Beyond My Years

Learning alongside your multilingual learners, starring Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Ed.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 2 • Episode 3

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Host Ana Torres is joined by Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Ed.D., a linguist and speech pathologist known for her work with multilingual learners. In this episode, Elsa focuses on small changes that educators can make to create classrooms that are more inclusive and supportive of multilingual learners. She shares strategies for morphology instruction, learning useful information about students’ home languages, shifting away from a deficit mindset when it comes to multilingual learners, and more. She’ll also touch on why techniques like asking students to respond in full sentences and slowing down your rate of teaching can better serve students. Ana and Classroom Insider Eric Cross then reflect on Elsa's insights, and Eric shares a vulnerable moment that demonstrates his recognition of humility and openness to learning as a core teaching principle.

Show notes:

Quotes: 

“First come in with the attitude of ‘I'm a learner too: I want to learn about you, and you'll learn about me.’” —Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Ed.D.

“I look at the faces of the students that are there and that motivates me. All the other noise doesn't matter because I'm there to help them reach their dreams.” —Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Ed.D.

“You don't have to be an expert in every single language. You just need to know enough about that language to serve your students.” —Ana Torres

“I am an educator of all students; it doesn't matter who they are.” —Eric Cross


[00:00:00] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: When I know something about the structure of these students in their home language, I can understand better the error patterns, and I say errors inform instruction. 

[00:00:11] Ana Torres: This is Ana Torres and welcome back to Beyond My Ears from Amplify. And I am here with my amazing Classroom Insider. I always call him amazing. He's probably like, Ana, can you use a new word now? 

[00:00:24] Eric Cross: No, I'll take it. 

[00:00:24] Ana Torres: You'll take amazing. Okay. I'm here with my amazing Classroom Insider, Eric Cross. How are we doing today, Eric? 

[00:00:32] Eric Cross: What's going on Ana? I'm doing great. How are you? 

[00:00:34] Ana Torres: I'm great. So, on each episode, just want to remind everybody we're tackling a different real-life challenge that educators face.

[00:00:44] Ana Torres: We'll be getting some tried and true solutions from seasoned educators and leading researchers. And on today's episode, we will be talking about small adjustments that all educators can make to better serve [00:01:00] multilingual and English language learners. Has serving MLs and ELs been a challenge for you, Eric?

[00:01:06] Eric Cross: Yes, but I want to be specific about challenge. Multilingual learners and English language learners, they are not the challenge. The challenge is, it's an area of growth for me as an educator. And I am an educator of all students. Doesn't matter who they are. And as a teacher, you're always confronted with things that you may not be strong in.

[00:01:26] Eric Cross: Like it's part of the job and that hits you. And I'll be transparent, like it hits you in the ego. You know, sometimes you'll get a kid who there's just like brilliant at science and you're like, I don't know what I'm going to teach you. And I'm a monolingual learner. I'm still trying to get English right.

[00:01:40] Eric Cross: So, when I have a student who has two, three languages in their brain and they're holding all of that, I am like, that is amazing. But I'm also like, how do I take the content that I'm teaching and to, you know, maybe native speakers in the class, and how do I make it accessible for you? And that's an area for me where at times I feel really deficient.

[00:01:59] Ana Torres: Well, I've got some good news for you, Eric. Today's guest is a real expert on the topic of multilingual learners and English language learners, and she's got some small adjustments that all educators can make to have a major impact with their multilingual and English language learners. Now, Eric, I'm going to bring her on now and then we're going to catch up later on the other side and unpack the episode.

[00:02:23] Ana Torres: Sound good? 

[00:02:24] Eric Cross: Sounds great. I'll see you then. 

[00:02:27] Ana Torres: We can make small adjustments to make a big difference, and that is something that today's guest shared with me when we first spoke a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagen is president of the Valley Speech Language and Learning Center in Brownsville, Texas. You heard it right. Brownsville, Texas.

[00:02:49] Ana Torres: She's working in one of the poorest counties in Texas and she has seen some really amazing outcomes. What she's going to do today is share some of those small adjustments that all educators can make to have a major impact with their multilingual and English language learners. One of the things that I talked to Elsa a couple of weeks ago is that yes, I am a fan girl.

[00:03:14] Ana Torres: I use her Literacy Foundations for English Learners book that she's like literally seeing me pull up right now. This is a book that I've used in a lot of my work and conversations with educators. It is a comprehensive guide to evidence-based instruction.

