Our co-host for this episode, Carrie Parker, has worked for more than 20 years with states and districts to improve programs for culturally and linguistically diverse learners, leading both quantitative and qualitative research studies on topics including identifying disabilities among multilingual learners, understanding patterns in reclassification of English proficiency status, and identifying strategies for high quality instructional practices. Parker is the director of SRI’s Multilingual Learner Program Area, which works to ensure equitable educational opportunities and outcomes for multilingual learners from birth to post-college. Carrie will be sharing reflections from work she has done over the last five years to better understand how teachers in grades K-3 identify disabilities among multilingual learners. She conducted research in three districts, speaking with both teachers and administrators. She will also share about connections she makes from that work to research conducted by her colleagues with multilingual learners with disabilities, as well as to broader conversations about race, language and disability.
Intro/Outro Music done by Keith Jones of Krip Hop Nation. His information is below:
SoulTouchin' Experiences
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Ruchika 0:24
Welcome to the urban collaborative podcast. We are here to listen to stories and personal experiences of people in our community, their successes, how they got there, and advice they might share with others who are facing some of the same challenges and opportunities they may have had. Each of our podcast speakers will connect us to the theme of the month that we are looking to explore with you all our urban collaborative members. I'm Richard Gere Chopra, host of this series that we call collab cast a resource from the urban collaborative, supporting over 100 districts in 29 states across the country to build equitable and inclusive practices. During the month we will also have for you our members, access to a scheduled Zoom meeting around the theme and additional related resources will be shared. These topics concern issues that you have told us you are grappling with and want to learn more about. We are starting off the school year by engaging in conversation around our multilingual learners, who are classified as having a disability. To learn about this group of students we start off by hearing the perspective of teachers. Our guest today, Carrie Parker will share some stories from teachers that she has worked with. To better understand how these teachers in grades K through three have identified disabilities among their multilingual learners. Carrie conducted research in three districts speaking with both teachers and administrators, she will also share about connections she has made from that work to research conducted by her colleagues, as well as to a broader conversation about race, language and disability. Carrie Parker has worked for more than 20 years with states and districts to improve programs for culturally linguistically diverse learners, leading both quantitative and qualitative research studies on topics including identifying disabilities among multilingual learners, understanding patterns in reclassification of English Proficiency status, and identifying strategies for high quality instructional practices. Carrie Parker is the director of SRS multilingual learner program area, which works to ensure equitable educational opportunities and outcomes for multilingual learners from birth to post college. Parker has served as data consultant on district reviews of Special Education Programs that examine whether and how districts are providing high quality education to students with disabilities. The reviews use data from multiple sources including student and parent focus groups, classroom observations, and walkthroughs. Teacher and staff interviews and analysis of district administrative data. Results help districts leaders identify patterns that limits student success, and provide evidence for steps to implement change. Our conversation with Carrie will be framed around four broad questions that we have shared with her. But really, we're here to learn and hear about her learnings and research in the area of multilingual learners with disabilities. Welcome, Carrie, and thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking our time to share your work.
Carrie 3:41
Well, thank you for having me.
Ruchika 3:44
In the introduction, Carrie, I shared your broad areas of research. Can you please take some time right now to share some details of how your most recent research was detailed, some more specific details around that as well as reasons why you may have focused on this topic for the last few years?
