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ALAS Opens a Women Superintendents Policy Leadership Academy

The Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents (ALAS) has created a new leadership academy specifically to help new female superintendents learn advocacy skills and develop their understanding of navigating and implementing education policies. The Women Superintendents Policy Leadership Academy is accepting applications through July 31, 2021 for its 2021-2022 cohort, which begins in September, 2021 and runs through May, 2022. To learn more or to apply, visit www.alasedu.org/wspla-women-superintendents-policy-leadership-academy/. Please note the due date has been extended to July 31, 2021.

This women-led, women empowerment superintendent preparation academy is for diverse female leaders who believe every child should have equitable access to quality public education. It focuses on developing participants’ competitiveness to lead in diverse student communities that are seeking change leaders to advance innovation, student voice and equity. This unique program is aimed at increasing the number of women in the CEO seat of public school systems across this nation. Presenters will include district and state women superintendents, elected officials and business leaders.

The Academy is being led by Dr. Christina Kishimoto, newly retired state superintendent of the Hawaii State Department of Education, and includes both virtual and in-person sessions, including a meeting at ALAS’ annual education summit in October 2021 in Washington D.C. Applicants must be members (or must become members) of ALAS to participate. The program is for those who have been in a superintendent or assistant superintendent role for two years or less.

“To be an effective district leader, you have to understand the ins and outs of policymaking at the national, state and local level. You must also be able to take a critical eye to the policies in your own district to make sure they align with the district’s goals and are helping to meet the needs of the students you serve,” said ALAS Executive Director Maria Armstrong. “Our Women Superintendents Policy Leadership Academy is unique in that it focuses strictly on policy and advocacy and helps women leaders find their voices in policy discussions. By 2023 Latino/a/x students will make up 30% of all PreK-12 students. The goal of our leadership academies is to develop strong, dynamic leaders who know how to help these students succeed. Understanding and being a leader on policy issues is a key component of this.”

The Women Superintendents Policy Leadership Academy allows participants to learn organizational leadership proficiency from a veteran superintendent. Its focus on policy understanding and adaptations to support equity will help participants navigate and understand how policies are written, whom they are written for, and when to navigate or advocate. The program has a fee of $3,000, plus travel, for 80 hours of instruction over the course of eight weekends from September through May. Six of the weekend sessions are virtual, the other two are in-person and include mock interviews.

The Women Superintendents Policy Leadership Academy is one of three ALAS Leadership Academies. It also holds an annual Superintendent Leadership Academy (SLA) and a Principal Leadership Academy (PLA). For information about participating in the SLA and PLA, contact [email protected]. For more information about ALAS, visit https://www.alasedu.org/.

U.S. Department of Education Focuses on Equity

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education held the first installment of its Equity Summit Series, “Building Equitable Learning Environments in Our Schools.” The program featured First Lady Jill Biden, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten, leaders and educators from across the country, and student performances.

During the summit, participants highlighted the administration’s commitment to advancing equity in school reopening, recovery, and long-term investments in education, including the American Rescue Plan, the American Families Plan, and the FY2022 budget, which it is claimed will more than double funding for Title I schools through new equity grants designed to incentivize states to address inequitable school funding systems.

“Many of us have come from low-income backgrounds, faced adversity and challenges, but we used education to improve our lives, so we know it’s possible. The real challenge that we face is how do we make that happen for more kids, and while the pandemic set us back, there’s no reason why we have to stay back.

If we can think holistically about the needs of children, and recognize how their social, emotional, and psychological needs are related to their academic and intellectual, there’s no reason why we can’t produce better outcomes for all kinds of children across the country, and this should not be a controversial issue. This is really at the core of why we have public education,” commented Pedro Noguera, dean of USC Rossier School of Education.

First Lady Jill Biden highlighted English learners in her comment: “For many years schools across the country have grappled with issues of inequity, especially our students of color, those from low-income homes, students with disabilities, and English language learners. As we recover from this pandemic, it’s on all of us to ensure we don’t return to the same broken systems of the past, but build back better than before. And that’s exactly what our administration is committed to doing.”