[00:03:30] Ana Torres: And so without further ado, yes, she's a huge author, y'all, Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagen. Welcome to Beyond My Years, Elsa. 

[00:03:40] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Thank you so much. So excited to be here. 

[00:03:43] Ana Torres: I'd like to start, you know, always asking how long have you been in the educational arena? 

[00:03:50] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Well, we're now likely at 40 years. That's a long time. 

[00:03:56] Ana Torres: Four decades in the game, right, Elsa? And so, yes, I think that does, that does qualify you as a very seasoned educator. And so with that, I would love for you to share with our listeners a little bit more about the work you do and the amazing outcomes that you've seen in the Brown Brownsville area. 

[00:04:16] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So what I'd like to begin with is just saying that I had the privilege of working in traumatic brain injury for many years. I'm a speech and language pathologist, and that really taught me how amazing the brain is. And that even when there was an insult or an injury to the brain that it was so amazing that we could make connections and individuals can learn to listen and speak and read and write again.

[00:04:43] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And I always thought, well, if that's possible for someone that had an injury to their brain, it has to be possible for all the students that we have in front of us. So, for me, that really began with kind of leaving that world, wanting to spend time, more time with my children and really digging into starting the Valley Speech Language and Learning Center.

[00:05:06] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And with that is when I began to see, ooh, these children not only have language issues, they have literacy issues, so let me learn more. So I would go to the Houston, to the Neuhaus Education Center for two years to become really an expert at teaching reading and writing to students.

[00:05:24] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And because of that, I also realize that where I live, most of the students speak Spanish in their home. And when they come to school, they're also learning an additional language. So then I dug really deep in looking at the Spanish language much in the way the English language had been teased apart. And I didn't really see that the Spanish language had been teased apart as much as that. So I began to look at all these individual patterns and sounds and connections across languages.

[00:05:54] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And fortunate for me with, you know, the school district where I live, the Brownsville Independent School District, they allowed me to do a pilot project to see how would these children, how could they benefit? And of course, here in the clinic we work with children with language and learning disabilities.

[00:06:10] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: But here's the thing. They're bilingual, they may also exhibit a language disorder and dyslexia, but I'm going to tell you something, they end up biliterate. Minimally biliterate. And so no one's going to tell me that we can't do this work. It's what you do, when you do, how you do, but it's having that deep knowledge of the interconnectedness of language to literacy and looking at things through a cross linguistic lens. 

[00:06:38] Ana Torres: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that is a tidbit that maybe some of you don't know about Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagen and that interconnectedness that, you know, kind of propelled you to do this work. And so can you tell our listeners, like, would you mind sharing a bit more about your experience as a student yourself when it came to speaking Spanish? I think we have some similar experiences as English learners. 

[00:07:06] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Yeah. So about the time I was entering school, you know, the Bilingual Education Act had already been passed, but what was at issue there is that the philosophy still was English only. And we were actually told, and our parents were told, do not speak the home language to them speak only English.

[00:07:29] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And even in our classrooms or in the lunch room or in, you know, in the playground, we were actually punished for speaking our home language. They would get out these wooden paddles and whack. They wanted us to speak, and I was so terrified that, you know, I didn't speak much in the elementary years, and I think I told you that when I got to the middle school years, I was so excited to take Spanish as a foreign language. And I'm like, "Yes, I can show them all that I know." 

[00:08:00] Ana Torres: And I'm assuming that experience, right? I mean, because it sounds like a pretty traumatic experience and you had to unfortunately not be your authentic self because you couldn't speak the language. And you know, Elsa, I didn't share that kind of trauma, but as a student that, you know, as a young girl that came here from Panama at six years old, I have my own level of trauma of being thrown in a corner, not acknowledged for the gifts that I had. And so it's hard not to bring out that little trauma, and I think that trauma propelled you, right? Would you say that that experience impacted the work you're currently doing? 

[00:08:35] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: What I really am hopeful for is that every educator out there sees these students that really have this potential for the multilingualism and for being multi literate, that you realize they have so many assets and talents.

[00:08:52] Ana Torres: That's it. 

[00:08:53] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And that we no longer need to be looking at this from a deficit point of view. And we no longer need to be telling parents don't promote the home language. And in fact, it takes decades to undo that philosophy. Oh, English only. English only. We're one of the only countries that thinks like that.

