DISCLAIMER: Raw, unedited transcript from webinar. No guarantees are made for the accuracy of the content.) >> Please standby for realtime captions. >> This is Robbin, I wanted to thank people for joining us. It will be a little bit before we started, but you are in the right room and the audio is working, if you are hearing me. >> Please standby for realtime captions. >> All right, we will get started in about five minutes. Thank you for coming today. >> Good morning or afternoon. We will get started in just another minute or so. We will let people join us in the room, and then we will get started. >> Okay, I showing it is the top of the hour. This is Robbin Bull with NCDB and I want to begin by welcoming everybody. I am going to go through some housekeeping items before I handed over to Megan Cote who will be presenting today's presenter. First of all, all phone lines have been muted to reduce background noise and we ask that you keep your phone muted, unless you are going to be speaking. The question and answer session will occur at the end of the presentation, however, you can write your questions in the chat box at any time during the presentation as it will be monitored throughout the webinar in preparation for the question and answer session. We want to let you know this webinar will be recorded and archived on our NCDB website and will be posted in the next couple of days. And I am going to handed over to Megan Cote at this point. >> Hello everybody. I would like to welcome you, again, to the webinar today. I am excited to introduce Sarah to you all. She is a professional learning specialist focusing on improved cultural understanding, communication and collaboration with almost 20 years of teaching, training and coaching experience. Having taught English language and literacy skills to every age group, including adults. Sarah has enjoyed working in public and private schools, nonprofit organizations and corporations across the United States and internationally. Sarah has her masters in curriculum and instruction with a focus on social justice in urban education. She has certification in general education, English as a second language, bilingual education, specifically Spanish, reading, coaching and mentoring and she is currently earning her diversity and inclusion leadership certificate from Cornell. She has extensive experience as an instructor and supervisor for several educator preparation and masters programs, all designed through innovative action-based research models for maximum impact and sustainability. Sarah is the owner of Confianza, where she and her team support schools and organizations face-to-face and online to positively and proactively respond to increasingly diverse populations. So without further ado, Sarah, you can take it from here and we are thrilled to have you. >> This is Robbin, I will but in for a moment because apparently I did miss type the phone number at the top. So anybody who has dialed in might be having some problems. So I am going to correct that and just give a moment for people. I am sorry about that. >> Okay, I have the number posted there and we will have people come in shortly, but a lot of people hopefully have done the dialback and are on the audio. So, Sarah, why don't you go ahead and get started. We have the captioning of people cannot hear right away and then people can dial in if they need to. >> Okay, very good. Okay, very good. I just want to make sure that my audio is working. >> Yes it is. >> Great. Thank you. Good morning or afternoon to all who are joining us here today. I am very excited about the opportunity to work with your network and also, hello to those of you joining on and archived webinar. I want to give a special thank you to Robbin and Megan and your team for inviting me and my organization to be part of what will be a three part webinar series to support your network. Today will be about Culturally Responsive Partnerships. Before I get into that, I would like to frame our work more around the goals we have for the larger network webinar series. You have heard a little bit about me and my work and I am excited to hear about you and your work. We have some polls today and time for interaction through the question and answer. The three part webinar series will start today and we will get together in a couple of weeks to talk about informed practice, particularly around family relationships and engagement. Later in the summer we come back together and that focus will be a little more in depth on parent advisory councils and ambassadors. I am excited to work with you as I said, on this three part webinar series. I will be inviting three of my key consultants to join us in the future webinars. A family engagement specialist on the second one and the third one around parent advisory councils. We are all really looking forward to supporting you and hope that you can ask questions throughout, as Robbin said in the chat. We hope to get to them today and if not, after today and throughout the time together in this series. So, welcome everyone. So where are we going? Today we are going to unpack our identity. I will model for you what it is like to examine, perhaps, your own biases, your own social location and how that impacts work with families from culturally diverse backgrounds. That is going to be the first part and a big part of our time together today. After that I would like to offer some ideas for exploring where you are working for those partnerships across your network and building on the strengths that you have already. Finally I am going to ask you to consider one, maybe two action steps to go with you, to take with you after today to build up that support network. I do want to keep that in mind as we start, that I am going to be presenting a lot of information. I welcome you to go back into the webinar, back into the resources to go