Latest / The Recess-An Inside Look at the Auburn School District / Episode #46 Michaela Peringer, Elementary Multilingual Teacher

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Episode #46 Michaela Peringer, Elementary Multilingual Teacher · The Recess-An Inside Look at the Auburn School District

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to the Recess Podcast.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Alan Spacotti, the proud superintendent of the Auburn School District.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: The Recess gives me an opportunity to take you behind the scenes and get to meet people in our district who are making a difference, who you might not otherwise get to see.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I have the privilege of being in schools every week.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I clear my calendar on Monday morning to get out and have just met fantastic folks in schools and support buildings, and of course, most of all our students.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I like to tell their stories and share that with you.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I think we're getting close to not quite to graduation season, but we're going to have a lot of students coming up to end the year.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: But we have a few more fantastic staff members along the way, and you're going to meet one of them right now.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd like to introduce Michaela Perringer, and she is a multilingual education teacher at Willcrest Elementary.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Michaela, welcome.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Happy to be here.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so happy to have you here to talk about a really important part of our district, a growing area, has been for quite some time, and a lot of just inspiring students who have amazing stories.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we've really worked hard to uh support our multilingual learners.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you're gonna help uh our audience understand what you do as an ML teacher and a little bit about our kids and families, and uh, you know, a lot of just really exciting um cultural growth in our school district.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So uh let's get into that, but we're gonna set it up with a question I always start with, and I think you're gonna have some interesting answers because I know you're an Auburn kid.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Who was your favorite teacher and why, or maybe who were your favorite teachers and why?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because yeah, you you came all the way through our system, right?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: I um I did my whole K-12 education in the Auburn School District.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: I went to Schinook Elementary, Olympic Middle, and Auburn High Schools, Go Trojans.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: It ha it was an interesting experience coming back to the Auburn School District as an employee, working alongside some of the teachers that I had as a student and learning to move away from Mr.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: or Mrs.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: and calling people by their first names.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was a transition.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I bet.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and it is hard for me to pick a favorite teacher in part for that reason.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: I had so many um amazing teachers in the Auburn School District as a young person.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I think what what stands out to me is um the experiences that I had as a music student.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I studied the violin and actually started my college career as a music education major.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I know Dr.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Spacotti, you were also um a musician of sorts, a music educator.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and um I'm sure you understand the the unique relationship that music teachers get to um develop with their students.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so in the Auburn School District, I had um Dr.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Elsa Fager in Olympic Middle School.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: She was my first, my first music teacher, and uh Mr.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Johnson at Auburn High School.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And both of them were consistent leader figures for me as a young person, kind of coming up with my own way of, you know, just growing up and showing up in the world, and and they were always champions for me and really gave me leadership opportunities through orchestra to kind of develop into the kind of person that I think I ended up becoming.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So, like I said, many, many favorite teachers in the Auburn School District.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: If any of you are listening, you were one of them, I'm sure.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: But um, those are the ones that stand out to me today.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I can identify you do have, you know, just a closer relationship in large part because you probably had them for three or four years each, I would imagine, right?