[00:09:12] Ana Torres: So now we're going to dive into some really amazing strategies, and I want to be really clear that we're going to be talking about strategies that all educators can use, not just by literacy specialist or dual language educators. So let's get started, Elsa. What's some advice you'd like to pass along? 

[00:09:33] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So one of the first things is, as we look at language arts and as we look at the teaching of reading and writing, we know that every language in the world has sounds. And, you know, my language has about 22 sounds, some will say 24. The English language has 44 sounds, some will say 46. No matter how you look at it, English has doubled the number of the sounds of my home language. 

[00:09:58] Ana Torres: Yes. 

[00:09:59] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So, but give me credit for what I do know. And really take note, oh, these are the sounds that transfer across these languages, whether it be Vietnamese or Arabic, or you know, Mandarin, what have you. And for the English language, we know this is important. But more importantly, I'm working in those early skills of learning the sounds and the letters and the sounds and how to read the words, I need to be attaching the meaning, right? The meaning to everything that I do. And we know for this population of students, and really for all students, it helps to have a visual. It helps to have some verbal supports. It helps to have an explanation. And then it helps us, what I say is my four Ts: think, turn, talk, then tell it back to me, right? And I always say that. So I want my students to have a little bit more think time, they turn and talk to a partner, then they report back to me. But what that gives is every student in that classroom the opportunity to express themselves. And if I come into your classroom, the first thing I'm going to tell you on my observation form or in my kind of like noticings and wonderings, would be, "Can you please have the students answer in a complete sentence? And if they didn't answer in incomplete sentence, let's model why, and let's make sure that whatever was missing, that we're really addressing it. And then what you find the next time I come in, they take that little adjustment, what do you find? Students using beautiful sentences, speaking and expressing their complete thoughts in a complete sentence.

[00:11:30] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: This is fantastic. And that's one of the foundations that I'll say, you know, let's work on what they have currently, let's build upon that, let's also see ourselves as models. What we don't realize, we speak very quickly, so I use my teaching rate of speech. 

[00:11:49] Ana Torres: Mm-hmm. 

[00:11:50] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Can you slow down your rate so that as a new learner of this new language, I understand better where the word begins and where it ends. Because if I speak like this, I don't know where the word begins or ends, and that's very complicated. 

[00:12:06] Ana Torres: It is. It is. 

[00:12:07] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So that's one of the adjustments. 

[00:12:10] Ana Torres: And that goes back to what you said initially in the conversation too, which can encompass any teacher, right?

[00:12:16] Ana Torres: Know your students. And you even use the word, little adjustments, or just small adjustments that you need to make. Let's talk a little bit more about the idea that every educator needs to know something about language literacy and content. What do you mean when you say that? 

[00:12:35] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: What I mean about that is, when I teach the students, I think about the components of language as I'm thinking about the components of literacy. And in the components of language, we have the sound system called phonology.

[00:12:49] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So I bring in, you know, making sure that we've got the sounds there, and I connect that to phonological awareness. I make sure that they have the words and their understanding. That's called the semantics. So as we're, you know, as they're producing new words or reading words or sentences, I'm making sure that they have the meaning and the vocabulary to support that. But something very important is syntax. 

[00:13:13] Ana Torres: Yes. 

[00:13:13] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Understanding the function of words and how the words have a function and how they can change a function. But the other thing that was truly a gift for me was morphology. Do you know that I didn't have a chance to learn about that words have smaller meaning units?

[00:13:32] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: I learned that in undergraduate school at the University of Texas at Austin by Professor Daley. It was an elective course called Greek and Latin Roots for Medical Terminology. He changed my life. I now understood for the first time in my life, oh my goodness, there's a lot of words from Latin, and these word parts can make many words.

[00:13:53] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Or they're from the Greek and I can build my vocabulary. For me, I have really brought all of that down to the early elementary years. Children love to know about words and about how to build words. Those are word- learning strategies. You know, this idea of, teach every single word, let's not give them the fish, let's teach them how to fish, and morphology does that. 

[00:14:19] Ana Torres: And as a former fourth grade bilingual, dual language teacher, I knew the importance of that because that obviously is the grade where we're, you know, my babies were tested in writing, right? That was the first year that they were... and knowing what they knew. And you talk a lot about it being, you know, asset-based, it's like, "I'm maestra. I know what that word means in English," right? I can take that prefix or suffix, right? So as you can see, I get excited about the area of morphology and students got excited about it too. And we'll talk a little bit more about the morphology in a minute so you can give us a little bit more strategies on that.