Carrie 4:02
Sure, sure. So I would say broadly, the research that I have been working on focuses on policies for multilingual learners. And I've been thinking about three different ways in which I've been doing that research for the last couple of years. The first has to do with developing frameworks that for what we want from a multilingual Learner Program. And this has been an amazing opportunity to work with state educators at the state level as they think about how they want to frame an overall multilingual Learner Program for for their state and to pass on to their districts. There's I could talk about this, this for a really long time. But I want to highlight one point that you'll notice that I said multilingual learners and not English learners that switch from English learners to multilingual learners is a very complex switch and an important one that many states are engaging in very, very carefully and deliberately. When we talk about English learners. That's that comes from the federal legislation that defines an English learner as being In need of services to improve their English to be able to access high quality, high grade level curriculum. But But what that does is that emphasizes the lack the students deficit of English. And when we switch to multilingual learners, we do two things. First, we celebrate the assets that students who are learning English and bring an additional language, but one if not more languages, and they really are multilingual and that they carry that with them while they're learning English, to there's a growing recognition that multilingualism itself is really an amazing asset and should be promoted. And so therefore, when we think about multilingual learners, we are both acknowledging that learning English is not the only thing that multilingual learners do, and that all of us can aim to become multilingual learners. So that so that's one piece around developing frameworks. Another piece of research had to do with COVID. And I had an amazing opportunity to interview teachers, high school teachers during COVID. So this was like all of 2020, spring of 2021, all of whom were working remotely. And we're talking about how they were working to engage students in the midst of everything around COVID. But the reason why I mentioned this is because I worked with one district where the majority of students were English learners. At that point, they were called English learners. And then another were a high school that actually has a dual language High School. And so speaking Spanish and English is part of the curriculum. And in both of those schools, they talked about this switch, that this shift that that teachers were undergoing to understand translanguaging, which is this idea that you can use more than one language at the same time. And that is a strength that students bring. And so they talked about this, also, while they were like talking about being in tears, or actually being in tears with me, given given the stress that they were going through, but what I really what I pulled from that, from that those conversations over the years, was the way that teachers learned in the midst of all of this things that really helped build assets for their students.
Ruchika 6:58
It's great. And Carrie, I just want to pause there for a minute because I think part of the conversation that you've been having with the teachers as well as with the districts around this change of English language learners to multilingual learners, thinking about translanguaging is so key to as we start thinking about all of our learners about the different assets that they bring into the conversation and the different experiences that they bring into the classroom into their present learning styles and all of those pieces, they'll their learnings and so forth. And I wonder that when you were talking with these teachers, was there certain key components that came out of that conversation? Like Were there certain key learnings that came out of that conversation? Are there some specific pieces around that that you learned?
Carrie 7:45
I would say a few, a few things, I also was able to speak to some students, which was really great, I thought at the height of it there. I think there were there were two things. One is this idea of translanguaging that I just described. And the second is relationships, the teachers, the only way that teachers really could be successful in this online instructional setting was building relationships with with the students. And oftentimes, that's where the tears came in, because they felt like they were not being successful in that. And even even since, as I spoken to teachers, who these were middle school teachers, after, after students had returned, they talked about the challenges of building relationships, even in person. But that that was the thing that was keeping them connected and keeping instruction happening, was really seeing the students as individuals and as people, and focusing on that for for those students.
Ruchika 8:40
And this component around relationships in the last few podcasts that we've done, has been key in in the conversation around building those relationships with our students and with their families and building their relationship with the other teachers and communities. And we know that coming back after the pandemic has been that that component has been hard for all of our students. How did this when when the teachers were speaking to around a multilingual learners were classified with disabilities? How did that component around? What did they do what it was some of the things that they said that they did to help them develop those relationships during that pandemic time as well as coming back, especially with those students who are dually classified and in some ways,
Carrie 9:24
that's actually the third area of research that I wanted to describe? We haven't even I haven't even described exactly what I've done around multilingual learners with disabilities. My most recent research has really focused on the process of identifying disabilities among learners. So it's, it's before they get classified and so they're not in special education programs, per se, yet, the piece in terms of relationships in that area has been around actually understanding how to collect data around students. So when you're when you're trying to understand a student's learning progression, their language development, that the the importance of having Relationship with families of being able to understand the context that the student is coming from is very, very important. And I would say that's where teachers have felt the least the least able to do that successfully. Even in the state frameworks for English learners, building family and community relationships. And engagement is always one of the main principles. And it is often the one that people have the least concrete details of what to do, of how to actually do it. So I guess I would say that overall, what I've seen is that teachers are really struggling with that and not sure what to do. And I don't have any specific examples of where that worked, but to an acknowledgement that, that is part of the process of teaching students well, is understanding that what's happening outside of school,