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, several years.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and you know, you just get to deepen those relationships over time.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And also the the practice of preparing for a concert and you know, organizing all of all of that, it's just an additional layer of um connection that you get to build with a teacher.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm glad you brought up Arts Education.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're big fans, obviously.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I have my own bias, but um thanks for that.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And shout out to Elsa Fager and Dale Johnson, uh, Miss Fager was still teaching at Auburn Riverside when I started here.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I got to know her.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I got to know Dale Johnson because my son studied violin and was in the Tacoma Youth Symphony, and so uh Mr.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Johnson was his conductor after he had retired from Auburn, and just a delightful uh man and uh just uh some great teachers, and you as you said.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um speaking of great teachers, let's get to know you.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, what was your journey to becoming a teacher in the Auburn School District?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: I started college as a music education major.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: That was uh a a learning experience for me going to a college with a very strong music department.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: The the lift in that particular program was very um performance heavy.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I found myself kind of becoming disenchanted with playing the violin, and I didn't want to see that happen.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, violin has brought me so much joy, and you know, I kind of found myself in this place of just self-discovery of like, is this really what I want to do?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I ended up taking some intro classes at in college to try and figure out are there some other ways that I can still become a teacher, but maybe not a music teacher, and um ended up taking an introduction to linguistics class and totally fell in love with the idea of language learning and teaching language.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that is the area that I chose to major in linguistics.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: When I graduated from college, going to college out of state, I moved back home and wanted to continue pursuing English language education as a career, not understanding as a you know early 20s young person that different states have different requirements for public educators.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what would have qualified me to be uh an English language teacher in the state of Utah where I went to college was not up to the standards of Washington state.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I started um in 2013 as an ELL paraeducator and through that work was motivated to pursue a certificate, teaching certificate.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: And big shout out goes to uh my friend and colleague Heidi Abbott for really pushing me to do that.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I I guess the rest is history.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: I got um ended up getting a master's degree in elementary education to allow myself to pursue that dream of being uh what's now a multilingual specialist.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've gone by many names, but right now a multilingual specialist, and I've been doing that for about 10 years now.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: We have been intentionally uh uh lifting up alternative career paths into teaching.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: You really don't have to, you know, be that four-year education major and then go straight into teaching when you're 22 or 23.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've had people out of industry, military, maybe raise their kids and then came back and taught.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Really, it's it's so valuable to have that classroom experience prior to being a teacher.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So um I'm glad that you share that.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that about you, but that's really cool.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the role you do now.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And as you said, uh maybe we could just take this straight on because I think some people are like, wait a minute, isn't it EL or EL?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we call it ML now.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you set the stage by ex explaining what ML means and and maybe why we choose that term and then just talk about uh what it's like to be an ML teacher.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Currently my my title is Multilingual Specialist, and I believe the the purpose behind that vocabulary is to focus on the asset-based, I guess, asset-based language to show that our students are in fact carrying with them a great asset of multilingualism, um, and that developing English as as one way of communicating alongside whatever language they are also learning at home or in their community is a great thing and and worthy of the recognition as the asset that it is.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And some of these kids are truly multilingual.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like they actually speak more than two languages.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um in fact, many of my students, you know, our home language surveys have one line for them to write down what is the home language.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: I noticed that many of the families have multiple languages on that line.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh this language slash this language slash this language, um, which I think is fascinating.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what's an example of that, just so our audience can picture?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm thinking about the students that I work with the most at Willowcrest are um students with Afghan heritage, that many of them are developing Dari and Pashto at the same time, which I've learned a lot in my time at Willowcrest about the origins of those languages, how they're related or not related to each other.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: They are not mutually intelligible, they are very much two separate languages.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the fact that students are able to develop their proficiency in both of those languages at the same time, as well as learning English at school, I think is just a a testament to their tenacity, their um resilience is really, really impressive.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And let me just give a little big picture um background for the audience.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: So our students today in Auburn School District, as we're recording this, speak uh at least 117 languages, and that actually changes.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: It could literally be a family moves in from a new country or a new language, and that could go up, it could go down.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: But 117 languages, um some languages obviously are the main concentration of our students.