[00:14:57] Ana Torres: But we also know, and we also talked about the importance of understanding our multilingual English learners, that they don't fit all in one box. It is instead a continuum. Can you talk a little bit more about that and you know how all educators can kind of wrap their minds around "we don't all fit a box," and I use the word we because I still consider myself a multilingual learner for life. 

[00:15:25] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: All right. And what I want to say about that is, you know, as we look across the United States, there's 400 different languages spoken in the homes of students who are multilingual. And what I want to say about that is even when, for example, you speak the Spanish language, I speak the Spanish language, but we come from different areas, right? From different countries. And what happens is, even within our country, each one, we have our own dialect. 

[00:15:55] Ana Torres: Exactly. 

[00:15:56] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And there's going to be these variations in the language. And so don't assume that every Spanish speaker out there is the same, every speaker of Arabic is the same, every speaker of Mandarin is the same, because there are dialects and variations, just like in English we have that.

[00:16:14] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: But what I want to say about that is, it's up to us to know more. And that's also where the connection comes in with our families and our community. We have to have that, kind of that, connection. And do you know how intimidating it is to come to a school when you yourself don't speak the language?

[00:16:31] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And the families, you know, in many cultures we entrust everything to the educators. Everything that you tell us we're going to do. And so what I want to say about that is make sure that you are really understanding where they come from. You yourself learn something about the structure of their language.

[00:16:49] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: I'm not saying you have to be proficient in their language. But just know something about their language that you could potentially connect when you're teaching foundational skills of reading, when you're teaching vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing, you know, maybe that fits into the syntax.

[00:17:05] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And all of that leads to deeper reading comprehension and deeper writing expression, and deeper oral language too. 

[00:17:13] Ana Torres: Well, and that goes back to what you mentioned, and as you can see, I'm, I'm, I'm avidly listening to literally everything you're saying, is don't be overwhelmed. Right? As teachers, we can kind of get overwhelmed. "Am I meeting the needs of all students?"

[00:17:28] Ana Torres: How can listeners kind of apply this, and, you know, understand this in a very useful way, is that it's just a small adjustment you need to make in order to be able to really ensure that all students get what they need? All of our multilingual English learners get what they need.

[00:17:43] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: What I'd like to say is if you just first come in with the attitude of, "I'm a learner too. I want to learn about you as you try to learn more in this English language and what I'm teaching you across the content areas." That's number one. Number two is always thinking about, "how can I make those connections?" And researching that, you know, looking up like, I like to give out websites, like mylanguages.org will tell me about the sounds that exist.

[00:18:08] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And in Colorín Colorado, we have, you know, the cognates, those words that are similar across the languages. We have all kinds of information. In my book, I give ways, like just little templates of like, when you're doing this lesson, here's the extra thing you do, making the connection to their home language, their culture, you know, their background.

[00:18:26] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: When you do that, you're honoring them and you're motivating them. You're doing that cultural responsiveness, but you're also doing linguistic responsiveness, and both of those work together. The cultural responsiveness works for engagement and motivation. 

[00:18:41] Ana Torres: Exactly. 

[00:18:42] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And the linguistic responsiveness that's going to give me the outcomes in reading and writing. 

[00:18:46] Ana Torres: And you know, I get chills because you are a linguist and so, in case you didn't know, and, and again, you know, shouting out your book, Your Literacy Foundations for English Learners, you do unpack that in a very, very powerful way. Now, you also mentioned the importance of morphology as we kind of started our conversation here, and I feel that, you know, listeners may also want to know, like, how can they apply that in their lives?

[00:19:14] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: I really encourage entire schools to do this, and I've seen some schools that have really taken it to heart where when you walk in there's a tree, and on the tree it's like, this is the word parts we're working with, and let's see the class that can generate the most words and ideas. We can use those words in multiple ways and maybe at the end of the week we get a pizza party or an extra time in recess, what have you.

[00:19:36] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: But it gets children really becoming very meta linguistic. And I talk about the meta morphological awareness, that I'm not only having the awareness, "Oh, these are some words and word parts in this language, but how do they connect from my heritage language to that second language?" And what you're making them think, and you're really making these students really be so aware, but to use that as a strategy, as they're reading and writing and learning and listening to teachers.

