59. Supporting Multilingual Superstars: A Deep Dive into Bilingual Education with Andrea Bitner
Listen to the Podcast:
You might not realize it, but the child sitting next to yours in their third-grade classroom could be a budding multilingual superstar. Join me, Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore, as I sit down with the seasoned educator and English language learner teacher, Andrea Bitner, to discover the fascinating intricacies of supporting multilingual students in education.
Andrea, with her 23 years of experience, shares riveting stories about her students - many of whom only realize their bilingual abilities around third or fourth grade - and their journey of becoming leaders in their own families by helping their parents navigate the community.
We then navigate toward the poignant tale of the Lopez family, a courageous family of seven children who Andrea had the honor of teaching. Their story inspired Andrea to put pen to paper, resulting in her book 'Take Me Home'. We discuss her and her colleagues' efforts to support the children academically and the beautiful tradition of celebrating graduating seniors with a "T-shirt Day" every year.
Amidst these celebrations, we also touch upon the heartbreaking story of Nancy, one of the Lopez children, whose loss had a profound impact on the family.
Tune in to hear how Andrea shares her passion for multilingual education and how it inspired her to create her passion project encapsulated in Take Me Home.
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This transcript was developed using A.I. There may be errors.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
00:01
Welcome to Design Lessons, the podcast where we design our teaching days to be fulfilling for us and irresistible to our students. I'm Dr Michele Schmidt Moore and instructional design is my superpower. Each episode we will take actionable steps to create great teaching days. We'll focus on mindset, real-world opportunities and critical and creative thinking for us and our students. So, whether you're on your commute to school, walking your dog, or doing the dishes, let's start designing.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
00:35
Hey, designers, today we get to talk to Andrea Bitner, an English language learner, teacher and author of Take Me Home. Now, Take Me Home was born out of the tragic death of one of Andrea's students. It began as a poem that she wrote for her student, Nancy's funeral. that later became a book that chronicled Nancy's life, as well as the lives of 10 other English language learners. Each of their stories is vastly different from each other. First, Andrea is going to share with us some strategies that we can use to support and spotlight our multilingual students, and then share stories of her students. Here's Andrea.
Andrea Bitner
Guest
01:19
Hey everybody, my name is Andrea Bitner and I am an English language learner teacher from Philadelphia, PA. I've been in the education field for about 23 years now. I didn't start out that way. Started out as a high school English teacher. I hired right over the weekend out of Westchester University and quickly learned upon my novice first year in teaching high school students that my kids didn't know how to read And it really bothered me enough and challenged me enough that I went back to school And I became a reading specialist.
01:52
I spent two more years learning how to be a reading specialist and got a master's in reading And from that I started to work with middle school students. I dropped down to the middle school level and I spent a few years as a reading specialist with middle school kids And I had this great, great partner across the hall named Mike who worked with all of the English language learners in the building, and so I started to get really curious about working with the ELS And so I talked to him and I started to have some ELL students in my group that day and then within that year And I went back to school again and I got a certification working with ELL students. So the bulk of my career almost 16 now of the 23 years has been spent in the support role, whether it was working as an ELL teacher or a Title I reading specialist, or a little bit of both, and I'm currently working as a full-time ELL teacher with grades one to eight in Delaware County, pennsylvania.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
02:46
Oh, I love that. I love that story. I'm currently working with students also who are in middle school and some of them are ELLs who, if you do your WIDA, their speaking is level four, level five almost in terms of speaking and listening, but we're at like more like a, 1.8, et cetera for reading. So I love that. This is sort of a point of connection for us. But I'm always curious about strategies that I can use and things I can do And I know that people listening are also sort of curious like what are things that we can do to make schooling even easier for our different students who have more than one language? I always find that to be a gift And I'm wondering sort of what are some concrete things we can do?