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So after English, uh the top languages, uh I believe in order are Spanish, Ukrainian, Dari, Pashto, the two from Afghanistan, Marshallese, a large uh Marshallese community uh for the Marshall Islands, Punjabi and Russian.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so 117 languages, some uh that are are much more common, some that are really just a handful of families, probably.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me about how how I think people want to know, how do you work with a classroom that may have numerous languages spoken in it?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just what's that like as a teacher?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: I can speak from my experience as specifically as an elementary educator.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think for us, the younger students are are very open to a bit of silliness, if I can say it that way.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, when I have a a group of especially emergent or newcomer students who are really developing English at the for the first time, they're at those beginning stages of English language development, and we can't make any assumptions that they're going to understand the instructions or or what it is that we're saying, sort of opening up some of that fun aspect of it.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of songs, a lot of chants, gestures, movements to to align with the vocabulary that we're talking about sort of becomes a way for the kids to engage in what looks like play to them, but is actually very academically focused and aligned with the stages of language acquisition.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: So something as as you know, silly as like a little dance that we do.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: For example, I'm sure most people are familiar with head, shoulders, knees, and toes, like the I guess that's a nursery rhyme or a a song and somewhat of a dance that um people are familiar with.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: That is actually very useful in my classroom to teach the kids about different body parts.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: They need to know what eyes are and ears and what their nose and their mouth are.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so things like that sort of feels like tricking them into learning, right?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're having a good time, but you're also learning vocabulary that's important to you.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: So being open to uh some of the the fun aspects of it and layering academic learning on top of that have really been useful in my work as an ML teacher.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's let's uh further kind of pull a curtain back and I'm gonna ask it this way what's a typical day like for you as an ML teacher?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there are six grade levels in um elementary school, and I work with students at every grade level.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: For the majority of my students this year, the the dynamic has changed a little bit.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have quite as many students who are really at that entering emergent stage.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Most of our students at Willowcrest, at least, have been developing English for for some time, uh a few years perhaps.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're at a point now where their social language has has strengthened.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: They're able to access listening and speaking skills.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of our focus is more on the academic piece of reading, writing, really those foundations of just reading and writing in general.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: I do a lot of um small group work, so pulling students that have a similar language level or at a similar stage of language development, and really honing on on this in the specific areas that they need to grow, giving them the more repetitions, giving them more access to strategies that help them develop that language.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I do a lot of collaborating with classroom teachers as well because I'm one person we we say often in the ML department that every teacher is a is an ML teacher.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Some of those numbers that you just mentioned really lend themselves to that um adage because we have so many multilingual students in the Auburn School District.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if I could just uh break in for a second, so we have almost 5,500 students in the ML program, and and this is in a 17,000 student district, so uh over 30% now of our students are multilingual learners uh uh by uh qualification for the program.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have I believe we're up to about 45% of our students live in a home where another language is spoken.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And some of those students maybe aren't in our ML program, but they either didn't didn't qualify because they had enough English, or they are former we call 'em FELs, I think we still do, I don't know, but former uh students in the program and they've graduated out of it because they've attained a certain level of English proficiency.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess what I'm getting at is to your point, every teacher is an ML teacher.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have hundreds of Michaela's uh to instruct fifty, five hundred students.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: So can you just talk a little bit about some of the strategies that our uh general-ed classroom teachers use to support ML learners?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Some I already mentioned the the chants and gestures are are very helpful because something like a a gesture is understandable across language.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it's just layering the vocabulary on top of that gesture really supports and scaffolds the language learning for those students.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about a lot of the B GLAD strategies that many of our staff members have been trained in.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: So things like graphic organizational input charts, sentence patterning frames, any kind of visual aid that again removes some of the cognitive load that our students have to do because just listening to the instructions or listening to the instruction is difficult at times when they're having to translate and really understand language that they don't quite have access to yet.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: But if they can see something, a poster, a picture, or something visual that kind of helps cue them into the theme or whatever it is the teacher is trying to teach them, it really does remove some of that affective barrier and allow them to access the instruction much more seamlessly.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Even our students who are monolingual in English are developing English proficiency, they're learning ELA in their classrooms, and so a lot of these strategies are pretty well just as effective with monolingual students as they are with multilingual students.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great explanation.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a range of learners within those almost 5,500 ML students.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um have been here for many years, and you know, you could almost speak to them and and not think of of them as an ML learner, but they're still still learning academic language, and then you have some who are quite new to the country, and currently we have over fifteen hundred students who have been in the United States less than two years, so uh a little over a quarter of our ML learners are really newer.