[00:20:05] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And so always, and I think in the book I have like, "here's the ways you do that, here's simple things, follow this routine." And when you add these routines, those are the adjustments. And you do that over and over. And the students start to begin to use that as their own strategy. 

[00:20:21] Ana Torres: Exactly. 

[00:20:22] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: They take ownership.

[00:20:23] Ana Torres: That is such a great strategy and again, talking about small adjustments that you can make. 

[00:20:30] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: I have a story to tell you.

[00:20:32] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Okay, go ahead. Yes, you can.

[00:20:33] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Oh, I can.

[00:20:33] Ana Torres: I love stories, so yes, please share it. Yes. 

[00:20:36] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: It just reminded me of a story. We were observing, like from one of our research studies, and it was a read aloud, you know, the teacher was doing the read aloud and the students were reading, and then the students themselves told the teacher, and one of them was saying it in Spanish, another one in English, "Maestra! Teacher! Look, it has these words, right? Miraculous, dangerous, that has that word part that suffix us. And in my language, it's milagroso!" And I was just like the teacher had not selected those words, but as the children were listening to that read aloud they were picking up on, "this word part is the same. It connects to my home language. The words are exactly similar. They use, you know, kind of the same ending, 'us' versus 'oso.'" And I was like, "Oh my goodness." But that was an example of these little second graders really being very metamorphologically aware, applying it, thinking about the meaning of the word, thinking about the morphology, and making those connections on their own.

[00:21:40] Ana Torres: They were only in second grade and you saw the power of morphology in those early literacy years. And I think that is something that when I talk to educators and leaders, it's like we can't wait until the intermediate grades to, you know, to actually say that morphology is important. So thank you so much for sharing your stories, and this is a storytelling podcast, so please continue to share those, okay?

[00:22:06] Ana Torres: Now another tip you gave, you said it's okay if you don't speak the language of your multilingual English language learners, which I know a lot of our listeners are thinking, "what if I don't?" You can still learn enough about the language, right, to better serve those students. And you mentioned this idea of learning which sounds kind of match up across those languages. So what other advice could you share about learning more about the languages that students speak? 

[00:22:34] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So we have so much at our fingertips now. And so as I receive students, I want to learn more about them, their culture, their language, and what I want to know about is—well, it depends. Am I, you know, teaching these early literacy skills? Am I going to even work on phonological awareness or phonics? Or do you know your students, they already have those skills, so, no, I don't need to do that. Or that they're at the very beginning stages of this, you know, second language acquisition and second literacy acquisition. So, I need to look at not only the sounds, but I need to look at the patterns. And did, you know, even when we think about writing, there's a lot of spelling patterns that are the same? 

[00:23:13] Ana Torres: Right. 

[00:23:13] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And there's a lot of, when we think about syntax, there's some similarities and there's some differences. But what this forces me to do is to understand much better when I know something about the structure of these students in their home language, I can understand better the error patterns. And I say errors inform instruction. So now I can look at these errors as, "Hmm. Now I understand why they did that." It's because this sound in their language is represented this way in English, it's a different way, or this word in their language or the syntax. Oh my goodness. You know they're putting describing words after the noun, right?

[00:23:51] Ana Torres: Yes. 

[00:23:51] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: That's what they do in their home language. How do we put that in their language? Or they're overgeneralizing from the home language to the second language, so I'm going to say, "Oh, I know why, you know, you are thinking this way and in the English language, it's this way and this is anew." So they have a concept, you know?

[00:24:09] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So think about it this way. Do the students have the concept and they just need a new label? Or is it that they both need the concept and the label? That's what we need to be thinking about, and researching more, and discussing more, and describing more, and thinking about. Because oftentimes they already have the concept, they just needed a new way to represent that concept in this new language. 

[00:24:33] Ana Torres: Hearing you say that too, just really speaks to, you don't have to be an expert in every single language. You just need to know enough about that language to serve your students. So that's how you can also make connections with your students.

[00:24:49] Ana Torres: Making that small effort, right, making that little adjustment goes a long way. So what about any advice for bilingual and/or dual language educators out there? 

[00:25:01] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: I think one of the things that I'd like to say first is you're a language teacher, you're a literacy teacher, and you're a content expert teacher, so everything that you do must be related right to language.

