are we going to do to ensure that we provide those resources for our students? We, as an agency just today, I as at another hotel doing a training. It was with our Education Service Centers, and we re providing training on ELLs for administrators. One of the resources that we need to ensure is that our administrators know what to do when they walk into a classroom. The days of Great job, Suzie. Great job. No. Great job, Suzie, because you are meeting the needs of those students. Great job because you re doing cooperative learning. Great job because you have aligned the objectives. You have a content objective. They must know what it is that you re supposed to be doing in your classroom, so when they give you feedback, there is that alignment between the feedback and what actually is occurring in that classroom. I encourage you to visit our TEA Bilingual/ESL website where we have all the resources that are available. In that TEA website, we also have another link to a web portal, ELL web portal. That link has all the trainings, all the resources that we have. Those are in Project Share we have courses, online courses for our teachers. We have online courses for our administrators. I encourage you and I invite you to go to our web 4
portal that has all of those resources available. We have also something new this year. Before we can instruct a student, before we can instruct an English language learner, we have to identify to make sure that they are English language learners. When we identify, it s a process that we go through. That s the LPAC, Language Proficiency Assessment Committee. That committee is very critical to determine: What are we going to do for our English language learners? Are they going to continue in the bilingual program? Are they going to continue in the ESL program? What type of assistance are we going to give them? What language are we going to give them? This year, we have something new, and they are vignettes. Actually going into our website, if you will go to the Region 20 website, you will see it where it says Language Proficiency Assessment Committee. You click on that and it s going to give you all these resources that are available for the teachers, for the individuals that are part of the LPAC. But the new ones that we have this year that we re very proud of and we ve received feedback from those year-round schools already that are out there doing their LPAC training are vignettes. They ll tell you exactly what an LPAC is supposed to look like. The assembly line of just, Let s go. Suzie, yes. Have her remain in the bilingual program. Sign right here. Let s go. Next one. Okay, yes. Juanita s going to remain in the bilingual program. Let s continue. Those assembly lines, those days are gone. We want to ensure that everybody knows what that LPAC is supposed to do. What is it supposed to look like for students that are in Special Ed? What is it supposed to look like for a student that goes into ESL? What is it supposed to look for a student that goes into bilingual? So I share all these resources with you because we as an agency, we re very proud of what we re doing. We re very proud of the fact that we don t do it by I, as a state director, there is no way that I could meet the needs of every single child and every single educator in here. I work collaboratively with 20 education service centers. They work with their respective LEAs. In turn, we work very collaboratively with and I still call it SEDL and it s not SEDL, it s REL. That s the important thing, is that one person alone cannot do it. I provide guidance to ensure that we re following the track that we re supposed to follow, but we all work collaboratively to ensure that we are all meeting the need. With that stated, I welcome you and I thank you for being part of this phenomenal session that s going to occur today. Everything that you take today and everything that I have shared with you share further. I mean, it s all of us in that village that will make sure that our English language learners needs are being met. Again, on behalf of the agency and on 5
behalf of being your state director, I welcome you and I thank you for being part of this session. Thank you, Vicki, and thank you, Linda. End of Transcript 6