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um I th you mentioned that until recently you had quite a number at Willowcrest.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um can you talk about just specifically Willowcrest, uh who you work with, students, their families?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I know you started a uh uh a really innovative uh approach there, so uh the floor is yours.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah, I mentioned at Willowcrest we have a pretty strong Afghan population.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of the students that I work with who are their home languages, Pashto or Dari, or both.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think part of the the heavy lift of supporting students in in this situation of being brand new to country is that they're not only learning academics when they come to school, they're also learning how to interact, like what are the norms around um interactions between adults and and children.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're learning what different clothes look like, what different food tastes like.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: They're really learning how life is the same and different than than what they've been used to.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: I I really do try and honor that because that is not an easy thing for any human being to go through, let alone um an elementary age student, um, or a student in general.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these these families also um my focus is elementary, but I'm very aware that there are middle schoolers and high schoolers in the same in the same uh situation.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, part of that, knowing that about a lot of our families has been taking a whole child approach that, you know, these kids have um caregivers in their lives that that really do believe in them and trust us when they send their their most precious treasures to to us for six and a half hours a day.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that those families, the adults in those families, the caregivers, are also learning how to communicate and what the expectations are.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that is also just such a heavy lift, especially if you don't have a connection already in your school or in your community to help you kind of figure some of this stuff out.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so the program that you mentioned was our at Willowcrest, we do a monthly Afghan ladies' tea night.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: So once a month we invite all of our um Afghan families to send their caregivers to to the school.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: We provide child care for young children if that's a barrier for for families to participate.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: We focused specifically on female caregivers, so mostly mothers, because we noticed in our first year as a school, we're only in our fourth year as a school, so we're still learning a lot about the community.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um But we had noticed at the very beginning that a lot of our the back and forth of like who's who's dropping the kids off, who's picking them up, who's you know, the first person to answer the phone when we need to call from school were the mothers.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they didn't necessarily have a way to communicate their needs to us at the beginning.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: We just didn't know what the needs were.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so part of the work that my program tried to do, and I give a lot of credit to my colleague Ivory Smith as well for working with me to create this program, was simply to provide space.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And invite the families in and to say, look, you probably have a lot of questions.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just come together as a community and and lay it all out on the table.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: What is it that you need from us?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what we would like to know about you and your families, and and let's just go from there.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're in our third year now of doing that.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was it's been amazing.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: We we are able to get, you know, we collaborate with our teachers.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's a field trip that permission slips need to be signed.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Most of those permission slips are hard for for families to understand.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: They look in the backpack, they're like, What is this?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what it is.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: We bring them to T night and we say, Hey, do you have a kid in third grade?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want them to go on this field trip?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead and sign on the line, you know, and just again remove some of that affective barrier and give them a place to feel belonging in our schools.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: I just love that you've been innovative in that way and really thought about, you know, not how do we make people conform to our structure that may or may not really meet people's needs, but get a little bit outside the box and it does take a little extra effort, and uh, you know, I I commend you and your colleagues for doing that.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it makes such a difference and it shows, you know, I often speak about my goal is for the district to be a great district for all students and families, not just for some.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that that little bit extra effort I think helps to realize that dream.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: So just thank you and uh and and again commend that work.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take just a minute.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you do more than just be an ML specialist, and I know this is like uh maybe a passion project for you, uh, training you've had where you've been helping the district with uh our recruiting and retention of other educators.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Can you just say a word about that?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know it's something you're passionate about.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I I've been working um a lot with the Puget Sound Educational Service District.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: My collaboration with them started back in 2022 on putting together uh a grant to support local school districts in recruitment and retention of a diverse educator workforce.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I know a lot of districts, ours included, have a goal of refining our workforce to reflect the population of students that we work with.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that is a statistic that's pretty consistent, not just in this region, but nationwide, that there is a need for um a diverse educator workforce, and students really do deserve and thrive when they have educators that reflect their lived experiences.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of that work, and it has been work, um has has culminated in this grant that we were able to receive a couple of years ago and put together, and um Auburn School District is one of the districts that participates in that work, and I'm really, really excited to continue to see that moving forward.