[00:25:15] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And you know, we've done studies looking at mathematics and looking at science and doing these kinds of strategies in there and getting some nice outcomes. But the fact of the matter is, is that it takes more work, right? These adjustments take a little bit more work. But you can bring this in as a routine, really looking at, "What am I teaching today? What kind of connection can I make? What extra, instruction do they need in regards to the language demands of what we're doing? What about the vocabulary? The comprehension? What about their prior knowledge of what they do? And what about just the actual action of reading and understanding?" And a lot of times we get a little bit of pushback from my own multilingual community saying you know,, don't focus so much on the foundational skills. And really, it's a balance. We know that we have to make sure they can read the print off that page. 

[00:26:09] Ana Torres: Exactly. 

[00:26:10] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And very importantly, we always have to be attending to the language demands of that text, you know, what is the vocabulary, the background knowledge, and all that strategic thinking that goes into place.

[00:26:23] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And so I really think that we can be explicit language instructors. A lot of times when I go into the classrooms, you know what, I see? Lots of sentence stems and sentence starters, and I think to myself, "okay, that's one way to get them started." But then as I progress through the year, you know, kind of following these students and following these classrooms, I see, "Oh my goodness, I see still the same sentence stems." 

[00:26:50] Ana Torres: Right. Right. 

[00:26:51] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: So why don't we really know our students? Know your students, know what they bring to you. Can we, in fact, like, you know, here's what they're speaking, let me take a sample of that. What is it, you know that I can do to expand that? What structures are still necessary, and let's give a lot of opportunity and practice. But let's be systematic in that approach. Not incidental. 

[00:27:18] Ana Torres: Ooh, ooh. That's a hashtag. You know, I'm always looking for hashtags and things to put on a bumper sticker and t-shirt there. So that is powerful. Now, one of the fun things that we're doing in Season 2, a little bit different than Season 1. We've got some quick questions we're going to ask.

[00:27:35] Ana Torres: We're calling this the Wisdom Nugget segment, and so I know you've dropped a few wisdom nuggets already, but we're going to see how many we can get to in about two minutes. So are you ready? 

[00:27:45] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Yes. 

[00:27:46] Ana Torres: Elsa's, you know, hanging onto her seat here. What are these questions? All right. If you weren't an educator, Elsa, what would you do for work?

[00:27:54] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: I'd be a comedian. 

[00:27:56] Ana Torres: [Laughter] 

[00:27:57] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: I wouldn't make much money though. 

[00:28:00] Ana Torres: What is one resource, whether it be an article, a podcast, a blog, that you would recommend for educators today? 

[00:28:08] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: You know, one of the first things I think that really brought awareness is Emily Hanford's Sold a Story. And I encouraged her and now she has it in Spanish. So I really think that that really gives the idea of what we need to be teaching, and the why that's really thinking about that Science of Reading and that structured literacy. 

[00:28:27] Ana Torres: Now we're going to do a fun one. What's your candy snack drawer? What's in it? 

[00:28:33] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: What do I love? I love chocolate. 

[00:28:36] Ana Torres: I think most teachers love their chocolate, right? Any favorite chocolate? 

[00:28:39] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: It would be, it would be like a Kit Kat. 

[00:28:42] Ana Torres: I was a Snickers girl. So, whiteboard or Smartboard? Elsa. 

[00:28:46] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Whiteboard. We've got to, yeah, whiteboard. 

[00:28:49] Ana Torres: Old school over here. Okay. 

[00:28:50] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Old school. 

[00:28:51] Ana Torres: Small-group or direct instruction. 

[00:28:54] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Direct instruction and all the way—whole-group, small-group, doesn't matter. Explicit instruction. Direct. 

[00:29:00] Ana Torres: Explicit instruction. I like that. 

[00:29:02] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Explicit and direct. Mm-hmm. 

[00:29:03] Ana Torres: What about the book that has contributed the most to your work? 

[00:29:07] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: In speech and language pathology, I actually brought my book, it's so old to show you. It's a book by Dr. Lois. Bloom and Margaret Leahy, Language Development and Language Disorders.

[00:29:18] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And then as I learned more about literacy, it was the Foundations for Literacy in 1992 by Aylett Royall Cox, where has everything about the English language. And so I would connect these two books together to put my two worlds together. 