Ruchika 10:48
understanding the context of where they're coming from learning and building those relationships with their families. And again, extremely hard to do easy to say, but extremely hard to do, especially when there are families coming from so many different contexts, which may not be similar to the educational staff in the building. So it is definitely an area where nationwide, we're thinking about and globally, we're thinking about as an area where we need to do better and to learn more about. So in that framework of of these places where these teachers are not able to build those relationships, be it because of context, be it because of the pandemic, be it for whatever reason, the classification of the multilingual learners in that age group of birth to third grade, how did that process look like when you were doing that research within the in those districts? What came out of that? And what were some of the learnings that came out of that,
Carrie 11:40
or we began this research because there because of the differential identification of disabilities among among multilingual learners. So in some districts, there's an over representation and in other districts is an under representation. So clearly, the patterns of the strategies that teachers use to identify disabilities among English learners, varies greatly. And so we wanted to understand more about that. And so that's where you went to multiple districts to try and understand what was really going on. And interestingly, I think there was a little bit of selection bias in that the districts that agreed to participate with us, most of them had, in fact done a fair amount of thinking, whether it was teachers at the individual level or district wide, about what their identification process should look like for multilingual learners. And so we were speaking with with teachers and administrators who really had been thinking about this for a while, which allowed us to see some things that were working as well as ongoing challenges. So in that sense, it was really fascinating research. And I would start by saying that individual teachers are demonstrating an incredible understanding of their students. And there, there are a couple of teachers in particular, because we ask them to actually focus on one student and to describe their understanding of that students trajectory, from the time they started the school up to that set to third grade. And a number of teachers really were able to, and these are third grade teachers who knew what these students had been experiencing since kindergarten. And they were able to really describe how different strategies had been employed to try and address what could have been a language development issue, or a disability. And so that dedication of the teachers to understand individual student experiences really stood out to me. More generally, we came up with, you know, four, you always have to find your major findings. So we ended up with with four. And some of them actually, our findings that we found in a similar study, 10 years previous in a different state, which I thought was really interesting when I went back and looked at that, but the first is collaboration in a this is something that I've done work where you know, helping classroom teachers collaborate with special education teachers and building in those structures whereby there are times to collaborate together. But adding in the ESL teacher, the English as a Second Language teacher is often just one step too far for principals to think about. And so they often didn't have scheduled time. And they talked about coming in early. And also the big thing that was really interesting, particularly given the shift to remote learning, because this was pre COVID was the importance of physical proximity. And so ESL teachers whose classrooms were closer to general education, teachers, were able to collaborate much more often and have much more fluid communication. And those that were farther away found that they were just much more isolated. So that the importance of collaboration has to do with a major tenant which is understanding that that multilingual learners belong to all teachers. And I think students with disabilities also belong to all teachers. And so having the making sure that the general education teacher was not just letting the ESL teacher do all the do all of the language development, but also recognizing that the student was struggling generally students who or maybe identify disabilities who are also multilingual learners struggle to learn English, they struggle with literacy, they may struggle with the mathematics. And it's all it's all very closely intertwined. And so it's really important that, that there'll be collaboration across. Together with that is their understanding of multi tiered systems of support, and progress monitoring. And where English instruction fits within that there are some schools or teachers or districts where there's a clear separation, students are learning English, when they get to a certain level of English. And if they're struggling, then we put them in a multi tier system support intervention, but that intervention is in English. And so therefore, a student who doesn't have enough English doesn't have access to that intervention. And that's one model. And then there's another model that really understands that those interventions need to be aligned with the English students English proficiency, and that if they need an intervention, it needs to happen no matter what level of English they're at. And so really identifying specific strategies that can work with students who are at different levels of English, some teachers seem very sort of connected to the way an intervention works. So I put them, I'm certainly doing this box imagery that there's an intervention in here, whereas others were like, they would grab strategies. And they would look and say, Okay, I think this student needs x. And so I'm going to pull from this intervention to provide support for that student in that way. And those teachers who were more about figuring out what would work for each individual student were the ones who described more successes than those who were more committed to an intervention, per se. So those are two things. I can continue with two more of our big findings.
