Highest Aspirations

How are educators reaching English Learners and bilingual students in a border district during a pandemic, both in addressing immediate needs for support and in looking ahead at the impact of learning loss on the future of instruction? What techniques can educators use to identify different types of bilingual learners and evaluate the effectiveness of their program and instruction? How might we transform the subtractive model of schooling that is rooted in generations of an “English only” mentality to celebrate bilingualism and encourage students to take pride in their native dialect? We discuss these questions and much more with Dr. Carolina Lopez. Carolina Lopez is in her twentieth year in education and is a Bilingual and ESL Strategist at Weslaco ISD, located in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas .  Prior to serving as the Bilingual and ESL Strategist, she served as the Secondary English Language Arts & Reading Strategist.  She has a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies with a minor in Bilingual