deeper, but really it is not about doing it all, it is really about taking one or two things that connect to your practice and that you can take with you, so keep that in mind. Looking ahead, as I said, the informed practice webinar is going to be about family engagement, so we will get into deeper themes and ideas around that. And finally as I mentioned before, the parent advisory Council and ambassador work. So the concept of cultural proficiency is woven throughout our work together. Today we will be taking that off, but we will not be losing track of that in all of our work together in the series. So when each of the series I have been able to work with Robbin and Megan and the team to send out a video and definitely you will receive post resources, because we want to make sure you are equipped to go deeper into any of the concepts and themes we've discussed. So if you had a chance to see this video before today, great. If you didn't, you may want to check it out. It is a language immersion story and is about a child named Moises who is an immigrant from Mexico, experiencing many challenges and also bringing many aspects to school. I will be touching on him as an example as a case study in our work together today, but it is not a requirement to have seen that. It is there for you if you would like to go a little bit deeper in the future. Like all the videos, we do have closed captioning. This one is from CBS. As other materials, should you want to dig deeper. All right, let's dive in here. This is a fundamental place to start for any work around cultural competency, proficiency, and relationships in general. What I like to call it is an equity-based mindset. We can have all the strategies and practices and tools and tips, but it is not going to get us that far unless we really believe in ourselves, believe that we need to change our perspective sometimes and also, of course, leave in the families and students that we serve. From what I understand about your network, you're coming with that which is such a strength. Today I invite you to think about, what does that mean in terms of your culture and what does that mean in terms of shifting it for specific linguistic needs or cultural needs, or other identity needs, of the people that you serve. So I would like to talk a little bit as we get into this first part of identity, just framing it around statistics and the data. In the public school system across the United States, we are dealing with a vastly growing subgroup of students. This is the specialty where I work, what we call English language learners or English learners, often abbreviated as EL or ELL. It might mean they are learning English as a second language, but also that their parents are. If the children are proficient it doesn't mean that the parents are and that is part of our work, getting to know what families are bringing to the table and how we can best and most effectively communicate with them. So framing it in this trend that we are looking at about one in 10, and that is an opportunity to really embrace. Most of our English learners are born in the United States. We do have, and I work closely with many schools with unaccompanied minors and immigrant children and families, we do still have most of our English learners -- it is something to think about, where students are coming from, their family background and their experiences a big factor of their identity. So when we look at this trend, we want to think about, this is not a monolith. Students are coming from many different linguistic profiles. All of these resources are linked at the end of the PowerPoint so you will be able to go back to these for your own use later on if you would like to. Here you can see trends in the language groups. May be no surprise to you. Most of our English learner families are coming with Spanish as a home language. However, that is not the case in every situation, so I will be asking you in a while to consider the language profiles of those you serve. So we have here, as you can see, not just Spanish, but Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Haitian, Creole. I work with communities, as well as many on the East Coast, in the Boston area, we have many growing groups. Including Portuguese speakers from Brazil and Cape Verde. Students from all over the world and of course, students that are born here that are bringing the linguistic profiles from home. Many of them are multilingual, too. We don't want to think they are bilingual. Many are multilingual. That goes to the assets. I don't have to tell this group, students and families from special populations may be viewed in the dominant culture from a deficit lens. Always start with the assets. I offer the framework of funds of knowledge. A research base that really states what I think you all know. All people are competent, all people come with their own gifts and assets and it is really our job to find out what those are. To find out what those funds of knowledge are and build on them. With English learners it is often in the form of cultural capital and linguistic capital. So it is a huge strength. It strengthens the brain, it allows for more opportunities to have more relationships with different communities. There is more earning power. It goes on and on, the benefits of being bilingual. So we want to really recognize that and build upon it. As well as the biculturalism and multiculturalism. I want to think of it as a window. To really honor where they are coming from. We are able to see different parts of the world. We are able to understand and experience different kinds of pieces of our own history in this country, but also where we are going and not just in the United States, but also globally. I do a lot of work on international schools, too, and it is fascinating. As you may already know, the United States is one of the most monolingual trees -- countries in the world. We really have an opportunity here to be more global, globally competent and globally connected in our diverse world. Now we will talk about the challenges, because certainly there are challenges and we don't want to gloss over those. We want to acknowledge them and address them. To start, we have the identification and referral issues. From what I imagine and what I know in my experiences working with deaf and hard of hearing and blind populations, professional learning with groups and in my own experience in schools as an educator, the identification issue is a big one. So we are really relying on self reporting. We are relying on families to give us language history and we are relying on observational techniques in the classroom. However, this population, we are required, actually any public school, to ask every child about their language history. That doesn't mean we get every child's accurate history or picture of their linguistic profiles. So there is a challenge. We need to really do some detective work and build relationships with families. With that comes, often, a stigma around maybe being undocumented or having other issues with prejudice or bias with different cultural and religious groups in schools, and the society in general. Families may not want to come forth and be honest about what they are bringing, because they may fear real or perceived persecution from that. As you can see here, we've got other challenges, like learning language and content at the same time. So not just learning biology, also the language of biology. So they are doing double duty, potentially. The referral issues, we have an over referral trend in special education and and under referral trend in special education, happening in different ways in different places across our country. That is essential to acknowledge for misidentified students. That is a really complex process, but it can be done equitably. The dropout issues, right around 62% of English learners making it through high school and that is against the national trend of 82%, so we have a culture of failure. Unfortunately there is a deficit lens, not just from educators that are underprepared and systems that are underprepared and fastly monolingual and monocultural, to students and families themselves often having a deficit lens of their own identity. And we are in a position to change that. So let's go through a little bit more about the levels of language acquisition, just so everyone here is on the same page. If you don't know that, you might know this already. Please take it as a review. After that we are going to swing back into identity as a whole. Language is a big part of identity. These are the five levels. I worry these quickly. Consider language learners you may work with. Students, staff, and where they might fall in this continuum. Here we have the first level, usually called preproduction, the silent period, or beginners. That is where we are speaking or understanding, so not getting very specific in the vocabulary yet. We may have a silent period. I know I am constantly trying to learn other languages in my travels and I definitely go through this myself, starting to soak it in but not Letty to produce yet to those that are verbal. Visuals are really key. Simple questions, but I want to stress it is not watering it down. That has been a disservice in our schools, thinking they don't know enough English so they are not capable of high levels. That is really not true. We really need to scaffold support for students to reach the high levels. So the first stage can last a couple days in some people I have known, all the way to a year or so. To contextualize this, think about a student asking for water in your classroom. I had students in my classroom say nothing or give me the sign, because I taught them sign language for simple commands like that. Or they might just say water or agua, if they spoke Spanish, for example. Then we move on to the second stage, production. We start to develop some chunks of language moving into communicating and understanding phrases, sentences. A more specific vocabulary, but again that is stronger than the productive. Support is critical. Some ideas here, to extend to other contexts that you work with. Students and families. This phase, as well, is pretty quick compared to other phases. An example, a student may say, water, may I have? It's not perfect, it is about communication and getting it across. We've got it, the message is coming out. The child is thirsty and once water, much like this plant in the visual. Going through these levels there is a plant growing higher and higher. So this phase I really want to address, the intermediate phase. Developing. It is very, very misunderstood. The research points out across different contexts in the United States, because students and adults alike may sound like they are very proficient with their oral language. They are listening and speaking might sound really proficient, but literacy, not so much and also vocabulary is a big part of that. So they often sort of pass as a language proficient person and they are not. This is where the gap starts happening in many cases, working with schools at this time of the year. We assess where students are at and we see a lot not making the grades, because we are not addressing their needs. We are not really responding. So on and so forth. Again, this has specific support, like feedback around specific errors, but not over correcting. It is not about a page full of red marks. It is about meaningful action again. This is where it can last for a while, so I want to point that out. It can lag, but we don't want kids to fossilized here. Students, or people, are starting to present sentences, simple sentences. Going on, the next two cases I will gloss over because they are self-explanatory. Moving into technical