Ruchika 16:40
Yes, please, please. Because I think this will help the districts who are listening in to kind of think about what what are the areas that they need to be thinking about when they develop their practices, and as they grow their practices?
Carrie 16:52
Okay, great. So the third area, and actually it was the second, I would put it at the top, even though I mentioned it third, it is cultural responsiveness. It really is, like, we found some huge differences in terms of how teachers understand the experiences that students are having in the end that they bring with them. And there are some teachers for whom cultural celebration like a cultural night was the extent of their understanding of how to integrate a student's culture into into the their school day, whereas others had described really fairly intense self reflection to, to understand their own biases, and what they were bringing to the classroom and to students. And then we definitely saw educators who framed cultural differences as deficits and you hear some descriptions of students that are painful to listen to, as teachers really don't see, the student they see they see a deficit rather than seeing the students. So we, we definitely saw that. But thankfully, that was not the majority of the teachers that we that we spoke. But this idea that that you can't do MTSS, you can't do collaboration, you can't do instruction, without the understanding your own cultural biases, and building your culturally responsive practices. And so that that's is very important when thinking about this idea of identifying disabilities. And one district where the there was a large community from East Asia, talked a lot about understanding what disability means in the culture. And so the need to work with that, as well as just understanding a specific student's experience, but also how their community is understanding what what disability looks like. The last one is using data. This is where, as I said, you know, there are many teachers have this deep knowledge of their students spanning years and some teachers brought the folders of the students and they went through and they were like looking at all the different progress monitoring and able to really understand how students were progressing. But also that teachers are doing that kind of work, but they don't always feel confident about it. They don't always feel confident that the assessments are actually measuring what the students know. And I think that's, that's a big area of unknown around multilingual learners and identifying disabilities, there are different strategies and ways to be able to disentangle disability from language development, but it's not a clean well, well, just as identifying a specific learning disability is not a clean, quote, scientific process. It's very subjective. And so when you add in language development, you're adding in an additional variable of subjectivity. There's really it's really, really important that teachers understand what they can learn from the data, and that they use the data and that general education teachers classroom teachers understand what that a particular students English proficiency data tells them about their what they know and what they still need to learn, and not just leave that to the ESL teachers to understand that, but oftentimes to recognize that sometimes you don't have enough data, because you don't have an assessment. In the students home language for multiple other reasons, it's not it's not always possible to know. And so you just have to focus on working with the strategies that make the most sense for that student.
Ruchika 20:11
Thanks, Carrie. I think if I was to think about all of the points that you made, based on the on the research that you did, I'm thinking about that component that you started with the knowledge of students, and how powerful that was, and in your conversations, and in your research, and how all the four areas that you spoke about the collaboration, the multi tiered supports, and understanding where those interventions might lie for someone and when to be able to provide that the cultural responsiveness to understanding how even just the crafting of what disability looks like in a specific culture, the labeling of that, how does that look like? And what is what is the impact of that, and then just this conversation around data and being confident in what we have, and then understanding what else we need, and being able to understand those nuances of how some of the assessments that we use, may not be giving us the clear picture of who the student is. But going back into that the power of knowing your students and that content around sharing that information of the knowledge of our students, from one teacher to the next teacher to the to all the players in that student's life, every year and every day of their school life, it just seems that there is so much in that there's so much unpacking that you need to do with with districts when you are having those conversations with classrooms and teachers would have been I mean, we did talk about some of the barriers that you found, in doing this work that teachers have identified the relationship, one that you began with developing those relationships, how hard it can be, what are some of the other barriers that came up in the conversations around with the teachers around this work?
