The Question that Burned in my Brain for Years

Between 2019 and 2022, I was stuck. All-caps bold STUCK. Gathering data to measure progress toward goals had been drilled into me all the way back from my teacher training and every year since. From grades that are percentage-based, to trackers that calculate percent mastery, to attendance measures, to me, goals and tracking progress were synonymous with percentage. Yet, I had no idea how to even begin doing that with measuring communication. Today, I want to share the breakthrough that got me out of my rut.

Tip of the Week

*** This tip is much longer than usual, but I promise it is worth your attention. ***

Don’t measure translation and interpretation usage as a percent of a total. Set a discrete goal using the number of students combined with anticipated activities.

​Below is a list to show you what I mean.

Goal for phone calls placed with an interpreter: Consider the number of students in combination with the calls expected that quarter

• For example, if your district expects teachers to call multilingual families to schedule their conference, your phone call goal will be at least the number of students in the school, since each one should receive at least one phone call to schedule a conference. Don’t forget attendance calls, or calls that might be placed by auxiliary staff such as nurses and counselors.

Goal for in-person or virtual interpretation: Consider the number of students and activities anticipated that quarter

• For example, if you have a goal of 70% of students to have a conference, then we would want that to extend to multilingual students as well. Take 70% of your multilingual families to set the goal. If you also have a family information night happening the same quarter, add one to the goal.

Goal for documents translated: Number of documents expected to go home

• The number of students is irrelevant here. Whether you have 1 multilingual student or 500, every document that goes home should get translated in some form or fashion.

​*Goal for texts and emails translated: I highly encourage you to figure out how to get this automated, if it isn’t already, so that you do not have to track this goal. Often times, these metrics are not even transparent inside digital platforms, so automation is the best way forward here.

The Story

The problem for me, being stuck on measuring progress in terms of percent, is that there are so so very many communications going out to families all the time, from so many campuses, initiated by so many individuals, through so many methods, many of them not trackable, I had no idea how to set our goals and measure progress toward them.

Texts and emails are often completely opaque. It is impossible to know how many teachers sent home a half-sheet on any given day, much less quarter. And even school administration itself might be sending things home that you have no idea about unless a parent flags it for you. Even if staff are supposed to log their parent calls … they probably aren’t (as a teacher, I didn’t document calls unless it was about a sensitive subject).

How do you know if you are 20% or 80% toward a goal if it is literally impossible to know what 100% even is? That is where I was stuck.

One spring, I sent out an email on a massive email thread of all the ELL Coordinators for my region, asking for help. I got crickets … which I took to mean that others were in the same boat as I was. Except for one.

Bless this woman, for being so generous with her time, to talk with me on the phone and discuss this problem. When I asked her how you are supposed to measure percent when you don’t know what the total is, she said, “You can’t.” Ha! This was the woman that I and my counterparts looked to as the be-all-end-all of ELL Coordinators, and she just confirmed my fears. But for her, it was not a dead end. She spoke of having the coordinators at her various campuses be in administrators' and teachers’ ears all the time to ask them, “Did you get that translated?” or “Have you requested interpreters for that event?”

This was an incredibly freeing moment for me, and it allowed me to get creative. I wasn’t able to use the same strategy she was, because at the time, we were an ELL department of two, so we didn’t have ears in all the meetings or hallways to remind others when we overheard conversations. We could only be in so many places at once.

She also described looking for discrepancies. If a campus had 200 multilingual students, but had only placed 3 calls with an interpreter recently, then something was off, and she could then bring it to the admin team.

That got me thinking. I thought more in-depth about each thing I was trying to measure: phone calls with interpreters, in-person interpreters, and translations. Some of those correlate with student numbers, but not all and not entirely. I realized that if we cross-referenced multilingual students with the school calendar and what exactly was happening in a given quarter, that would allow us to set goals … and track our progress toward them.

​And guess what – when I implemented this method along with the many other pieces of the framework I teach:

• Use of translation by non-ELL staff increased by six times.
• Use of interpreters for meetings and events by non-ELL staff also increased by six times.
• Use of telephonic interpreters to place phone calls to multilingual families by non-ELL staff increased by eight times.

The amount of information families could understand from the school increased tremendously, as did their personal touch points from a wide variety of staff. After all, ELL teachers are not the only adults who care for their children all day.

Call to Action

Do an experiment.

1. Select one campus.
2. Get the number of students whose parents require a language other than English and get out their school calendar.
3. Look at the upcoming quarter, and attempt to set a goal in each of those categories: 1) phone interpretation, 2) in-person and virtual interpretation, and 3) document translation. 
​4. See how smoothly or roughly the process goes. Write down what worked and write down what you need to make it more effective.

For example, maybe you prefer this to be a collaborative process with building admin in order to ensure you have the correct information when setting a goal (e.g. they may have made changes to events you don’t know about) and increase their buy-in (no one likes to be given a goal they had no say in).

Faster Together

So many leaders know that their multilingual families aren't getting equitable access to information, programming, or people in their schools. But most get stuck, like I was, when trying to fix it because they are over-tasked and under-staffed. I spent years and dozens and dozens of hours in trial and error trying to fix this problem.

I help educational leaders in multilingual communities set up communication equity systems and practices so families can get what they need, feel a sense of community, and school staff can feel proud not only of what they do, but how they do it.

Get support so you can skip all the trial and error and go straight to the part that works. It can look like coaching for full-service consulting.

1) Schedule a free consultation.
2) Tell me about your school and community.
3) Get your plan for creating a better experience for multilingual families, and better results for kids.