vocabulary, fluency, able to understand cultural concepts. Still tricky, though, like idioms. Like a fish out of water or it is raining cats and dogs. That is very culturally dependent and confusing for language learners. As you can see from the student example here, I would really like please some water because I am thirsty. So we are getting more in the language, but not necessarily native proficiency. That is indicative of the stage. Moving to the final stage, the person is really able to be and sound more proficient in terms of literacy and oral language. This is where we want to transition out of the language program or EL program and really encourage students to join the quote-unquote, mainstream. To get the support they need. At the adult level, this is where we want adult learners, as well, to move out of level V and two level VI and say something like, excuse me, may I please have some water? I am extremely thirsty. Or parched. The quality and quantity of languages there and that is simply the overview of the stages. I would like to offer you, going back to culture, a concept you may be familiar with which is the Iceburgh concept of culture. When students and families are dealing with the language levels I just described, we are also dealing with, perhaps, cultural differences from the dominant culture. This metaphor is quite helpful for thinking about culture. We have the surface level and there is a picture of an iceberg here. On the surface, those are the things we see. The visible aspects of culture. Food, dress, music, language, arts, holidays. Things that are more obvious and indicative of a group identity, but underneath the surface is where most of the culture is and that is concepts of time, child rearing, behaviors, perhaps concepts about disability, concepts about friendship, age, gender, personal space, body language. Getting into things that are learned from the group, because culture is learned, and it does change over time. But again, it goes back to the group. Just a reminder on that. If this metaphor is useful, please take that with you. Let me give you an example. I'll talk about my own identity in a moment, but just to point out some of the common aspects of identity that we come across in our work are here. We can't overlook and we don't want to overlook race, gender, ethnicity, age, language, spiritual affiliation or religion, ability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, those are all important, but we don't want to stay at that level. This can sometimes be the surface level only. We want to acknowledge that there is much more than these possibly more obvious aspects of identity. So with myself, I will invite you to listen to me talk about my own identity and consider what might be more visible and surface level or what might be a more deep level. Currently IM and educator as you know and I also consider myself as a "edu-prenuer." that might not be obvious to those who meet me. I surprise any people speaking Spanish were grading them in Arabic, trying out different languages. That becomes obvious, but it might not be. This is one that might be invisible unless you know me deeply. I am the sister of a person with disabilities. Craniofacial birth defects and hearing impairment. People might not understand how much that impacted my identity. That is a little deeper, right? As well as being the daughter of parents were strong advocates in special education. And supporting my sisters needs and my needs. As well as being a first generation college student. People are often shocked to hear that, because I have come so far in terms of socioeconomic change in the generations in my family in a short amount of time, so again that might not be an obvious piece of my culture on the surface, but it is a deep peace of who I am. As well as the last one here. I am a former free lunch student. Again, so with the economic path I have traversed, not so much on the surface apparent to other people, but definitely very important to how I shaped my own identity and how I understand the challenges that families can come with when they are moving through poverty and dealing with special needs. So I ask you to consider, what is visible? What is invisible? What might be both, depending on the situation? And as I explained, what assumptions might be made about me? Therefore, what assumptions might be made about you? And of course, what assumptions might we be making about the people we are serving with the best of intentions? We know there is a difference between intention and impact, so we want to align that. This is important to think about your own identity, because it does shape your biases. That is when we lack a viewpoint, coming with some kind of learned perspective that usually comes from an aspect of our culture. This is a framework from an article included at the end of the PowerPoint that goes into more depth and I find it to be a useful way to think about it, in terms of our iceberg, our own iceberg we are coming with. Our cultural lens. This is a simple framework to think about, what do I notice? Right? But what am I not noticing? What might be deeper and what am I going to do about it, most importantly? Let's look at an example. This goes back to the child I was talking about earlier in the video that you could watch. His name is Moises. I will bring this right back to my experience as a teacher, starting my first, second year, a long time ago as a teacher in an urban school district. I had never ever worked with Latino families. I was a white, monolingual, you know, non-Spanish-speaking, non-culturally proficient educator and I made assumptions, based on my own identity. So I had a childlike Moises, actually about 20 children like Moises , in my classroom. I thought to myself, wow, this Hispanic population is not coming to family events. What is going on with that? Why aren't they