High Standards, High Impact
By Sarah Ottow
Jessica Lander is the kind of teacher you wish you had. She is warm, engaging and completely focused on students finding their own joy in learning. Plus, she learns from her students. Jessica embodies the concept of confianza--mutual respect and trust--between herself and her immigrant origin students.
What’s more is that Jessica gifts the rest of us publications documenting her work and research from the field. Her newest book Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education, is a capstone of learnings from the past, the present and the personal, informing everyone--not just educators--of what binds us together around belonging and striving for education.
I recently had the chance to catch up with Jessica to dive into her book. I’ve been struck not only by the book’s overarching messages of hope and justice but by the practical takeaways connected to our mission at Confianza. For example, in Chapter 5: Advocates, Jessica highlights a successful schooling model in Guilford School District, North Carolina, in particular the work of a team of educators led by EL Director, Mayra Hayes. When Jessica observed instruction in 2019, multilingual students were engaging with this complex sentence:
On an autumn night in 1607, a furtive group of men, women and children set off in a relay of small boats from the English village of Scrooby, in pursuit of the immigrant's oldest dream, a fresh start in another country.
One of the educators told Jessica that if she had visited the school three years earlier, she would have witnessed simplified text like:
Chimpanzees are eating bananas. Bananas are yellow.
Simply put, when we “water down” language, we water down expectations. Our students deserve access to rigorous, grade level text. At Confianza, we teach this in our coaching and courses as exemplified in our “makeover” process like these coaches discuss in this article. My coaching team and I also try to put educators in students’ shoes, as much as can be done from a monolingual perspective, by having them tackle new, complex text that they may not have a connection to, for example:
When you read this text above, you may wonder what the topic is. You may also feel panicked or vulnerable since you may not know what this text is about, especially if you cruise through life as a “proficient reader” or someone who doesn’t typically struggle with language, even in your first language of English. This kind of confronting of cognitive dissonance is what we want to help educators feel. Why? Empathy-building, as Jessica highlights, is a major part of the educational process and the overall human experience. (Hint: the text is about music.)
We know that language can be inclusive or exclusive, yet when it is complex, we don’t need to lower the expectations for what students can engage with. We can provide pathways into learning at grade level. We need to. We must. Our students deserve that. All students deserve this. What Jessica reminds us of is that we actually have higher impact with higher expectations. We don’t need to throw an entire book or even an entire paragraph at students. Less can be more when engaging with complex text.
In Jessica’s new book, she provides us with creative and inspiring current, powerful examples and stories of why high standards are necessary and how to do this work in a practical way, including one of our featured schools, The ENLACE Academy. We need more and more examples of what’s working, not more status quo lowering the bar for our students who have historically experienced the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
As Jessica shared with me, her classroom and her teaching has been transformed by all she learned from the classrooms and programs across the country that she profiled for Making Americans. This Calm Corner in her classroom holds a small herbaceous garden filled with herbs from around the world where students can come when they are feeling anxious, sad, or upset, the garden is modeled off one she saw and writes about in Making Americans at Houston’s Las Americas newcomer school.
Jessica teaches history and civics to recent immigrant and refugee students at Lowell High School in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her students come from more than thirty countries from across the world. (In the image at the beginning of this article, her students explore a map of the world in her classroom that shares where all her students come from.)
Check out the interview with Jessica about her new book below:
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[Sarah] Hello, I'm here with Jessica Lander the author of an exciting and important new book called "Making Americans: the Stories of Historic Struggles, "New Ideas and Inspiration in Immigrant Education." Hello to you, Jessica. Can you tell us about your new book?
[Jessica] Hi, Sarah. It is so lovely to be here this morning talking with you about my new book, and it is powerful too because I remember having conversations with you three years ago right when I was setting up to write this book. So you asked to tell you a little bit about this book. This book is inspired by the work I do right here in my classroom at Lowell High School. I am a teacher of recent immigrant and refugee students here in Lowell, Massachusetts. I teach students from about 30 different countries from Columbia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Cambodia. And I teach history and civics, and every day. I mean, I'm just so inspired.
I'm looking around my classroom right now, and I just, every day I'm inspired by my students. They are remarkable young people, and they do such powerful work both in our classroom and outside of our classroom in the community. And it was really working with them that inspired this book that three years ago in thinking about how our schools can be do better by our students and really help them thrive, it made me wanna seek out what others were doing across the country.
And so I actually, I took a year off from the classroom and traveled across the country sitting in the classrooms of others and learning from others. And setting out to write this book, I wanted there to be three types of stories because I think if we are serious about re-imagining immigrant education, there are three types of stories, three types of perspectives that we need to learn from.
