Guest author Giselle Lundy-Ponce has been working in the field of PreK-12 education policy, research and advocacy for the last twenty-seven years. In 2004 she initiated the partnership with WETA’s Learning Media Department to develop Colorín Colorado.
In 2005, the AFT announced that it was launching Colorín Colorado, an online resource hub, to provide educators of English language learners (ELLs) with evidence-based resources, best practices, and information to help their students read and succeed. At the time of the launch, we recorded 400 visitors to the site, and we were pleased because we were reassured that we were meeting a need. Fast forward to today, we are thrilled beyond words that the initial 400 visitors have grown to over 3.5 million. When Colorín Colorado was launched, it was limited: We were almost exclusively a PK-3 website focused on literacy instruction, and the target audience was primarily educators and families of Spanish-speaking ELLs.
Now we offer resources that span the PK-12 range, and the content of the website is applicable to ELLs from all language backgrounds. While many of the website’s resources are still available in Spanish, and we refer to the website as bilingual, we have added family literacy tip sheets in sixteen languages. Every year, we have kept growing and expanding beyond the literacy scope and are now the main clearinghouse for what works for ELLs in content areas across all academic subjects, social-emotional development, how to address trauma in the classroom, and a whole host of other topics on ELL instruction and ELL well-being.
When we initiated the partnership with WETA, we knew that what we produced together was going to be immensely beneficial to the field. WETA, home of the PBS Newshour, had a reputation for superb educational programming for television and online, and the AFT’s commitment to providing outstanding programs and services to its educators made for a perfect pairing. So how did we begin this collaboration?
I arrived at the AFT in 2000 as a junior-level education policy staffer, fresh out of graduate school. I was a generalist, versed in a wide array of education policy topics. The AFT was one of the most progressive forces in education policy, and it was a dynamic, spirited time to work on issues such as academic standards, assessment and accountability, early childhood education, and teacher preparation. At the time, anything related to ELLs was mislabeled as “bilingual education,” which was, unfortunately, one area where the AFT did not have much credibility or expertise.
Prior to my arrival, any inquiry related to ELLs was delegated to anyone who had time to research it, but another staffer in the department kept a log of all such inquiries in hopes that a single staffer could someday be tasked with the issue. The inquiries soon filled a large, three-ring binder. Soon after joining the Educational Issues department, this colleague walked into my office, plopped this giant binder with hundreds of pages on my desk, and said “you’re bilingual, right? You should take a look at these.”
The binder was full of questions from across the country, revealing a landscape full of uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, and lack of knowledge about ELLs. Numerous union leaders, members, and others wrote via mailed letters, faxes, and emails, or left voicemail messages wanting to know any number of things: What did the research say about ELLs? Why were there so many immigrant families from Latin America settling in areas that few if any Spanish speakers, and could they enroll these students in other districts better suited to serve them? Should ELLs be placed in special education? Can teachers credentialed to teach Spanish as a foreign language teach ESL? How come students who had picked up English at lightning speed were still not passing the classroom or state tests? Should students who had limited English proficiency (that was the official way of describing these students) be placed in content classes that corresponded to their grade? Why are students not participating in class? What do I do with kids who have never been to school in their home country? And on, and on, and on.
I felt overwhelmed and underprepared. Yes, I was bilingual, and yes, I was an ELL when I entered kindergarten, but I did not have the formal knowledge or pedagogical expertise needed to answer most of these questions. In grad school I had sat in on a couple of lectures by the renowned ELL researcher Kenji Hakuta but had not actually taken a full course on anything specifically focused on ELLs. I was somewhat panicked, but the more I read through that binder full of educators waving SOS flags, the more I felt we had to do something. But what?
I started by returning calls to gather more information. Each call became pages and pages full of notes, and even more questions. I quickly realized I had to fast and furiously read up on the subject matter and get immediately acquainted with the lineup of experts and researchers who had made second language acquisition their life’s work. Experts and researchers such as Diane August, Kenji Hakuta, Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan, Fred Genesee, Claude Goldenberg, Guadalupe Valdés, and Aida Walqui, to name a few. At one particular American Educational Research Association conference, I practically stalked Diane August, attending all her presentations. She noticed me showing up early and often, and I built up enough courage to approach her and peppered her with so many questions that she invited me to dinner with another luminary in education research, the late William G. Demmert. To this day, Diane August remains one of my mentors and a dear friend.
Meanwhile, I still had to attend to other work in my policy portfolio, so my days grew longer and longer, and I still did not see how we could possibly address all these calls for help.