coming? Of course I am thinking of my own experiences with my mother and father being trained advocates, getting out there and helping and advocating for other families. Thinking, well, something is different here. Why aren't these families like my families? The next question is, what am I not noticing? What do I need to learn about others? For me, I needed to learn those deeper aspects of culture. I needed to figure out, okay, there are different values around schooling in this culture and they are not bad, they are just different. I learned that the way the Puerto Rican and Mexican cultures that I was working with viewed me, maestra, which means teacher in Spanish, they viewed me, they perceived me as up here. Like God and teacher. We don't get involved. We respect what you are doing at the school. We don't think it is appropriate to come in and participate in the same way that I was used to in my white dominant racial framework, cultural framework. So that was one cultural value and I had to learn about that through the families I was working with and my teaching assistant who was bilingual and bicultural and could teach me about that. The other thing is the language. As we discussed, the language barrier is incredibly challenging. There can be shame around that. There can be experiences families are coming with that can impact even trying to get support through an interpreter. As well as many other families I worked with were in poverty and not able to come, even if they wanted to. Working across the city or working all night. Nevermind issues that Moises went through about trauma, right? And the fear of, perhaps, being undocumented. So the third part of the framework is what am I noticing and what am I not noticing and now, what am I going to do about it? And how am I going to be more critically conscious and anti-bias? I always try to learn by active listening. I try to find ambassadors who can educate me and build those relationships on mutual respect and trust. By the way, the name of my organization is called Confianza, which means mutual respect and trust. The experiences I had as an educator and becoming bilingual myself, living and working in bilingual communities, taught me that this is a critical piece of our work. That mutual respect and trust. So really it requires us, as you know, to get outside of our comfort zones and get to those deeper levels of culture. Again, what am I seeing from my own bias standpoint and being okay to address that. So, let's reflect on this. Let's reflect on this and before we go into this, I would like to have you go back and queue up, Robbin, for the poll on language groups. I will go back to that slide so you have it as a visual while you are listening or reading the captions. What is the majority language group of the families you serve? The choices here are mostly Spanish, mostly Chinese, mostly Vietnamese, or other. Which can be many other languages. I myself have worked with over 50 different languages at one time, so it could be many possibilities here. Thank you, Robbin. We are seeing the answers come in. Excellent. So it does look like as the answers are coming in, no surprise, mostly Spanish-speaking is our largest group. I want to point out, culturally, that doesn't mean they are all the same, as I think you all know. I give an example of Moises who is Mexican, but I have also worked with Puerto Rican families. Living in the United States, perhaps a little more Americanized, quote-unquote, and of course the language is different. Even then, we don't want to lump families into one category. Thanks for sharing that information, everybody. That is helpful. And if you don't know, I see that is 11.5%. That's fine, too. This is an opportunity. Perhaps it will be your goal to think about what you want to learn from the families that you serve. So, thank you so much. We will get back into the learning. I was really helpful to think and hear about that. So as I go through this process of what you notice and perhaps what you do not notice and what you're going to do about it. That was a great example. I noticed most of my families are Spanish speakers, but I don't know the other language groups. That might be what you do about it to find out. So when you think about and consider your stance around being culturally responsive, as I said before, it is an equity-based mindset and even deeper, anti-bias. I don't want these biases. We all have them, but how do I really start by always thinking about anti-bias behaviors and values. One of the organizations we work with that is such a tremendous support and resource is teaching tolerance. We are showing all these resources with you at the end, but this is a great place to start if you are wondering what does that mean? Antibias education, what are we talking about? I will just very briefly touch on these seven and then ask you to choose one that reflects to what you are thinking about now. This is an anonymous. This is just literally for you to reflect. As I read these, consider, and then Megan will post a poll in a moment. The first is, do I want to build and draw on intergroup awareness? Do I want to understand more about one culture, perhaps? What about creating those environments that reflect diversity, equity and justice. And I put classroom, because I know you are in different spaces, many kinds of environments, thinking about that. Number three, engaging families and communities in ways that are that mutual respect peace, that meaningful level of interaction. Number four, encouraging students, and perhaps families or other groups you work with, to speak out against bias and injustice. So it is not enough just to acknowledge, but perhaps you are responding to this one, speaking to you, that you would like to learn more about that or encourage families. Encourage families to speak out. On the other ones here are including