Equity in education is about providing all students, from all backgrounds and all parts of the country, with the resources and supports that they need to succeed and thrive in our society. It’s about providing them pathways to contribute to their communities and to make the world a better place.

Equity is not a passing buzzword but an ongoing, continuous effort to make sure that every student feels supported in their classrooms and in every educational environment. That’s why this summit isn’t a one-time event for us—but something that will be infused in all of our work at the department and across the administration for the next four years,” stressed U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

Adults CAN Learn New Languages Quickly

Contrary to one of the most-cited studies in the field, a new research paper from University of Kansas (KU) linguists shows that even as beginners, adults can quickly begin mentally processing sentence structures in a second language like a native speaker. “We were inspired by a study that is cited in our article as Osterhout et al., 2006,” said KU linguistics professor Alison Gabriele. “They were looking to see whether novice learners could show any kind of sensitivity to grammatical rules, even after very little classroom exposure to French. In their study, they started to test these learners after just one month of university French classes, and then they tested them again at four months and seven months.

“Their findings were interesting because they show that, even for linguistic properties that are similar between English and French… the novice learners’ brain responses were different from what native speakers of French showed.

“We thought it would be interesting to try to do a similar kind of study with a larger sample size, a comprehensive statistical modeling approach, a wider range of linguistic structures, and an array of individual difference measures,” she said. They also chose to work with Spanish students.

Over a four-year period, the organizers tested two cohorts totaling nearly 50 students, mainly to compare how their brains worked when processing a linguistic structure that is the same in the two languages—requiring agreement of number between the subject and verb, such as “the boy cries (el chico llora)” vs. “the boys cry (los chicos lloran)”—and when processing something that differs between the two languages, such as number and gender agreement between a noun and an adjective.

To illustrate the difference, in English, one can say “the flower is beautiful” or “the flowers are beautiful,” and the adjective is unchanged. In Spanish, however, la flor es hermosa becomes las flores son hermosas, and the adjective has to be marked for both number and gender. For the sentences testing agreement between a noun and an adjective, the researchers were interested in comparing brain responses to number and gender because number is a feature that is similar between English and Spanish but gender is unique to Spanish.

“In our study, the second-language learners showed a native-like response for both kinds of number-agreement errors— subject-verb agreement and noun-adjective number agreement,” Gabriele explained. “This suggests a strong facilitation for features like number that are part of both the inventory of the first and second language, and we think this means that second-language learners can build on the inventory of features in the native language when learning the second.

“Probably the most exciting finding for classroom second-language acquisition is that it shows, even with very limited exposure to a second language, that learners can at least begin to show these brain responses related to grammatical processing just like native speakers—at least for properties that are similar between their first and second languages. So I think it’s cause for optimism for university foreign language instruction. It shows that, even with limited exposure in the college classroom, learning can happen quite quickly and efficiently,” concluded Gabriele.

“Examining Variability in the Processing of Agreement in Novice Learners: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials” will be published in January 2022 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

FEDELE Launches Virtual Escape Room, Raffles off Trips to Spain

The Federation of Spanish Language Schools (FEDELE) has launched a Virtual Escape Room and will raffle off eight 14-day all-inclusive trips to Spain to players who successfully “break out.”

In the escape room, players are tasked with helping Álvaro Berdión unravel a centuries-old mystery. They learn about works of art, great literary works, the Spanish language, and numerous Spanish locations.

With this activity, FEDELE hopes to raise awareness of Spanish as a foreign language, encourage people to learn about Spanish culture, and promote safe tourism at a time of sectoral reactivation. Additionally, winners will enjoy a treasure hunt in different localities which will allow them to experience total linguistic immersion with activities that range from traversing part of the Camino de Santiago, to riding in a hot air balloon in Cádiz, to visiting the Prado Museum in Madrid.

The activity has international support from institutions such as TURESPAÑA, the Instituto Cervantes, Embassies, and Education Councils. Furthermore, a large number of local institutions will ensure the winners’ experiences in Spain.

For more information, please visit elmisterioespanol.com.