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Our communities of practice series is starting up in the spring, and so it's just another avenue for educator leaders and superintendents, HR departments to kind of work across district to really figure out like how can we achieve this together?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And rather than this district's doing this, this district's doing this, how can we work together and really learn from each other to um better support the educators coming up to become those reflections of our students' experiences in the classroom?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for that, and actually I think the region thanks you because I know you've been a big part of the ESD work.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so kudos.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's uh take one more crack at at sharing the magic of our ML programs.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we like to do this on the podcast by asking guests what does a student success story look like uh with your ML learners?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is such a a beautiful and difficult question to answer because my work in a multilingual program often I I work with the students that require the most support with their English language development.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And once they achieve a certain level, once they start to fill that gap, I have to let them fly from the nest and join their general education students.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so that on its own feels very successful because I know how much work those students put in just to be able to have access to what's going on in their general ed classroom.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's really a beautiful thing.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bittersweet thing for for me sometimes.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: I know I have one student in particular who, when we started as a school, she was in first grade and she had a lot of support needs, and she was in a um a small reading group with me for all of first grade, and something clicked for her.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: She just started to really take off and she filled that gap, uh, that language um development gap very quickly.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: And while I haven't actually worked with her directly for all of this time, she's in fourth grade now.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: She still, I'll say, I think it's daily, daily finds herself knocking on our door and checking in and making sure that we're doing okay and letting us know when she takes a reading test, she wants to tell us how she did.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it really is just beautiful to see how connected these kids can become from that place of really just not understanding the basic foundations of what's being said in the classroom around them, to then being so proud of themselves and racing to our classroom to tell us about how great they're doing.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: It it's such a joy.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'll bet that's just uh you know, must make you feel really good and just to see, you know, some teachers uh you you don't really know until they walk out the door, maybe they come back.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: So to have them come running down to your classroom, that's really cool.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, students uh in a new country learning a new language, um, it's it's a big learning curve.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but when they get through that to the point that they have become, you know, truly bilingual, biliterate, uh, and exit the ML program, do very, very well in school academically.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and it's really heartening.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a compliment to yourself and the 87 multilingual teachers that we have, uh, as well as all of our teachers who use strategies to support multilingual students in their classes.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: We got we covered a lot of stuff.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I hope people enjoyed learning more about a very important program in our district and from a very successful educator.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now we get to end with the fun stuff.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: What was your favorite thing to do at recess?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I was uh one of those kids that kind of hopped around from thing to thing at recess.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: I had my time doing volume, what is it called?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: I I had my time doing tether ball.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Tetherball.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed playing out in the field, playing flyers up, getting muddy with the with the other kids out there.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but something that I actually found myself looking for at Willowcrest when I got there was box hockey.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: That was something that I really enjoyed as an elementary student was playing box hockey.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't know, do they have box hockey out on the East Coast?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know box hockey until I came here.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm originally from Pennsylvania.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's just a fun game and a safe way to do hockey because uh yeah, we had the kind where like people get black eyes and all that stuff.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't want that.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: But box hockey's great, and uh I don't think anybody's mentioned Flyers Up.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I know how much fun that is for kids.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Tetherball is a is a pretty popular one.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, it's a fun one.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I I still find myself if there's a ball, I'll I'll bring some kids over.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let's play some tether balls.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we want, and we want you to represent for the grown-ups.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: Michaela, thank you so much.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: You've been a great guest.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: All right, my guest has been Michaela Perringer, our ML specialist at Willowcrest Elementary.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'd like to thank Vicky Alonzo, our communications director, who does the work behind the scenes to uh make these episodes sound good and get on the air.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd like to thank all of you.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you know somebody who would just be interested in a little bit more information about the Auburn School District, maybe they switched majors and might want to think about being an ML teacher.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: We have a big need.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh share this episode because um we're just trying to get the word out, and we'd love your help in that process.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that'll be a wrap for today's episode.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back in two weeks with another episode.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.