When I made the move from Reading Specialist at a dual language school in Austin to Dean of Students in St. Louis, I got some truly fantastic training in coaching teachers and leading PD. The structure our schools used at the time was adopted from Uncommon Schools in New York, and the basic structure is “See it, Name it, Do it”. I am so grateful for that training, because it has proved to be a very effective framework for training adults! That last part, “do it,” is probably the most neglected piece in most adult professional development, and that is why I thought it was so important to share this tip with you this week. If you are trying to influence staff behavior and get all staff to use the translation and interpretation resources and protocols you have put in place, doing it must be a part of training. Tip of the WeekWhen you plan your professional development for training staff on language access systems, it is not enough to just tell staff what you want them to do to communicate with multilingual families. Plan for a practice portion for staff to actually do the thing you are training them to do. The StoryThe first time I led language access professional development, I was training our operational staff how to place calls using the telephonic interpreter service we contracted with. I planned for a practice portion of the session, but I hadn’t actually requested enough time for my session to make it happen (i.e. I was complicit in allowing multilingual training to get squeezed and minimized), so we ran out of time before getting to practice. And guess what. After training them on using telephonic interpreters, no one other than myself used telephonic interpreters that year. The next two years, I made several concessions on the professional development time I requested of principals during summer professional development. (To be clear, every concession I made ended up being a mistake, and I will address each one in future emails). One of those compromises was on the total time of the session, again resulting in the need to cut practice time. And yet again, the only team that used translation and interpretation consistently those years was ... the ELL team. That was a major problem, because parents were constantly receiving communications from the school office, district office, and teachers that were not in a language they could understand. As the ELL team, we were constantly hearing about things after they had already gone out to families, and worse – we didn’t hear about them from staff realizing their oversight. We heard about them from parents, who were asking for help understanding the communications they were receiving in English. In the fourth iteration of my training on language access, I stopped making compromises. As you might guess, I held the line on the time I needed for the session this time, and nearly half of my 90-minute session was dedicated to having staff do what I was asking of them: setting up their text and email broadcast accounts to automatically translate (not merely showing them and counting on them to do it later), placing a call with our telephonic interpreter service, submitting a request for a document translation and in-person interpreter. In the school year following that session, even though our multilingual population stayed stable, non-ELL staff placed ten times more interpreter calls than the previous year and requested seven times more translations and in-person interpreters before communications went out and without me doing it for them. Though the professional development was not the only change I made to my communication equity systems, I received feedback throughout the year that staff and leaders felt that that training had set them up for success. The practice portion of PD makes sense when we stop to think about it. In a lesson with students, would we just tell them how to add without having them practice adding and giving them feedback? Would we ever tell students the meaning of new vocabulary words without giving them lots of practice hearing, reading, and using the new vocabulary? No! In student instruction, we build in tons of practice! Yet frequently, we tend to have a mindset that when training adults, we should just be able to tell them. As much as we want that to be enough, it just isn’t. And it isn’t a matter of staff not being up to par. They are smart, competent people! But even smart, competent people learn better by hearing, seeing and doing than just hearing and seeing. Normally I can’t even tell myself something and remember to do it. I have to put it in my calendar, say it out loud, intentionally build a habit (that includes lots of practice and failings), ask for help, trouble-shoot, and I often need an accountabilibuddy. Thinking of it this way, of course our staff didn’t do what I wanted them to do after getting “trained” just by telling them! Call to ActionFirst outline the language access systems you want to see greater usage of. When making your list, think about all the ways staff might communicate with families: text and email from a platform, text and email from a cell phone or computer, documents that go home in backpacks, documents that go home as email attachments, newsletters on a digital platform, phone calls, and in-person meetings and events. Don’t take for granted platforms that say they auto-translate (e.g. Dean’s List, Parent Square, School Messenger, etc.) and verify whether translations are truly automatic, or if the user does have to do something to trigger the translation (such as check a box that says “translate this message”). You don't have to train on all of them if you don't need to, but don't overlook something by accident. Then for each item on your list, write out what the acceptable protocol(s) is/are for communicating with a multilingual family using that method. For example, "When scheduling an event for families, the event planner should submit a request for in-person interpretation using our request form" ... or whatever your expectation is. Finally, write out the steps staff would need to do in order to practice each of those items. For example, our schools use Dean’s List to send texts and emails, but the user has to check a box to “translate this message”. The good news is they only have to check that box one time, and it remains checked each time they sign in. So in my PD session, my goal as to have every single participant log into their Dean’s List account and check that box. By the end of my session, I could be sure that every text and email going out in Dean’s List would be translated, because I wasn’t trusting or hoping people would check their boxes later (because 99% of them won’t). FASTER TOGETHERIf you found this helpful, and you would like more support with caring for multilingual families at your school or district, just:
Thank you for all you do.
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Anne TruranI taught, coached, taught again, founded an ELL program and taught and coached some more. From the border to central Texas to the Midwest. Now I work with schools to improve communication and connection with multilingual families. Archives
May 2024
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