Losing Languages Means Losing Remedies

The media frequently discusses language decline in terms of numbers alone—many of us have likely heard the oft-cited statistic that one language goes extinct every three months or the projection that 30% of the world’s languages will be extinct by the end of the 21st century.

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge,  published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, asks to what degree indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants is associated with individual languages and quantifies how much indigenous knowledge may vanish as languages and plants go extinct, and attempts to further contextualize this data, by exploring the unique knowledge held within many of the world’s Indigenous languages.

Specifically, the team of researchers from Switzerland’s University of Zurich observed the ways in which language decline can trigger the loss of medicinal and botanical knowledge unique to a given population of speakers.

“Unraveling the structure of indigenous knowledge about medicinal services has important implications for its resilience,” the paper reads. “Most indigenous cultures transmit knowledge orally. Therefore, if knowledge about medicines is shared widely among indigenous groups that speak different languages, knowledge resilience would be high.”

By researching linguistic and botanical trends across three different regions with many different endangered Indigenous languages and significant biodiversity (North America, the Amazon, and Papua New Guinea), the researchers concluded that a significant degree of knowledge surrounding medicinal plants is encoded in just one language alone. According to the researchers, most of the world’s knowledge on medicinal plants is unique to just one language—between 73 and 91% for each of the three regions observed in the study.

While the plants themselves are not typically endangered, the languages that encode information and knowledge about their uses are endangered, meaning that these plants and their medicinal properties will be rendered useless. The researchers estimate that knowledge about nearly 12,500 medicinal plants will be lost as the world’s Indigenous languages continue to decline in use.

“Our study suggests that each indigenous language brings unique insights that may be complementary to other societies that seek potentially useful medicinal remedies,” the researchers conclude. “Therefore, the predicted extinction of up to 30% of indigenous languages by the end of the 21st century would substantially compromise humanity’s capacity for medicinal discovery.”

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, Jordi Bascompte

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 2021, 118 (24) e2103683118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103683118

Chinese Writing Contest Now Open for Submissions

MSL Master, a Hong Kong-based education solution company, is now accepting submissions for its first-ever Chinese Writing Contest.

In an effort to encourage Chinese language learners to read and write more, MSL Master is inviting students worldwide to “show their creativity” using 320 Chinese characters.

The winner will receive a Complete Beginner’s Chinese Reading and Writing Course Kit.

The first runner-up will receive a one-year subscription to Du Chinese.

The second runner-up will receive two copies of any title from Mandarin Companion.

The winner, first runner-up, and second runner-up will each receive a six-month subscription to Maayot.

Imagin8 Press will publish the top 10 to 15 submissions as a collection of short stories.

For guidelines and deadlines, please visit https://www.mslmaster.com/index.php/8-contest/196-chinese-writing-contest.

No Downside for Bilingual Kids

A first-of-its kind study in U.S.-born children from Spanish-speaking families has found that minority language exposure does not threaten the acquisition of English by children in the U.S. and that there is no trade-off between English and Spanish. Rather, children reliably acquire English, and their total language knowledge is greater in that they also acquire Spanish.

Results of the study, published in the journal Child Development , show that children with the most balanced bilingualism were those who heard the most Spanish at home and who had parents with high levels of education in Spanish. Importantly, these children did not have lower English skills than the English-dominant children. Children’s level of English knowledge was independent of their level of Spanish knowledge.

Led by researchers at Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with The George Washington University, the study is the first to describe the outcome of early dual language exposure in terms of bilingual skill profiles that reflect the relations in the data between children’s skill levels in their two languages. The study addresses the question of what level of English and Spanish skill can be expected in 5-year-old children who come from Spanish-speaking homes in which they also hear English in varying amounts.

“We found that early in development, children who hear two languages take a little longer to acquire each language than children who hear only one language; however, there is no evidence that learning two languages is too difficult for children,” said Erika Hoff, Ph.D., lead author and a professor at FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.

A key finding from the study is that low levels of proficiency in two languages at age five is not a typical outcome of exposure to two languages. Bilingual children who have weak skills in both languages at age five may have an underlying impairment or inadequate environmental support for language acquisition.