Andrea Bitner
Guest
03:39
I love that you mentioned that it's a gift, because that's the first thing that I share with our kids And I know they don't really realize that they are bilingual until around third grade. And one of my students that I worked with in second grade just a few weeks ago put it really easily to me. I said, sophie. I said do you realize your mom and dad have given you this amazing gift that you can become bilingual and speak in different languages? And she looked at me with this really perplexed face and she goes, miss B. she said I mean, i just speak to you in English and I look at my mom and I speak something else. Like it was really just that simple. You know, right around third or fourth grade my students will start to go, oh, i can do something, my friends can't. And I'm like, yeah, and then they'll start to realize, in my district in particular, oh, my one student said, also about a week ago you know, my mom's English isn't that good And I said, ah, and so they have to realize that as they're becoming these leaders, these middle leaders in their families, they're doing things that their parents are relying on them for at a really young age. I'll see them out translating in the community, helping them make orders, helping mom and dad as they're at the local restaurant whether it be a McDonald's or a local place placing their order for food. They're proud of it And I think they should be, and so, you know, the population of kids that I work with are really diverse.
05:06
I have kids who were born here and most of them are now. I have kids who were across the border. I have kids who were adopted. I have exchange students. I've got kids who came before their parents on a visa. I've got kids that waited 10 years and came later after their parents set up shop. So, and it's really interesting to see them, like you mentioned, at all these different levels, you know you have kids who can listen and speak all day long, but when you put a piece of content in front of them and look for literacy skills, they're like a deer in headlights.
05:38
And I've got the opposite. I've got kids that are master readers and writers, But if I ask them to take a walk down the hall to the office to pick up something for me for some practice with speaking, they freeze you know, So we've got like a wide level of one through six.
05:53
And something I do in a presentation I go out to teachers and work with them on our. When you get an EL student in your classroom, try not to be cautious but be curious, because they are so different And a lot of people make the assumption that EL label equals X Or, you know, if you're from this country, it means you had this experience and it's Y, you know. And so what I've created is what I call the 10 essential questions the teacher should ask when an EL comes on to your roster. And so we say things like start with that home language survey. When you send it out, did you send a follow up Google doc that's translatable, to investigate?
06:32
Mom checked off that they may speak Arabic at home. Well, is that once a week? Is that in the summers, when they travel? Is that a daily gift that they're giving their children to become bilingual? What does that look like? And then from there it goes into okay, well, now that we've got that information, let's give that Google doc to the family to learn a little bit more. And then from there it's okay. Now the Google doc came back and said yes, we speak Arabic at home. That is awesome. So now it's like, okay, are they coming from another country? Are they coming from a district down the street? Are they coming from a different state? Did they already receive services? And if they did, then it's easy, i'll just continue services If they didn't. Now I've got to do a little more digging And from there I make that decision, do I need to screen them?
07:15
And once I screen them, in Pennsylvania, being a lead estate, we use that screener. Then it becomes did they pass the screener or do they need some support? Because some of them don't need the support. Some of them are just amazing bilingual kids that are going to be in your building and have that gift moving forward, and some of them are kids that are going to need some support to become bilingual. So it just really depends.
07:37
And from there you start to look at all aspects of the building. Have you met with the EL teacher and looked at accommodations that'll fade over time? Have you made sure that everybody in the building knows who your EL students are? I'm a big believer that everybody should know And when I say that I mean from your maintenance team, to your office team, to your cafeteria team, to your transportation team, to your guidance counselors, to your nurse, to your social workers, to your teachers, because 80% of their interactions occur outside of the EL classroom, and so it's really important that they have the opportunity to feel successful outside of that safety net, if that makes sense. What the experiences are.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
08:19
No, that makes sense. So you've wrote a book called Take Me Home And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your inspiration for that and the whole process of making it go from idea to poem to book the top of the world.
Andrea Bitner
Guest
08:34
Yes, i can. So it's about 10 years ago. I was working at the high school level as an English language learner teacher And I had about 40 different students with about 25 different languages And, like I mentioned earlier in the podcast, they came from a variety of experiences And I worked with one particular family, the Lopez family, and I taught all seven of their children over many years And there were all boys and one girl And they happened to be from the country of El Salvador And I've traveled to Salvador myself a few times to do some work with schools down there And I knew this family really well And they started out with Sergio, who came over from crossing the border. They happened to be kids that had crossed the border All the way down the boys from Henry to Jeffrey to Jeffrey, from Las Vegas. We had all these different kids all the way down to Nancy, and Nancy was the only female of the family, and so we had this huge EL community and this huge EL family in our classroom And we had this banner up And the banner said what's your plan?