And the first is the past. And so in "Making Americans," there are eight stories of transformative moments in the last 150 years of Supreme Court case, landmark federal laws, and movements that have transformed our schools today. I'm happy to dive a little bit into those. They're really, really powerful.
And then we also need to be learning from the present. We need to be learning about the innovative and creative ideas right now in the country. And so I spent a lot of time traveling across the country, sitting in those classrooms of others, and learning from just these remarkable educators and schools that are working with immigrant origin students today.
And then third, and this is really for me the heart of the book is we need to learn from the personal. We need to learn from our students. And for me, I profile and share the stories of seven of my own remarkable former students, all recent immigrant and refugee students who so generously shared their stories of coming to this country and then their experience of our schools so that we can learn from them. And so this book shares those three types of stories, stories of the past, stories of the present, and stories of the personal.
And they're all about people. They're all about advocates for immigrant education, about young people creating change in their community, about educators thinking innovatively, about supporting immigrant origin students today. And it's just been so powerful for me over the last three years as I have been learning these stories, sitting with others as they share their wisdom, their ideas, their stories with me. And then just so exciting in the last month as the book has come out in the midst of my teaching to be able to now share these stories with you and with communities across the country.
[Sarah] Wow, thank you for the overview, Jessica. You know, I've really been diving in, and I just need to spend even more time pulling back the layers of those three perspectives that you talked about. I love that framework of grounding ourselves in what has happened in immigrant education history, which not everyone knows. I think even teachers and educators in the English language education field and bilingual education field may not have had the opportunity to really study some of these restrictive policies and really systematized racism that you get into.
It couldn't be more relevant today, that piece and kind of connecting it, right, and kind of bringing that thread into the present. How are schools disrupting that? What are the present models that you're seeing, and then your personal piece of your students. So the audience is really broad, isn't it, for your book? Tell us who you'd like to read it and how people can use this book in their everyday work and in the field.
[Jessica] Yeah, my hope is that it is a book for everyone. So it really, my hope is that like these are stories of people and that anyone who picks it up whether you are deeply involved in education or whether you don't have any connections to schools directly that there is something in this book that you connect with. I think this is an important book for everyone to read, whether you're in education or not. It is the stories of so many of us.
So like when I started writing this book, thinking too about my own family's migration story. My great-grandfather came as a refugee from what is now Ukraine in 1906. And for the book I looked at his own story and his journey coming here. He came at the height of the Americanization movement where his language, his religion, his identities and cultures and history were not wanted in schools and how that shaped him, but also his growth, his success, his family journey and then how that shaped us is a part of that.
And so my hope is coming back to your question of who is this for? I want this to be a book for everyone. I want this to be a book that people are learning some of that powerful history, are being inspired by the innovative work happening across the classroom, and really connecting and being inspired by our young people who are changing our communities today in so many beautiful ways.
And then particularly for those working in schools, working in communities, particularly those working with immigrant origin families and students, I hope this book is inspiring with all the ideas in it. That there's so much we can learn from the teachers down in Georgia at a school for refugee girls or the all immigrant high school in Maryland or the five schools in Aurora, Colorado who are creating a community school network where schools are open from sunrise to sunset. There's just so much we can learn, so many ideas we can pull from it.
And actually to that point, the last chapter of my book lays out ideas of what's possible and lays out ideas drawn from these three strands of stories around policy and practices to get us going. Maybe a blueprint if you will of ideas of how we can transform our schools to nurture a strong sense of belonging for our students. But it's also a version 1.0 because my hope is that this book is really just a jumping off point cause we have so much to learn from so many people across the country, and I hope that that list of ideas and practices and policies is really just a first draft. And that people, educators, but also policy makers, also researchers, also nonprofits and businesses and community members are part of creating the second, third, fourth, fifth draft.
[Sarah] Beautiful, just the sense of belonging and connectedness that we all have with our origins, wherever kind of wave of immigration we were in or even indigenous folks, how we're all connected through that is so important and again, couldn't be more relevant for the mainstream right now. So thank you for your work.
One practical idea that I was really inspired by comes in the form of learning from what can happen when we amplify text not simplify it cause I know that's something that we focus on a lot at Confianza is not watering down language and content, but providing that high rigor for all students, particularly for our multilingual students, particularly for our newcomers, and really not kind of perpetuating that sort of soft bigotry of low expectations as they say, which you really get into in terms of the systemic, political pieces. But the glimmers of hope come in the form of these stories.
And one of the stories that I was inspired by was around using complex text, again and you give an example of like a before and after sentence and what can happen when we don't simplify the language but amplify the support. So I'd like to just read those sentences for our audience and have you kind of wrap it up here and say what can we take away from this great example.