For the study, researchers used an examiner-administered test to measure the English and Spanish expressive vocabulary of 126 U.S.-born 5 year olds from Spanish-speaking families with one or two immigrant parents who have been exposed to Spanish since birth and who have also heard English at home in varying amounts, either from birth or soon thereafter. They also measured indicators of the children’s language learning ability.

Prior to this study, differences among bilingual children were described primarily in terms of dominance (English-dominant bilinguals, Spanish-dominant bilinguals) and balance, but that turns out not to be the only way in which bilinguals differ.

“Previous research has tended to treat bilingual children’s development in each language as a separate outcome, rather than treating dual language skills as the single outcome of dual language exposure,” said Hoff. “This approach not only fails to adequately capture the nature of children’s dual language skills, it also leaves unaddressed the question of how the acquisition of one language is related to the acquisition of another.”

Findings from this study suggest that dominance is not the same thing as proficiency. Bilinguals differ both in dominance and in total language knowledge. Teachers and clinicians cannot infer a bilingual child’s language proficiency from that child’s language dominance. There are balanced bilinguals at age five who have stronger English skills than some English-dominant bilinguals. Individual differences in dominance are significantly related to home exposure, although the function that relates exposure to dominance is biased toward English. Balanced language exposure at home does not result in balanced proficiency; Spanish-dominant home exposure appears to be necessary. Individual differences in total language knowledge are significantly related to indicators of language-learning ability, measured in this study in terms of phonological memory and nonverbal intelligence.

Taking Digital Communication to Heart

As pandemic-induced school shutdowns have accelerated remote learning, the importance of personal connections between students, their teachers, aides, mentors, and peers has become a major concern—especially for marginalized students, including multilingual learners, who have found it harder to access the support they require. However, there has been a welcome effort to enable such students to take part in remote education through the provision of subsidized devices and Wi-Fi, which we should now take advantage of to provide the personalized and social–emotional learning (SEL) that is so crucial to student well-being and their consequent success.

Social–emotional learning (SEL) can be defined as the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set positive goals, and feel empathy for others.
In its 2016 report, the World Economic Forum found that both existing and cutting-edge technological tools had the potential to bring SEL to scale, such as using game-based learning solutions to promote SEL elements like responsible decision-making, complex communication, and positive peer collaboration. The Forum’s report concluded that “achieving scalable SEL technology implementation cannot be accomplished by teachers or researchers alone. Instead, it will continue to require the commitment of many additional stakeholders in a wide variety of roles, ranging from investors and policymakers to families, technology developers, and businesses.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has acted as a catalyst for the development of remote learning and other edtech teaching tools, but, despite improvements, their adoption has remained uneven, as rural and other underserved communities have struggled to get up to speed in terms of digital access.

The marriage of technology and SEL may hardly seem a match made in heaven, but the impact of social media on emotional health is well documented and is an indicator of the potential for digital communications’ use to improve and increase the provision of SEL. Much attention has been given to the negative impacts of online social interaction on children—and with good reason, considering the potential for bullying, shaming, and other abuse—but we are only starting to exploit the possibilities of using digital communications as a tool to promote understanding and inclusion. Allowing children, wherever they are and whatever their situations or backgrounds, to share experiences and feelings with like-minded peers and skilled professionals could be one of the positive consequences of school closures, as long as great care is taken to protect those children from abuse and to ensure that the students most in need—the marginalized and economically disadvantaged—are prioritized.

Alongside their new access to online SEL, our students should be trained and encouraged to use moderated online tools to improve communication, understanding, and acceptance between children of different linguistic, racial, cultural, socioeconomic, and geographical backgrounds. Breaking down these barriers at a young age is key to the social cohesion that democracy requires.

Transforming Reading Instruction

1. Millions of people, including me, learned to read with the help of Reading Mastery. Why change such a successful product? Although Reading Mastery has evolved, the instructional design of the program remains the same. Reading Mastery Transformations is based upon the Direct Instruction pedagogy of explicit, systematic instruction. So, teachers can be confident that while they may see new content or skills taught, the way these are taught is grounded in the strong instructional design that is the core of Direct Instruction programs. In collaboration with the authors, we identified areas of focus for changes and improvements.

