Over the Bridge: Using Phone Calls to Connect Students’ Worlds 

Welcome to our series of Friday Teacher Scenes where Ethical ELA features teachers’ stories from their classrooms and experiences to contribute to and shape the public narrative of what it means to be an English language arts teacher in today’s sociopolitical climate. We hope to center and uplift one another by featuring the professional, informed, intentional work that drives and makes possible inclusive-affirming critical language arts learning spaces. We welcome your stories in the comments or contact Sarah if you’d like to contribute a blog post.

Over the Bridge: Using Phone Calls to Connect Students’ Worlds 

by Brenda Moreno

Early this summer, I visited the Chicago Botanic Garden. As I made my way from one garden to the next, I came across a sign that reminded guests that bridges symbolically link one world to another. This made me consider the tools teachers might use as bridges to link their students’ world at school to that at home. As an immigrant child who spent her entire life in the American educational system, I remember how difficult it was for my teachers to communicate with my mother. In Mexico, my mother began a college education, so I don’t want it to seem as though she was completely unaware of the world of education; the American system was simply a different world for her, and that was largely due to language. I remember having to translate conversations (good and bad) between my teachers and my mother, or official letters sent home from school.   

If You’d Like to Make a Call: In the fall of 2021, I worked as a part-time Dean of Students in addition to teaching three periods during the day. This was the year we all came back from the Hybrid—at my school, we went from having roughly 300 students a day in the building (most opted to stay home and join via Zoom), to having close to 3,000. It was hard and to be honest, I became very pessimistic due to wanting to ‘fix’ issues without having the right tools to do the job. My therapist helped me realize that I’d be upset for a long time if I focused on ‘fixing’ issues that were beyond my control. Instead, he recommended, I could focus on offering support to others. “Offer them,” he told me, “the kind of support you would have wanted. But be sure to have the tools to help.” 

A couple of years earlier, I managed to get a release from supervision. Instead of having a study hall or monitoring the hallways, I asked to be allowed to make Spanish phone calls for my department, which is made up of roughly 30 people, and I am one of very few people in the department who can speak conversational Spanish fluently. Many of our students’ folks at home are Spanish-speaking. My department chair helped me create a Google spreadsheet where everyone in the department entered information about a student or students whose folks at home they wanted me to contact. In one semester, I was able to make close to 170 calls.

 

Please Hang Up and Try Again: I possess a strong command of the Spanish language, and this was the tool I’d use to support teachers in my building. I updated a Google Form that a previous Dean of Students created to have support staff contact folks at home. 

This form went out to every department during semester 2 of the school year. Teachers could write what they wanted me to share with the student’s folks at home. After I made the call, I was able to provide the teacher with notes as to what happened in the conversation via the “feedback” feature on the Google form. That second semester I was able to make 150 calls—fewer than the previous year, but connecting worlds, nonetheless. 

When the 2022-23 school year began, and I was no longer in the Dean’s position, I asked my administration to provide me with a supervision release again so that I could continue to provide this support to my colleagues. Thankfully, I met another teacher in the building who helped me in this endeavor. We split the responsibility (I took some departments, she took others. We had two different Google Forms so that we would stay organized) and were able to make about 500 phone calls throughout the school year. 

Making these calls helped me understand that oftentimes there is a disconnect between what folks at home understand the American educational system to be, and what educators’ expectations for students are. For instance, regularly when I’d call to explain that a student had skipped out on a class, a parent/guardian had trouble understanding how this could be since they dropped off the student at school. I’d have to explain the concept of class periods and changing classes after 50 minutes, and how a student could go to one class but not another. Other times, I’d have to explain the difference between English (ELA) class and EL (English Learner). At times, folks were confused about why their student was in an EL class when they could actually speak English. There is miscommunication happening or a lack of information being provided to Spanish-speaking households. While I initially focused on bridging worlds between the English classroom and folks at home, I realize that there are a lot more bridges that need to be built in order to effectively link these two worlds. A teacher phone call, however, is a great start. Many times that phone call I’d make to tell an adult about a missing paper their student forgot to submit was the impetus to offering a service that family needed, and linking them to a social worker, for example.   

The Helpdesk: This was a very grassroots approach, and depends on a teacher’s willingness to help her colleagues. Sometimes a phone call can last 5 minutes, sometimes it can take up to an entire class period. At the end of the school year, I shared a spreadsheet of the second semester Google Form with administration in hopes that they would take the summer to look over data and notice trends so that they can better support teachers, students, and folks at home. Perhaps in this way, they can begin to build additional bridges linking these two particular worlds in a student’s life. 

But I’m wondering as a new school year begins, what I can do to create links between the two worlds a student navigates on a daily basis, and not just when a phone call home (positive or otherwise) is needed. I can translate my syllabus, parent surveys, and even emails. Full disclosure here: I often turn to Google Translate when I can’t seem to find the words, and utilize the resources available to me (other teachers, family, friends, anyone willing to help). And when I stumble on my words, I simply acknowledge that I am doing my best to walk this bridge that I am still building.