So the sentence that you lifted from the reading in this one classroom at Ragsdale High in 2019 is this quote, "On an autumn night in 1607, a furtive group of men, women, and children set off in a relay of small boats from the English village of Scrooby in pursuit of the immigrant's oldest dream, a fresh start in another country."
And then you discuss how the students are kind of come to talking about like what does this mean and using their home languages and kind of constructing meaning amongst themselves with this high level text in English. Eavesdropping, the teacher's kind of listening in and students are kind of directing their learning which I love, and we totally promote.
But the EL Coordinator had told you that if you had visited three years before, you wouldn't have seen this level of text. You would've seen something like "Chimpanzees are eating bananas. Bananas are yellow." So the contrast between those two kinds of texts are stark. And I'd like for you to just discuss that a little bit in terms of what does that mean and what are the takeaways for educators in that piece.
[Jessica] Absolutely, Sarah. So that piece, that story comes from the just really inspiring work I saw in Gilford, North Carolina. And this is a a district of 126 schools at the center of which is the historic town of, historic city of Greensboro. And these schools, some of them are rural, some of them are suburban, some of them are urban. There's at least one school that is an all newcomer school. And then there are some schools that maybe have five EL students. And so such a range. And what I found powerful is that the district leader for EL students, Myra Hayes, and her team have been working to innovate and to think creatively about supporting their students for more than a decade. And they had a series of ideas and approaches, and they saw success in some and not in others. And they kept iterating and experimenting and exploring, but they weren't satisfied.
And so about three, four years ago actually now about five years ago, how time flies. Myra was at a conference, and she learned about a new approach to thinking about complex text and thinking about literacy instruction that was created by a bicoastal relationship between a professor in California and an educator in New York. And she was really excited, and so she brought this idea back to her district, and said I would like to try an experiment and think about if we can totally reimagine literacy instruction for our EL students across the district. And then she and her team set about doing that.
And what I found so powerful is all of the ways that they were there for their teachers and for their schools to make this happen. And so that was everything from running group-wide, professional development, ongoing professional development, small support groups. That meant if a teacher was struggling, she and her team would go into that particular classroom, drive to that school and co-teach or model a lesson. Or if another educator was struggling to find rich resources, they would go out and seek rich resources for them and help collaborate in gathering that material.
They would provide all these different types of supports. So much so that other educators not in the EL department started seeing the impact in students and started coming to them going, what are you doing? Can we learn from you? And within about three years they were seeing dramatic increases in test scores, in language and reading and writing and math and science.
And it was really, really powerful to see that in action, to watch how they had just completely re-envisioned their approach to literacy and teaching newcomers with these complex juicy sentences and watching students as little as kindergartners. I remember sitting in this kindergarten class and watching these kindergartners manipulate text and get excited about that. I was just, it blew my mind.
And I think it's such a powerful example of not being satisfied and wanting to do more and wanting to, knowing that we should have high expectations for all of our students, but that often traditionally there has been, as you were saying that simplifying of language and challenging that and going we can do better, and how do we do better across an entire district? What are the supports that we need? And it's ongoing, everyday supports.
It's the types of supports where the district team is in individual classrooms helping each teacher where they need it, meeting each school where they need it. And it's been remarkable to see, and I think it's just such a shining example of thinking about challenging those maybe expectations we had before and thinking about them differently. I think so often, unfortunately, schools can have a tendency to simplify language and to set lower expectations, and so I think Myra and her team in Gilford are just doing such powerful, beautiful work in challenging that and seeing success, but it takes the whole team working together to do that.
[Sarah] I love that. And that's really one of the takeaways for me, and I'm excited to share this story in our network and beyond because long gone are the days of remedial and sort of separate and siloed. We've gotta really think about the whole school through this systems change, through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And that's really where this hits home. So it's not just for your EL department. It's powerful there, and it's for the whole school.
And I love what you said about it's for everyone. So this is available, "Making Americans." We are really promoting it. Jessica's encouraging you to go to your local, independent bookstore, which is wonderful. It's also available on the big sites, so Amazon and Barnes & Noble for bulk orders. It's also available as an ebook and audiobook. It's called "Making Americans: "Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas and Inspiration "in Immigrant Education." Jessica, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your work today.
[Jessica] It is so wonderful to be here. Thank you, Sarah, and thank you for sharing your wisdom over so many years. It's just wonderful to be in collaboration with you and with other educators, and I'm just so excited to share this book with you, and I hope you find all these stories inspiring.
[Sarah] Thank you. The feeling is mutual. Thanks, Jessica.