Two years after I inherited this giant tome of cries for help, I had learned a fair amount about the needs of educators of ELLs, but it still was not enough. I was falling short. Our members were not getting all the answers they needed. Then, in 2002, another AFT colleague, the late Darion Griffin, walked into my office to discuss ELLs. That conversation would change everything.
Darion Griffin was the AFT’s expert on literacy and reading instruction at the time, and she had been advising the signature reading website, Reading Rockets, which was also run by WETA. The staff of Reading Rockets had asked Darion to look at an offshoot project of Reading Rockets called Colorín Colorado to offer them some feedback. This offshoot literacy website was targeted at Spanish speaking families of young children. By then, I was establishing myself as the AFT’s point person on ELLs, so she asked me to look at this website and give her my opinion.
First, I loved the name—Colorín Colorado is part of the phrase in Spanish that is used as the ending to stories and fairy tales (“Y Colorín Colorado, este cuento se ha acabado.”) It is a familiar phrase throughout Latin America that gives you a warm feeling, one which takes you back to the joy of reading and being read to as a child. There is no literal translation, but it is most similar to “And they lived happily ever after.” So, the brilliant team behind Reading Rockets already had me at the name. Next, what I saw on screen was unlike anything I had seen before on informational websites for families about the importance of literacy. The information was engaging, clearly formatted, had beautiful illustrations decorating the website, and most importantly, it summarizedliteracy research in an easy, user-friendly style. It emphasized the importance of continuing to use students’ home language and encouraged families to continue reading at home, go to the library, and become more involved in their children’s education even if they did not speak Englishhttps://www.colorincolorado.org/es/aprender-leer. I told Darion this bilingual website was outstanding, and that I wanted to have a meeting with the team behind this website to learn more about it.
I wanted to learn more about it because I had an idea that I needed to explore with the remarkable producers of Reading Rockets and this new website. My idea, put simply, was to expand the reach of Colorín Colorado beyond families. What if we could add a whole new section, just for educators, that had information on what the research says works best for ELLs? What if we could feature videos of best practices in actual classrooms? Could we interview the most prominent experts in the field and veteran practitioners? And so on. The initial brainstorming grew to many more meetings, each more spirited than the last and filled with hope for what we could develop together. The producers of Reading Rockets were receptive to doing this, and to explore a formal partnership with us. It would not be easy or quick. It would require far more wherewithal, staff, and time to produce, as well as a lot of expertise to ensure that the content met the highest quality standards of WETA and the AFT.
Once we got the green light from both organizations to proceed with this collaboration, we started by reaching out to the highest profile researchers in the field to commission content and to start interviewing. As to the expertise needed to speak to best practices, I knew we needed an exemplary advisory board of veteran classroom educators, and so we went on to recruit members of the AFT’s ELL Educator Cadre. We asked several affiliate leaders to nominate their best, most seasoned educators of ELLs specializing in distinct areas. The group we got was akin to a legion of superheroes with various superpowers: it included a librarian, paraprofessionals, an expert in early childhood development and dual-language programs, a high school teacher working on her national board certification, local union advocates focused on social justice, an elementary bilingual education program teacher who centered her instruction on children’s literature, a linguist and college professor, and a veteran teacher of students with interrupted formal education. That combination of bringing together the best researchers and the best practitioners to develop the best content was the foundation of success for the reimagined Colorín Colorado.
Every year since then our partnership has been fruitful beyond what we originally conceived, and today we stand proud of everything we have produced. Along the way we have added other collaborators like the National Education Association, and twenty years later we have the widest reach and impact of any online resource targeted to educators and families of ELLs. For twenty years, we have worked hard to deliver the best availableevidence-based content to teachers, paraprofessionals, teacher preparation professors, librarians, counselors, administrators, and other educators, parents, and advocates. Many users of our content can barely contain their excitement when telling us what a difference it has made for them in their professional lives, ranging from how much it has helped them improve their instruction, to how their teacher preparation syllabus relies on our resources to train the next cohort of ESL teachers, to how they are using the resources to lead professional development sessions, etc.
We have indeed answered a whole host of questions, and fulfilled many wish lists for guides, resources, tips, expert interviews, practitioner insights, book and author recommendations, and videos, but we still have a long way to go. I can only hope that in these uncertain and turbulent times Colorín Colorado will have another twenty years to keepgrowing and producing and delivering trusted, engaging, quality content,and that it will continue to be abeacon for our hardworking educators and families of ELLs.
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