09:39
Education is opportunity, education is freedom, and so every year, as our students traveled with us through the navigating the ups and downs of high school life and acquiring English and the content and the strategies and all of that comes with it. Every year of their senior year, we would have this big celebration called T-shirt day And I would have the alumni who are now young bilingual professionals out in the world come back and they would bring a shirt for that senior, celebrating where they were headed next. It could be military, it could be entrepreneur, it could be college, it could be training of some sort, it could be I'm opening my own business, i wanna be a YouTuber. Whatever it was that they were headed towards next.
10:20
Our alumni were there to celebrate with them And they were also there to tell them about all these great things that were waiting for them now that they're these young bilingual professionals heading out. And so that was the opportunity. They would have to sign that banner that what's your plan banner and say I completed this chapter of my life. And so, from that experience, nancy, along with all those young men over the years and all these great kids we worked with, sign that Banner. And about a year after I was teaching Nancy, she had left high school. I was teaching in a building next door about a year later And I saw some helicopters outside one day and I thought, wow, like I hope everything's all right, there's a lot of helicopters out there today. And about an hour after that, my principal came down to get me, to let me know that one of my students had been hit by the train, and that student was Nancy.
11:10
And unfortunately, she had had some headphones on and we had to watch the video with mom and dad later. And there was a choice she made to walk along the inside of the train tracks instead of the outside gate, and she had her headphones on and she was walking along the inside and she didn't see the cellar and it clipped her from behind.
11:30
Oh, my goodness, and so it really threw this family and this you know awesome group of educators and group of kids and families that we were working with at that time into a sense of major trauma. And for the weeks following that we worked with mom and dad. Dad's actually a pastor in Philadelphia and mom works alongside him and they're learning English themselves And we worked through the immigration process of trying to get her brother to be allowed to come up to bury his sister.
11:55
We worked through the navigation of how they could bury their daughter and obtaining a free funeral, and we worked through the Latino community coming every night to sit with their parents as they worked through this horrible tragedy.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
12:08
Yeah.
Andrea Bitner
Guest
12:08
One of the most tragic things that day was that mom and dad were still learning English themselves, and so when they received a call that something had happened to one of their children, nobody on the local force spoke Spanish.
12:21
So they could piece together that something had happened, but they weren't sure what had happened or which child it was.
12:29
So they went up to the tracks and they were hours standing there waiting and calling all of the kids to try and figure out who was there, and so one of my jobs at that time, as we traveled through all of this together, was to speak at Nancy's funeral, and so at the time I wrote this short poem and I called it Take Me Home, and it was an homage to her crossing into the US and her life story, and so I read it at her funeral that day, and I continued to teach these amazing kids after that, and I kept that little piece of paper out on my desk, and a few months later I saw it one day and I thought, well, maybe somebody could be helped by part of this story, maybe there's somebody out there that could benefit from hearing it, and so I sent that out to a bunch of publishers on a whim.
13:13
And about six months later, a publisher got back to me and they said hey, andrea, we really like your poem, but we don't want you to write a poem, we want you to write a book.
13:23
And we're going to give you six months to do it And if you come back with something that we like, we're going to take you on and publish you. And I started to think Michelle. I thought, well, I don't just want to tell her story, I want to tell all of their stories, because they're so different. And a lot of people make this assumption that English language learners are all the same.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
13:44
Right ten out of nine.
Andrea Bitner
Guest
13:46
And so I went back and I took those six months and I interviewed 11 of my former English language learners who are now in their late 20s, early 30s, and I asked them to reflect on the question of this. I said you know, when you were in school, we did a great job navigating your society with you, your school systems getting you what you needed to become successful to that next chapter of your life. But now that you're a young, successful, bilingual professional living and working out in the world and you can reflect upon life that happened before this, what was that experience really like for you? And so, from those conversations, we created Take Me Home. We hit almost every continent and I hit almost every experience. So we created Take Me Home the true story of 11 of our former English language learners who give a firsthand account of what it's really like to become bilingual in America.