[00:29:34] Ana Torres: And I love that you actually have the physical copies of books like, you know, kind of like, I have yours here. You know, we're such... 

[00:29:40] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: And of course I want to say my book can, okay, it's a really old book. My book is the, that we'll have language and literacy together for multilingual students. 

[00:29:50] Ana Torres: So add that one to the repertoire.

[00:29:53] Ana Torres: Thank you.

[00:29:53] Ana Torres: Last question. On tough days, what reminds you of why you're passionate about education? Because it's not easy to be in this profession, Elsa, as you know. 

[00:30:03] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: What I do is I look at the faces of the students that are there and that motivates me. And all the other noise doesn't matter because I'm there to help them reach their dreams. 

[00:30:15] Ana Torres: And I like the word that you used, the word "noise," like all of the other noise doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we do the work we do because we care about the students that are in our classrooms. 

[00:30:27] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Mm-hmm. And if we keep them at the very center...

[00:30:29] Ana Torres: keep them at the center. Yes. 

[00:30:31] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: of everything that you do. And don't be afraid to ask for help. And ask specifically what your needs are so that you feel the confidence that you need to impart to them all the teaching and instruction that will benefit them.

[00:30:46] Ana Torres: Well, I can't wait. I know there's got to be a part two to this because now that I know that you would love to be a comedian and you know I'm a person of laughter. I can't wait to do a part two of this. Now, you hear her cackling now you guys, right? She kind of kept herself together and composed, but Elsa is a hoot.

[00:31:03] Ana Torres: Thank you so much for being on, you know, being on our podcast. Is there a home district or a district that's close to your heart that you'd like to shout out at this time? 

[00:31:13] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Yes. I would like to give a shout out to Brownsville, my hometown, the independent school district who let me in to do research and to continue that research on a local, regional, and national level. And they've been the laboratory, as well as many other districts, but they never really said no directly to me. 

[00:31:34] Ana Torres: So shout out to Brownsville Independent School District. Thanks, Elsa! 

[00:31:39] Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan: Thank you so much. 

[00:31:40] Ana Torres: Gracia, Elsa.

[00:31:45] Ana Torres: That was Dr. Elsa Cardenas-Hagen. She's a bilingual speech language pathologist and a certified academic language therapist. She's the director of Valley Speech Language and Learning Center in Brownsville, Texas. We'll have a link in the show notes to learn more about that. Now let's bring back Classroom Insider, Eric Cross.

[00:32:10] Ana Torres: So Eric, you've gotten a chance to listen to my conversation. What are your thoughts? 

[00:32:15] Eric Cross: It was, there were just things that I wish I would've been doing. And so I had to shake that and think about going back into my classroom, because you know, you're always growing, you're always learning. 

[00:32:26] Ana Torres: Let's, you know, get right to it Eric. I know you've got a few takeaways, right? 

[00:32:31] Eric Cross: These are my quick napkin notes that I was taking, listening to it. And the first one is making language a starting point and not something else. And I think this is a belief system and an attitude thing. I've caught myself being reactive and supporting my students and differentiating for language. And that's something that has caught me off guard and has caused me not to always be as specific and customize for those specific students. And this is an area that I really want to grow in. Teaching language skills should be built into everything that we do, not just added after the fact. And so one simple thing that I pulled from it was, you know, identifying like one or two academic words per lesson, and then connecting it to the home languages of my students in the classroom.

[00:33:08] Eric Cross: And when they're answering questions, having them practice answering them in full sentences. And when she said that I didn't even think about that being something that was like a useful tool and I've, there's been teachers that have had that have had me do that. 

[00:33:20] Ana Torres: Yeah. 

[00:33:20] Eric Cross: But this is something that I haven't been intentional about.

[00:33:22] Ana Torres: And a small adjustment, right? Just having students answer in complete sentences. Something simple, something that you could literally do tomorrow. 

[00:33:32] Eric Cross: Yeah. It's something that you can do right away. 

[00:33:33] Ana Torres: Any teacher in any discipline, right? 

[00:33:35] Eric Cross: Mm-hmm. 

[00:33:36] Ana Torres: What about your second takeaway? Let's, let's talk about that one.

[00:33:39] Eric Cross: Yeah, this one is really about becoming a student of your students and knowing the language and not just the labels. And so our students are coming in with their home languages and that shapes how they learn English. We know that when students develop proficiency in their home language and their mother tongue, that actually helps them develop a second language. We know that.

