Teaching multi-lingual learners

CHP's founder Nandini Menon was a voracious reader as a child; today she's a proud "lifelong learner." Discover how her educational upbringing and Ed.D. studies have influenced her teaching philosophies, and why she believes in pedagogical tactics like Singapore Math.  

On this episode: 

• How Ms. Nan's mother reacted to her Ed.D. path
• The importance of leading students by example
• Identifying the needs of multilingual learners  
• Why Johns Hopkins? 
• Pedagogical tactics to support multilingual learners in language arts
• Why Singapore Math works for multilingual learners
• How Ms. Nan's upbringing influenced her teaching philosophies
• Why homework matters

Decoding Education is the podcast that brings together research, experience, and community voices to answer your burning questions about preschool through grade eight education. Brought to you by Cedar Hill Preparatory School in Somerset, New Jersey.

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Transcript

Tori Marchiony:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Decoding Education from Cedar Hill Preparatory School in Somerset, New Jersey, the podcast that brings together research, experience, and community voices to answer your burning questions about preschool through grade eight education. I'm Tori Marchiony, a content producer who is fascinated by all things education. I came up through a top ranking public school system where I earned an IB diploma before getting a bachelor's at a public university. 

Ahead, you'll hear a conversation between myself and Cedar Hill Prep’s brilliant founder, Nandini Menon, who is nearly finished earning her EDD in education. Specifically, mind, brain, and teaching from Johns Hopkins University. So I bring a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm while she brings the real expertise. 

Tori:

All right, so Ms. Nan, you are in the process of finishing an EDD. What made you want to go for this giant… What made you want to sign up for such a responsibility? Amidst all of the other myriad things you have going on?

Nandini Menon:

I'll be honest. You know, when I started doing my EDD, my mom, who's 91, who was at that time maybe 88, called me and said, “Are you going mad?” So in her definition, I have everything I should. Why am I going to do a PhD? And my point was, I have one life to live. I want to experience everything. 

And when I'm a learner, I'm an empathetic teacher. If I have chosen education as a vocation, I need to know how to learn, how to handle the anxiety of an assessment. When I do that, I can articulate that with my children. And when my school kids see me talk about my 50th draft to my Chapter Three, they don't see me as someone they can argue with. They say, if she's doing it, we can do it too. 

And since I'm humanizing what we call desired difficulty to build grit and resilience, it's believable to them, because they can see that I'm working as hard as they are. That's what children want. And I truly believe that if I am going to advocate or have a product for someone, that I need to know how best to deliver it. 

So when I was a textile designer, I believed to be a textile designer, I needed to be an engineer first. To know how to design these fabrics, with all the machinery that's available. Whether it's weaving, printing, etc. So it was natural for me to pursue engineering, knowing that I could create once I knew what was involved in it. So when I decided to start a school, it was with the same kind of strategic planning. 

I come into the space of multilingual learners learning in mainstream classrooms, and I coach debate. And when I coach debate, I actually make children use all their senses. Which means: they have to read, then they have to write based on what they comprehended from the reading, and then we engage in rich dialogue. And when I do all these activities, I'm able to see for myself what they understood, what they did not understand, and what they misunderstood. 

My sixth year of teaching debate, I noticed nuances in my multilingual learners that many of my monolingual teachers were not noticing. That's what got me to think about doing research, coming up with pedagogical practices that I could share with the other teachers so that we could come up with some instructional sequences. That's what I love doing. 

So what happened next is I became a voracious reader. A voracious reader of understanding how best to support learning. And as I started reading, I also realized from the biomedical and the medical aspect that, thanks to these fMRI machines, etc, we're understanding that a lot of education is not a behavioral response but more about how we are neurally wired, how our brain is neuroplastic, and that if we teach a certain way, and if we include certain aspects, then that child understands it so much better. 

And then I wanted to do a doctoral program that was immersed in classroom practices. So an EDD program is just that, whereby you can study, you can do interventions, then you can try it in classroom spaces along with your teaching cohort. And collectively, we learn from these experiences what works and what doesn't work with children. So that, sorry, is the long winded answer to this short question as to why did I pursue my EDD. And Johns Hopkins was the only university that, at least for me, for what I wanted to do, their program described everything that would make me better at what I was going to do at Cedar Hill Prep School. And that's why I'm at Hopkins.

Tori:

Wow. What are some of the things that you have learned that you have implemented at CHP and been surprised with the results?

Ms. Nan:

Let me take Language Arts for example. Let's assume in a class of 30, we have at least 50% of the students from diverse backgrounds, diverse cultures, and who are multilingual. They bring with them their own understanding of language, their own skill sets in terms of proficiency. So if some of the families predominantly speak their native language at home, then the English language is mostly for conversation. Which is, with the final intent of communicating. Well, it is not about academic English. 

Academic English is what you see in textbooks. They use big words. The goal of academic language is to use one vocabulary word to succinctly describe this amazing feeling or description of something. Whereas when you're talking for conversation, you might continue to add your hand gestures, your facial gestures that compensate for vocabulary. For a school starting from preschool and pre-K, we need to teach our children to listen, to observe, to emulate. They need better peers. 

So in that paradigm, the teacher's goal when they're very young is to teach the phonemes. How to form the sounds, the sound-speech correlation, then the phonemic awareness, the blending, how English is such a nuanced language. So when you explicitly teach phonemic awareness, spelling, sentence structure, the semantics, then the child is able to put the puzzle together, because you are actually teaching those in a very formulaic manner. And you need to teach it in a formulaic manner, because there are languages where the sound and the speech are directly correlated. And then there's English, where it's a very opaque language. 