the anti-bias approaches as part of the community action. And number six, supporting the identities and making it safe. To me that seems like a good place to start. Who are we, who are our families, who are our students and can we all feel included? Finally, number seven, what about the strategies that support diverse learning styles? That is a lot. I know I have given you seven to think about and this isn't anything more than a starting place for you. So, Robbin, if you could put the poll up and we will have people take a minute and think about which of these speaks to you right now, in your practice. Okay. Thank you. I see people jumping right away. Many of you on the third one, the families and communities. Absolutely. That is great to hear. As well as supporting folks identities and making it safe. And encouraging people to speak out. Great. Excellent. Thank you so much everyone, for contributing. I think it is so important to reflect. I don't know about you, but we don't always get the opportunity to just reflect. Even just a minute here is a minute you can think about what this would be for you, going forward. So, thank you, I think we can move on Robbin. With those values in mind, and again, feel free to go deeper in your own time, I would like to remind you again that we are really here today to maybe have some new learning or refreshment of learning for those of you who know this. Most importantly I would like to encourage you to think about what is within your sphere of influence that you can take action on. As we think about language and culture and identity in these aspects around cultural proficiency, it is not about doing it all. It is not about doing all seven of those values in our practices. It is literally about taking one or two. I understand you have limitations, and I understand that because I have limitations in my role and see that a lot for different advocates, like yourselves, and for educators and family. Instead of the frustration that we might feel, getting overwhelmed, I would like you just to feel whelmed. Not overwhelmed, just whelmed. Because now we will get into how we can take this to our work and state partnerships given that we have this iceberg of culture that we can take with us as a lens. So, as we think about partnerships, I will ask in a moment where you look for them. It is helpful to backup, as we have done. First of all, know your self. I want to stress that. Know yourself and your own biases. Then, how are you knowing the learners? How are you knowing the families? How are you knowing the cultures? Profiles, language profiles. Of course, what are the resources to get you there? Discerning one next step. One or two, thinking about that. So I will have you engage in a poll again and I want to ask you, where are you looking for your partnerships as you are engaging in this work in your state? There are more than just these options. There could be other options to think about. School of the blind, school of the deaf, state agency of course is a big partner. Many people, I see the parent information centers. I can be very impactful. Excellent. So it looks like we are really between the state agency in the parent information Center, finding a lot of partnerships there, which is hopeful. So, thank you. I think we can and that poll, Robbin. Excellent. Thank you. Just to reiterate, I think you all know this because you are experts in your own areas, but when it comes to cultural proficiency, much like any nondominant cultural aspect of our work, there is no one-size-fits-all? People say to me, Sarah, how do I do that? What's the template? There is no exact template. It is things to think about, but it really comes down to who you are working with and the needs and the strengths of the community with whom you are working. And so I just want to share with you, before we open it up for questions, that these are the resources that I touched on and also that I recommend. If you would like to, these are short and sweet little blog articles from my contributors and myself around culture and around language and that process of looking at what you notice and don't notice. I also did mention the teaching tolerances critical practices, which I cannot recommend enough. Signing up for our mailing list is a nice place to start, as well as the teaching tolerance mailing list. Lots of ideas, as well as the data that I shared from our English learners before about all the data and the language group. That is all there, more than you could ever want to know about our language learners at risk, from NPR. So that is there for you. And finally, the book where I was going through the language levels with the plans kind of growing from level I through five, that is from my recently released book, called the language lens for content classrooms. It is applicable to community partners and working with families, as well. A lot of stories about students into deeper dives into some of the concepts we have explored today. For all means, if that is useful or you would like to download the free study guide, that is on the website for you as well. So that is what we have prepared for you today and I want to say thank you, again, for being here. For your work, your commitment to the students, the families and communities that you serve. I am looking forward to hearing if there are questions that I might be able to address. So, with that I will handed over to Robin and Meghan. >> Thank you for all of this information, it was very informative. I was writing frantically as you were speaking. I know there is limited time and limited resource to make the impact that we need with all the families that we serve, so you spending time talking about the importance of really setting and determining what cultures the families we serve come from, and then, based on that, what are our own biases and how those impact our state