[00:33:58] Eric Cross: You know there was another thing that she said that really resonated with me, and I had wrote this quote down and she said, "You're doing cultural responsiveness, but you're also doing linguistic responsiveness." And can I tell you something? Like, I've never heard of linguistic responsiveness before. I didn't even know it was a thing. I Googled it. And I didn't know that there was a whole background to what this is, and she said the cultural responsiveness helps with engagement motivation, but linguistic responsiveness, that's going to give you outcomes in reading and writing. And for me that was really profound.

[00:34:26] Ana Torres: That is deep. And because Elsa is a linguist, she understands the importance of how all of that is connected. So I'm so glad that, you know, as a science teacher, you understood and you kind of unpacked that and it was really meaningful for you. And giving the educators that are listening, that's another small adjustment, right? That they can make as well. I know you got a third. 

[00:34:51] Eric Cross: Yeah. The last one is using our students' home languages and culture as a strength and not a barrier.

[00:34:55] Ana Torres: Woo woo.

[00:34:56] Eric Cross: Yeah. Seeing that as an asset. And that's, again, that's another mindset shift. Look, we don't control who comes into our classroom and there's no person who can reach everybody with perfection, and we just have to embrace that.

[00:35:08] Eric Cross: Sometimes what can happen is you can, when you're put in that position, we can unintentionally "other" students, like it's them. It's them that are making things difficult, and no! Like we are teachers of students no matter who it is. You're just in a certain geography in the world, but whoever comes into your classroom, that's who we need to be equipped to serve.

[00:35:26] Eric Cross: And you're always going to be presented with people that you don't feel properly equipped to serve. And that's okay. It's part of being a human being. And what do we do? We grow and we are lifelong learners, and we go and find resources so that we can become better. And when we see our students coming in with these home languages that we may not have fluency in, that's a strength. And that's something that for me to learn how to be able to serve. And so I want to be able to connect what they know and their values and their culture and their backgrounds to what we're learning. Celebrating bilingualism, you know, letting those students become language experts, referring to asking like, how do I say this? Creating a culture where that feels safe and they feel empowered. Like that's important. Again, these small shifts, as a teacher, they really start with us. They really start with how do I perceive my multilingual and English language learner students in the classroom? Do I see that as an asset, or do I see it as a deficit? And if I see it as a deficit, okay, then I can change my thinking in that. 

[00:36:21] Ana Torres: There are times that as teachers, we unintentionally cause trauma. And the domino effect is when you do that, that permeates in your classroom. And then the other students see the ML learner/EL learner as deficient as well. So, know that what you model and say, or sometimes you don't even have to say it, that is a domino effect of what then the culture that you create in your own classroom of the deficit lens. So be really careful with your non-intentional behavior of when that ESL teacher comes in and has to pull out,  and it's almost like confetti being thrown in the excitement of, "Oh yes. Now we can get to teaching."

[00:37:06] Ana Torres: So I just always implore people to be really, really careful of the unintentional trauma that we can cause any student in our classroom. So that goes back to your intentionality piece. Let's be intentional about all of the students in our classrooms. Every single classroom has multilingual learners and English learners, regardless of discipline, every teacher has one. Eric, it's always really great to chat with you. We'll do it again. 

[00:37:36] Eric Cross: I look forward to it. It was fun learning with you.

[00:37:40] Ana Torres: Thanks for listening to Beyond My Years from Amplify. If you liked this episode, check out my Season 1 conversation with seasoned bilingual educator, Luz Muñoz. Luz, and I also recorded a bonus conversation en Español. We'll have links to both of those in the show notes. Next time I'll be joined by

[00:38:02] Ana Torres: Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of the bestselling book, Grit.

[00:38:06] Ana Torres: We'll be talking to her about her current research on school cell phone policies, as well as the science of self-control. 

[00:38:14] Angela Duckworth: My number one piece of advice is that you should alter your physical environment like a designer would. 

[00:38:23] Ana Torres: That's coming up in two weeks. If you haven't already, please subscribe to Beyond My Years, wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:38:30] Ana Torres: And if you like the show, please consider leaving us a review. It will help more people find us. I'm your host, Ana Torres. Our Classroom Insider is Eric Cross. Our music is by Andrew Smolan. Until next time, please remember to reach out and say thank you to a seasoned educator who has shaped your life.