Carrie 21:49
One of the things that I found very interesting was an in one district where the multi tiered systems of support was very well integrated into instruction. from kindergarten on, there were students who had started in kindergarten, who had demonstrated challenges with their home language, as well as with learning English. And teachers had done different interventions. It was a three year process of doing multiple different interventions to get to the point where they felt like they had enough data to identify that student with a disability. And this was a district that was being very, very careful because of some previous over identification of disabilities. And so for that particular student, as a teacher described it, what she was describing was process of interventions, that was finding what was most helpful for the student and collecting data along the way, but that student had had intensive supports, then there was a disability that was identified, then the IEP comes back with meeting one specialist twice a week for 45 minutes. And so whereas the student had previously had intensive interventions, and lots of lots of careful attention paid, the IEP was focusing on one specialist a couple of times. And so the big question then is, do the interventions continue? Or did the student once they got an IEP actually ended up getting less services, and maybe targeted to one specific identified disability, but not looking holistically at the student's learning? And so that was a challenge that that there are multiple challenges in there, one was being so careful that you're taking three years to identify disability, when the description of the child from kindergarten demonstrated that it you know, compared with his like peers, that is students who came in with a similar level of English, that student was definitely progressing at a much slower rate. Did it really need to take three years to identify disability, but then once a disability was identified, is the student actually getting the services that are most helpful?
Ruchika 23:51
So interesting to see that, Gary, because in most cases, we've heard so much about this conversation around making a quick determination. And but also the idea that making a slow determination might allow students to not receive that holistic approach of all the different supports that they might be able to get, and especially you were looking at the early childhood age group, that how important those supports could be, but then also thinking about that once those supports have been once it has been identified that they need those supports. Are they holistic enough? Are they addressing all the things that the student needs? And are we then taking away rather than providing additional support that the student might need? It's interesting that you found that because again, we've heard so many stories of over overly identifying and quickly identifying students who are multilingual learners, and students with disabilities in this particular case, it was different, but I think both those stories tell the same story that about identifying the students about how early or late what kind of an impact it could potentially have on a student's day to day experience in school and their learning is paired Mount and thinking about it as in the context of the multi tiered systems of support, that if all of those supports, like you, like you identified are being provided to the students, the classification of that student, how is that helping or coming in the way of the student being able to get what they need? Thank you for bringing that up a perspective that I'm not sure if all of us had really thought about earlier, to learn more about this particular research study, and some of the others that you have either connected with or have learned from, I know that you shared some of the resources with us, and we'll be sharing it within with our members. But is there a specific place that you usually turn to? Or is there one space? Or are there a couple of things a couple of places that you want to share with? Where teachers and administrators might want to go to to learn more research around multilingual learners with specific learning disabilities?
Carrie 25:53
That's a really good question. I think the answer is I There isn't a single space. And I think, at SRI, we're trying to create a set of resources based on the research that we done. And other places really are compile. A lot of really, there's some really, really strong federal resources, the Office of English Language Acquisition, actually has been doing some amazing things. We're thinking about disabilities, I would also say the National Center for systemic improvement, and CSI. And that's one of the links that I did provide to you. They did a series last year looking at language, culture and disability. The reason why I tend to encourage people to go to that site is because those webinars ask the question about what does it mean to have a disability? What is the social construct of disability? What is the social construct of language and language acquisition, and recognizing that if we remain simply in a compliance based world with a definition of an English learner and assessment to see whether or not they've reclassified and similar with with a disability identification, then we miss the complexity of what students are actually experiencing. And so I find that while those webinars may not be chock full of strategies, here are five strategies for you to use in your classroom. They really have helped me to think about what does it all mean? And I actually wanted to I wanted to name one more challenge, if I could, yeah, yes, please. There's I think, I think it's related to this, that there are a number of teachers who, to their credit, said when the system doesn't work for my student, I do whatever the student needs, I find a way to get the student what they love it. Yes. Which is fabulous. But then I found myself asking, What if the teacher doesn't really know what the student needs? Oh, right. Yeah. What does the teachers determine it? Like? How, like, how do we know like there are teachers are, are incredibly dedicated, and many, with many years of experience are very good at figuring out what it is that students need. But how can we balance the way that policies help guide practice with the need for teachers to be able to choose their own years of experience to make to make decisions about students, I just, there were a couple of teachers where they seemed to be depending on their gut. And that made me it made me wonder a little bit about like, we know, the data can't tell us everything about students. But I worry a little bit about that. So I think there's a challenge that teachers face when the data don't give them enough information, when the policies prevent students from getting what the teachers think the students need. And then the teachers are left with really trying to do the best they can. And so that's a challenge in there as well.