projects. Owning that reality and saying okay, who are we going to partner with. Not only find the families, but connect and serve them based on what we are capable of providing or not providing within the space of our current projects. It is really significant. When we plan to have Sarah come and do these presentations, we intentionally divided them up into a three-part series, knowing there would be some stuff for you guys with state projects and others who joined the webinar today from other agencies who serve families, to do some self-study around your own biases and studying, what does that do in terms of our abilities to serve families? Then start thinking of things you want to do, moving forward. Picking one thing so as not to overwhelm yourself. Maybe it is something as simple as, I just want to get information about -- or I want to spend time calling agencies to see what they do right now. It will be really significant to you. If you have questions, you can put them in the chat pod. Sylvia put one in from New York. She said, hi Sarah, thank you for the great presentation and reminder to take a deep look into ourselves and what my own biases may be. I am very passionate about the subject and I have a few questions for you. One, what system or systems do you use in your practice to communicate with families of multilingual cultures? >> Okay, great, thanks so much Megan and thanks Silvia, it is great to hear how passionate you are. It is a great question. I like how you put system in parentheses, because I think that is the magic answer if there is one, that there are many systems we are working with. If you have the ability to work with cultural ambassadors or as Megan was saying, community-based organizations, agencies, that already have relationships and knowledge about different cultural and linguistic groups, I can't stress that enough. That relationship can be one of the strongest systems, as you probably well know. So it is sometimes not just the interpreter, right, or getting the translated documents. The deeper piece is, what do I need to know? So I guess I don't have the magic answer all wrapped up, but I would say building on the places where there are, even if it is building from one family or one mother or father, on to whomever you might work with that is willing, you know, to work with you and help you navigate through the community. I am excited to get into that more next session and give you more specific tools that schools use that you might consider. The family engagement specialist is working full-time as a multilingual learner director and has a great toolkit of tech tools and other incredible things I wouldn't be doing justice to today. So I will definitely think about your question and I know we are really excited and we are planning that, to get more in depth. So I hope that was helpful as a starting point, Silvia. >> S, thank you for that answer, that is really helpful. So, another question, for state projects and others joining the call today to ponder would be, there are a few layers of complexity. Finding partners in finding the children and families. Finding people that can help communicate and have relationships with those folks, because they share the culture. And there is also the lair of interpreting the needs of a child and also interpreting the needs of a family. So when we think about, as a network, what information are we producing? How are we disseminating information to families to be culturally accessible and responsive? How does all of that get balanced in terms of our day, so I think that is a little bit, too, of what Silvia was basically saying, that when sharing information about opportunities for families, how does she make sure that she is meeting everyone's needs? It is a big pill to swallow, but I am excited for the next webinar where I know you guys will go in more deep on that. Silvia is saying as a follow-up, in my experience, many immigrant families live in the U.S. but never learn English language. In your opinion, what would be the reason why and is there any research on this particular issue that helps explain it? >> Very interesting, Silvia. It sounds like you have experienced that, with different groups, and I would be curious to hear more. I know it is limited what we can converse here, but I think it is a fascinating question, because it really depends on the context. As we say in language acquisition. It depends on the sociocultural context. Not just the neighborhood, or a city where families are living, but what is going on within those neighborhoods, within the city. What is going on perhaps with policy from the state or federal government to shape what they feel they can or cannot do. What is going on with the history of that culture, the history of that language group. What is going on with the drivers? That is one of the biggest factors I can point to that the research talks about, in terms of how accelerated our language development is. If you are motivated or not. The motivation has to be there. Myself I have been a voluntary language learner. I have lived in places and wanted to learn another language. I am privileged that way, but our students are not and they have to learn the target language to survive. But their families may not. I think that points to what you are saying. The families may not and there are many reasons why. The questions I was asking before about policy and context. Also it might be safer. There might be lots of reasons to feel unsafe. Again, the motivation might not be there. I know a lot of families have worked with from different language groups, and, not to generalize, but they sacrificed so much of their own identity and their own time, in their life, for their children. So it is really all about the children. It might just be about survival. Go to work, come home and support my child. And make it to the next level