For example, teachers will find enhancements across several areas including vocabulary, comprehension, writing, and collaboration. Even so, the primary levels continue to provide a strong foundational skills approach that aligns with recommendations for learning to read. We also wanted to leverage technology to address a significant problem for teachers – not enough time!

Through teacher interviews and observations, we found that most teachers were evaluating student progress but the number of teachers analyzing the data and acting on that data was inadequate. One of the main obstacles is time.

Analyzing data and pulling together resources once you recognize an issue is extremely time consuming. Now, teachers of Reading Mastery Transformations will access the remedy summary information which in real time analyzes the group data and pinpoints areas in need of additional support. To take it a step further, teachers will see remedy lessons designed to address those areas of need. No need for teachers to search and gather the information, as it will be at their fingertips.

2. What theories of reading acquisition are behind the update to Reading Mastery? In developing Reading Mastery Transformations, the authors considered feedback directly from teachers using the programs. Other changes came from an examination of ELA state standards, instructional materials, and state assessments. Many of these have increased the inclusion of informational text. Therefore, we felt it necessary to strike a greater balance between literature and informational texts during an instructional lesson. This shift ensures that students are prepared as they enter middle and high school.

3. Indications are that rates of reading acquisition have slowed during school shutdowns. How can teachers help students learn to read remotely? The environment of remote learning poses a significant challenge, particularly for students in the early stages of learning to read. Consider the impact that this type of delivery model might have on oral language acquisition or phonological awareness development. In addition, we know that young students experience distractions in their home environment, technical and connection issues, and the lack of real contact with a teacher and peers.

As students return to brick-and-mortar, our first step is to determine the degree of learning loss. Recent reports indicate that these losses are significant, particularly in schools that predominantly serve students of color. Once we identify the degree of loss, the next step is to help students with opportunities to accelerate their learning. For some students, this means increasing the time and intensity of reading instruction. Reading Mastery Transformations is designed to meet students where they are and accelerate their learning through an evidence-based instructional model. With Reading Mastery Transformations, we are prepared to help students to meet their full potential.

Kelly McGrath is chief academic officer of McGraw Hill’s School group.

Rumi in the Language Classroom Vol 7: Operational Definition

Rumi in the Language Classroom Vol 7

See Vol 1 here
See Vol 2 here
See Vol 3 here
See Vol 4 here
See Vol 5 here
See Vol 6 here

In the seventh part of Rumi in the Language Classroom, the story of “fight for the same entity” in Rumi’s “Masnavi-e-Manavi” is discussed. This is the story of 4 people from different ethnic backgrounds (i.e., Persian, Arab, Turk, and Roman) who wanted to buy grapes. The Persian said they want to buy “Angor” (Persian equivalent for grapes), the Arab argued they wanted “Aneb” (Arabic equivalent for grapes), and the other two used their own words to refer to grapes. Since they did not realize they were referring to the same entity, they started fighting.

This story delineates one of the biggest challenges of science especially human science called operational definition. Sometimes we argue about the same thing from different perspectives. In all these years of being the DoS (Director of Studies), I have observed numerous feedback sessions in which teachers and observers talked about the observed session. In most of these sessions, where there was a quarrel and misunderstanding, this concept (operational definition) was missing. I can vividly remember a feedback session I was observing in which the observer criticizes the teacher for not having enough effective ICQs (instruction checking questions) for her instructions whereas the teacher insisted on having ICQs in her class. The misunderstanding in this discussion roots in the definition of ICQ for the observer and observed. While the teacher considered ‘what should you do?’ as an ICQ, the observer believed that it is not an appropriate one. If they both had a fixed definition (operational definition) of the entity (ICQ) they would not run into a quarrel.

Therefore, in the realm of education, specifically ELT, it is necessary to provide a clear definition of the concepts in order to avoid misunderstandings.

Jaber Kamali

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