Ruchika 28:45
Again, an interesting perspective, because I when you said that they they shift their, if they don't get what they need, they decide based on their knowledge of their students, they make the determination as to what they can do with the student. And I was thinking great, but to your point, yes, great. But we need to be able to help with policy with data with it with people understanding what kind of data to look for, and to trust God in some some capacity. But we need to bring it all together to be able to develop those systems of support that we know would be beneficial and supporting our students in making the progress that we that we so want them to make. Thank you for sharing that. Definitely places for us to think about and as to consider I love that you shared some of the resources with us and I do you know, the pieces that you said about the webinars, it's helpful for us to think about the strategies that we can use, but it's also helpful for us to understand the way that we're thinking and framing which might help us educate our guts. A little bit about how we're thinking about some of our students to then be able to bring in and match the kinds of strategies and interventions that we know that could potentially work for our students. So thank you for sharing that. And to all of our listeners, we will be sharing these resources that Carrie shared with us with you so that you can go there. But before we leave this particular conversation, Carrie, is there one piece of advice you have always wanted to share with educators that you would like to share with our listeners today?
Carrie 30:21
So as I was reflecting on these questions, this was the hardest one. Because I, you know, I was a teacher for a few years, but I was not a teacher long enough to become an an expert teacher. And so when I go into classrooms, and I watch teachers, I am just overawed by, by what they do, and and how they, you know, everything that they do every single day that we've just been talking about, I don't really have a piece of advice, except just a recognition of how hard teachers are working and, and thank you that all of the resources that are out there can hopefully be helpful and I in taking what teachers know in their gut, and helping find ways that policies can be supportive of that, to find the the data and the evidence to make those decisions for students.
Ruchika 31:09
Right. And I think in all of that, I do think you give a piece of advice there for having us, as educators, all of us to keep thinking about ways that we can keep learning and hearing each other. Because again, all of us come with so many different perspectives, to be able to learn from each other to be able to find those resources that make sense and to help educate our guts. Again, I'm putting this in quotes business, but do educate our guts, so that we can make the changes we need. I thank you, thank you for your time to share with us. We know that learning your research, listening to the perspectives that teachers had in the schools that that were part of the study, their challenges and successes will connect with many of our listeners, we will be again, like I said before sharing resources and ways to connect with Carrie in our communication to our members following this podcast. So that again, people can districts can reach out to you if they're certain. Once they look at some of the resources, once they hear about your research, if there are certain connections that they'd like to make, we look forward listeners from you all to get your perspective after listening to Carrie, if if you want to just directly reach out to us and say, you know, this was something that that you heard in the podcast, and you'd want us to give you some additional support additional connection, additional resources about we would we look forward to hearing from you all of our listeners about that. With that we thank Carrie and we want to share a reminder with you our listeners, that for further solutions to help develop our practices in this area. We are going to have our collab talk with LA Unified School District, where they have developed an alternate reclassification method through the IEP team decision using their state requirements and how their teams distinguish between language acquisition and processing deficits. I think, again, to Kerry's perspective, when she was talking about thinking about all of this from a more acid based idea, we're going to look to see how LA Unified is using all of that in the IEP process and thinking about reclassification and thinking about the assessments they use and so forth. So we hope that you will join us for this. So then you can learn more about how their IEP teams make the decision and our collab talk on September 19. To register for this and other upcoming urban collaborative events and resources. Please go to our Instagram page, open collaborative ASU and click the link in the bio before closing our collab cast for today we want to thank Keith Jones of crip hub for providing the music his information will also be shared with you. With that thank you again so much Carrie and thank you to the listeners and participating in this collab cast.
Carrie 33:48
Thank you. I really appreciate your taking the time.