I didn't make it to, whether I was born in this country or not. So again, you know it is not an easy answer and I appreciate the question, too. But I would end that with anyway you can learn the stories of the families can help you with that, with the pieces I was talking about. Those are the research-based factors, but every story is different. >> Great. So I am not seeing any other questions in the chat pod. Someone is typing. Anyone else feel free to add your questions to the chat pod about things you may want to know from Sarah based on what she shared today or what you know is coming down the pipe, so she can continue to think about adding answers to future webinars that you guys may have. >> Please. >> Silvia says thank you very much. >> Oh, thank you Silvia. I would just add one thing from a research standpoint, other cultural differences below the surfaces that we expect, like what educated means. Some cultures, working with families from Laos for example, it is not a written language until recently. So what educated might mean for folks in that community is oral language, oral storytelling is education. So then we bring that what we have as dominant American schools, like no, it is literacy and containers of biology and algebra. You know, English language arts. Again, the way we have that perception from our culture. Excuse me, as a dominant culture and how we shape schools is very, very much derived from our own history and value. Other cultures are coming in, other language groups and cultural groups will have different perspectives and that is just as valid. So it could be that mismatch between home and school. >> Great. Marlene asked the question about, are CRC credits available for this training? I am reading it, I answered it in the chat pod, but for those not seeing the screen, unfortunately, no, there are not CRC credits available for this training. I see that there is another question coming in from Texas, so let's wait for that. Edgenie says, Sarah, this is fabulous information. Please share what Confianza means again. >> Absolutely, it is my pleasure. It means mutual respect and trust. So it is a word in Spanish and is similar in other Latin-based languages, Portuguese, Italian, French. You might think it sounds like confidence or it looks like confidence. Well, it is. That is the beautiful thing about language, things don't always translate, because they have a different cultural meaning. And I learned through my work in bilingual settings, especially when I lived and taught in Puerto Rico, that when you have Confianza, you really have the trust and that mutual respect of someone. So again, it is not just a word, but a cultural concept. There are so many examples like that. I love learning them in my work and encourage you, as well. Things don't always translate and are not always what they seem. >> Great. Are there any other questions? Feel free to put them in the chat pod if there are. I see that Edgenie is typing. She says that is an ideal philosophy to have when connecting with families. >> Yes it is. >> We will wait a few more minutes to make sure there aren't more questions. >> I will just share an anecdote while we are doing that, if I may, Megan. >> Please. >> I would just add, we will go into this more next time, but trying and fumbling with languages of your families is a really powerful strategy. I am reminded of one of my first humbling experiences. Humbling with Spanish and having one of the families, the mother, write me a note. And she says -- she said, thank you for realizing the dream of the students at this school. And me stumbling and trying to understand her Spanish, I realized that there is so much more that might be conveyed in another language. When she tried to speak in English, she couldn't convey it. She wrote it in Spanish and it was deep and meaningful. And it was an opportunity for me to read her Spanish and feel like our students feel, like our families feel, and really fumble and pronounce things wrong and all that and that is an important piece to keep in mind, right, that we are in this position of power. Being proficient in English, if you are proficient in English, and it can go a long way to really bring that mutual power relationship by learning, or at least acknowledging and trying the language. >> We have Silvia typing, she says one of the things I do when meeting a family of an unfamiliar language, I try to learn a word like hello or nice to meet you before meeting with them, to help build that report. A great idea, Silvia. >> Lovely. That is exactly what I am talking about. Thank you, Silvia. >> Well, I am not seeing more questions coming into the chat pod. Which means that I think you have blown everyone's mind. You have given a lot to think about, Sarah. >> [ Laughter ] >> In a good way. So, here is what I would say. As a closeout, as a reminder, you guys, the remaining two webinars in this three-part series will be held on June 21 and July 26 and you can check the NCDB website for the login details. We hope you can join us and we encourage you to share this opportunity with other state or national level partners with whom you are collaborating to provide the best possible services for families. And on behalf of NCDB and everyone who joined today, I would like to personally thank you Sarah for your time and expertise. I have no doubt your presentation will lead to enhanced outcomes for families and I hope everyone has a wonderful remainder of your day and we look forward to seeing you on June 21. We hope between now and then you will take a pause and think about as a project, a little bit about what Sarah shared in terms of knowing yourself, knowing your families and knowing your partners. Thank you all and we look forward to seeing you again soon at the June 21 webinar. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Sarah. >> [Event Concluded]