Similarly, math. Math is an abstract subject. We use Singapore Math at Cedar Hill Prep School because there's enough research to show that the best way to teach that is visually. So can I say a story here?

Tori:

Please. 

Ms. Nan:

So Singapore Math is called Singapore Math because if you look at the history of it, when the educators in the Far East looked at all this math that was written in English, and so dense in language, they looked at it. And remember, in many old cultures they use the abacus or other ways to teach children numeracy. So based on that, they realize that when you teach math visually, the children understand this abstract phenomenon very well. Eventually, they put it in a form of a curriculum. And they also broke it down so the children could visually grow and understand numeracy. They could conceptually connect the words with the concept. You know, I look at a child in the eye and say, “Oh, this, they need us to break the instruction to X number of steps so that they can understand it very well.”

Tori:

When you narrow down your area of research, it sounds like it was rooted in your observations of students that were coming through CHP rather than necessarily reflecting on your own experiences in education. But I'm curious now that you have these understandings and sort of new frameworks that you're working from, has it recontextualized any of the ways that you learned?

Ms. Nan:

Actually, absolutely. We're all a sum total of our experiences. This is what we term prior knowledge in education. New knowledge is only made by contextualizing prior knowledge. So in my case, I had a very strong, early childhood education. My father was in the defense in India. And that meant traveling all over. I must say, people used to commend my parents about the way I spoke when I was as young as five. It was because I went to a very good preschool in the northeast of India, in a place called Guwahati. It was actually run, according to my mom, by American missionaries. The focus was on speech and sound correlation and it was all language based. 

So I now, in reflection, realize it was my foundation, my early childhood education, where those teachers focused on language, focused on all the aspects of cognitive development. And then, subsequently, my parents kept moving every three years due to being in the defense. And finally, I landed in a city in the south of India where I did my elementary and middle school. I cannot tell you how influential every experience was. 

But like I say, I had a very involved family. I have an older sibling and I have a lot of older cousins. Everyone was about having rich experiences. Everyone was a voracious reader. Everyone shared the books they read. We were big into culture. So we all knew how to sing, music, athletics, we participated in everything. One thing that we were, we were a very conversational family, which means there was a lot of knowledge imparted every minute. I never realized how important conversation and interaction was in building skill sets. And I would say that was very important. 

When I went to middle school, I was always a happy-go-lucky child, which meant I want things easily. I didn't care if I lost because the experience was most important for me. So I used to be a captain in a sports team, I did debate, I did public speaking, I took part in theater. But my teachers loved that spirit, and so they encouraged me. So while I thrived in my schooling until 10th, for my 11th and 12th I went to this highly competitive junior high school. For some people, it was really positive, and each one of us has positive and negative experiences.

For me, having been in a very nurturing environment where my spirit was always encouraged, this place was not necessarily all about women. In fact, every underlying microaggression made us feel less. And for someone who didn't know what it was to be put in a little box… I couldn't articulate why I didn't like it much. I couldn't articulate why I didn't thrive there. But now as an adult, I will say those two years, when you're really growing up, those are your adolescent years, prime years, you're also emotionally growing, you're trying to figure out who you are. Those are very critical years to get a nurturing environment. But I will say that, that taught me grit, that taught me resilience.

I then went to an all girls college, the best in Bangalore, and we were all girls with the same passion for life, and we fostered each other. To date, they’re dear friends of mine. And so to me, you learn from those experiences. And then now full circle to your next question. How did that influence the school that I created? 

I actually tabulated what helped me build my skill sets, and what were the subtractive influences. And then when I put curriculums together, it was based on my education, which was teachers taught us language grammar, teachers taught us spelling. Everything was broken down, so that we learned the art and craft of everything. If it was science, we did lab experiments. We did homework. Now, one thing that I would love for us to segue to is homework.

I am shocked at how people, there's a lot of misunderstanding about homework. I am who I am today because homework helped me build my skill sets. And for me, that's all I see homework as. In order to remember what I learned yesterday, and put it in context for what I'm going to learn today and tomorrow, I needed that homework to just read again, “oh, she's going to build on or she or he is going to build on what I learned yesterday.” So it's all about practice. And then another aspect I'd like to talk about is assessment. 

Assessment is just a check, a check to see did I get it? Did I not get it? If I didn't get it, I need help in that. So as a school, we have used homework, assessment and cumulative assessment. There are enough research articles to say that the human brain has a huge capacity to store material. But the human brain also can only store material if it's constantly revisiting the material. So if you read something today and you don't read it for another five days, you're not going to remember it. But if you read today, and then it's connected with something else tomorrow, and then there are some activities the third day and the fourth day, that human brain becomes the storehouse of so much information that you become that expert. You are already on that way to success.

Tori:

Thank you so much, Ms. Nan, and thank you audience for listening. Be sure to tune in next time. If you're considering private education for your child, your next step is finding the school that's the best fit for their specific needs. And the best way to do that is to get on campus for a tour. Cedar Hill Prep is currently enrolling for the 23-24 academic school year, so be sure to check out the link in our description to sign up for an open house or call 732-356-5400 to book a private campus tour with CHP’s admissions director Donna. We can't wait to meet you. Until next time, this has been Decoding Education from Cedar Hill Prep School. Thanks for listening.