14:38
And it's written through their eyes in the first perspective and we weaved Nancy's story through it And I went back and interviewed mom and dad And it's written in English. It repeats in Spanish in the same book. We wanted to do that because we wanted to give people a glimpse of what it might feel like to try and read in a different language or understand in a different language, and it was also really important to me that Nancy's parents be able to read about their daughter, and so we weaved all that together and it's been out since July of 2021. And it's been really well received all around the country.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
15:13
That's wonderful It sounds. it sounds like you've taken something, obviously that was very traumatic and very painful, but also kind of turned it into something that is able to kind of represent the students that you've taught and that you've made connections with over the time that you've been teaching.
15:32
Yeah, and it really has, and I think that really speaks to the point that you said earlier. You talked about how you know, our sort of number one job is to be curious, and that you know. We all know that every student is different, but also, specifically, every English language learner is different, and so this book probably gives that perspective and that that story of each and every not every student obviously right, but it gives so many different perspectives and so many different windows into what it's like for people learning a second language. I just do, i have two languages, and I do feel as though it just gives you a different perspective, particularly if you, if you yourself, ever live outside of the US and are learning a language in a different country, people look at you differently. They assume your intelligence isn't as high as it is because you're not speaking the language, which is, of course, not true.
Andrea Bitner
Guest
16:28
Of course, you know that's one of the biggest pieces that came out of the many conversations I had with these young people. And you know, through those conversations that's really what has driven part of our mission to help people realize that. Number one lack of language never equals lack of intelligence. And number two, when you meet someone who's learning English or any new skill for that matter for the first time, treat that chapter of their like life like an asset and not a deficit, because they're on their way to becoming bilinguals in the world, which is a huge asset, it's a major gift that they have, and so they may not have the ability to see it at the time. And so that's why it's so important for educators that what we could I call that binocular thinking, we can put on those binoculars and see that long term vision when maybe at the time they can only microscope in and see their daily struggle. And so I think that the book has really opened educators up to that respect, accept and admiration of ELs around the country and their parents as well.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
17:33
So that was one thing that was inspired you clearly to write a book and also, of course, talk about your experiences. So my question is what is inspiring you right now?
Andrea Bitner
Guest
17:44
Oh, wow. You know I've had the opportunity to get to travel and visit educators in Texas and Florida and Ohio and locally here in Pennsylvania and Delaware and New Jersey. And you know, as our message grows, my inspiration is really growing by meeting all these educators. People in the education world don't often get the opportunity to step out of sight what I call our bubble and, you know, get to see what other educators are doing in you know, other counties, let alone other states, and I'm really inspired by all of what I call our village that is out there doing what's best for kids and just hearing their stories and their connections and reflections and questions and all of these great ideas. You know that they have to put on their best foot every day to respect, accept and admire all the young people we're working with. It's so much bigger than I ever imagined. We're such a huge, massive village here in the US and that just inspires me to wanna continue to work hard to provide people with the support they need and represent these awesome kids.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
18:50
I love that. Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I think we definitely all learned so much from you and I appreciate you coming on the podcast today.
Andrea Bitner
Guest
19:01
Thank you for having me.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
19:03
Andrea's story reminds us that our students and all the people we meet have gifts to give us in the form of their perspectives and unique experiences. The links to connect with Andrea are in the show notes and if you have been enjoying Design lessons, please take a moment to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Until next time, designers.
Dr. Michele Schmidt Moore
Host
19:31
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Connect with our Guest
Andrea Bitner is an educator, author, and speaker. She lives in Philadelphia, PA. She has worked with students in grades K-12 throughout her twenty-two years in public education from all around the world. Her first book, “Take Me Home,” was published by Austin Macauley in July of 2021. "Take Me Home" is the true story of 11 of her former EL students who give a first-hand account of what it's really like to become bilingual in America. She is also a co-author of Chip Baker’s “The Impact of Influence-Volume 3 and Dr. Rick Jetter’s 100 No-Nonsense Things ALL School Leaders Shout STOP Doing.” She travels the country speaking and teaching educators how to teach and reach EL students, and effectively communicate with EL families! You can find Andrea at www.andreabitnerbooks.com, or on social media @andreabitnerbooks.
@andreabitnerbooks on Instagram
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