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00:00:01
Maya Valencia Goodall
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Thanks for listening to our episode with Maya Valencia Goodall.
To keep up with or connect with Maya:
✨ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayagoodall/
✨ Website: https://www.corelearn.com/
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
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Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Maya Valencia Goodall and OLA
00:00:00
Speaker
So, Maya, I'm so excited to get to have this conversation with you. For content people, listeners who don't know you, can you say who you are and what you do? Yes.
00:00:12
Speaker
you. And I'm so excited to be here. My name is Maya Valencia Goodall, and I'm the co-founder of OLA, the online language and literacy academy at Core Learning. And what we do at Core Learning is we are a professional development house. We bring evidence-based literacy and language instruction to life, especially for multilingual learners, English language variety speakers, and students who have dyslexia.
00:00:38
Speaker
So my work lives at the intersection of research, equity, and practical tools that teachers can use tomorrow. I can't wait to dig in with you on this.
Impact of Core Learning's Professional Development
00:00:49
Speaker
And also funny, right before this call, i was having a conversation with a young woman who's running some LinkedIn ads for a couple of our clients. And she told me that she has a friend who is an educator who knows core learning and is a huge fan of it. And they use it in their classroom.
00:01:05
Speaker
Oh, I was so glad to hear that. They must have had some trainings then with some of our professional development consultants or facilitators. Yeah, via telephone. Her friend had wonderful things to say about it. So was just saying I was excited to get to have this conversation with you coming up next.
00:01:21
Speaker
There's so much I want to dig into with you. I want to talk about you as an
Personal Stories and Heritage
00:01:25
Speaker
educator. core learning and the work you're doing and you as an entrepreneur. First, I'd be really curious to know what first drew you as a person to literacy and language education initially?
00:01:38
Speaker
Well, I like the way that you frame that question. I often tell the story of hearing about how my grandmother was punished at school when she was a child, when she was caught speaking Spanish. And as a result, we did not grow up speaking our heritage language, which happens to be Spanish.
00:01:57
Speaker
And I did learn Spanish later in university. And with that, I was able to recapture and connect back with my heritage and my identity in new ways.
00:02:07
Speaker
And so I am also a daughter of teachers. My mother is a teacher. My godmother is a teacher. and so I have that teaching in my background, in my DNA, so to speak.
00:02:21
Speaker
And so I think it's just natural to bring this language learning and teaching and bring it together. at least it was for me. So just it's really important to tie the foundations of identity and learning, connecting that to reading.
00:02:36
Speaker
And so bringing that to the classrooms is something that I have become obsessed with but actually over my professional career. like that. It's cool to be obsessed with the work you're doing.
00:02:47
Speaker
Core learning's approach to literacy is really unique and deeply people-centered. From your LinkedIn posts, I see you posting about asset based model, but I hadn't been familiar with it until I came across you.
00:03:04
Speaker
So for someone outside the education space, how would you explain the asset based model to them?
Asset-based Model in Education
00:03:12
Speaker
Yes, it's really about thinking about a human being as whole and complete um when they show up in your classroom.
00:03:22
Speaker
You can really extend it to your life, but we'll keep it to the classroom. So thinking about someone who is... fully whole and complete as they are which isn't to say that they don't have new things to learn. Of course, we all do.
00:03:35
Speaker
But when you approach education from the point of view that the person who's in front of you brings cognitive background knowledge, lived experience, and that experience and who they are at that moment is full and complete, and we can build from there, then and that's really thinking about how we add new knowledge with a learner rather than filling a gap or a hole or a deficit.
00:04:03
Speaker
And I think oftentimes in education, we have thought in terms of deficits ah because we're trying to outline things that students do need to know. And there is a place where you are today and where, you know, we're trying to help you go.
00:04:17
Speaker
But when you build on it from a positive point of view, from a point of view that the students already have knowledge and we're going to use that knowledge to learn the new thing, not only does that feel good, it's actually backed by brain science. That's in fact how we learn is when we're...
00:04:35
Speaker
Gently, carefully and thoughtfully learning new things that connect with things that we already know. So that's really the asset orientation that we build on at CORE. What we want to really uplift in my line of work When we think about multilingual learners, oftentimes it has been seen through a deficit model, what they don't know.
00:04:57
Speaker
And in this case, maybe it's the English language or they don't have as much experience with it. And instead, when we flip that and we say, oh, they actually have a language, it means that they have infrastructure.
00:05:09
Speaker
They have an understanding of language. They have register. They know how to use language with different people. They have prosody in their language. They know cadence and what it should sound like. They have lot of fertile ground for us to be able to access and build upon and teach the new thing.
00:05:28
Speaker
Language learning is always about additions and never about subtractions. So really just bringing that to light.
00:05:38
Speaker
Thank you for that. um I don't know. what Honestly, as you're talking, I feel a little emotional about it because it's making me think um that someone's done a lot of therapy.
00:05:50
Speaker
like I can say that like feeling whole in and of yourself and not like you need to chase something or feel ah avoid or a lack through outside validation. That's certainly been like a journey of mine for sure.
00:06:03
Speaker
If I'm interpreting it correctly, it's this idea that the way we taught English for so long in the States and still really do in a lot places is this idea that if you don't have whole total fluency in English, that you lack something and you are not whole and you need that English to become whole.
00:06:25
Speaker
And that's, I can imagine the ways that consciously and unconsciously that like really detrimental just even outside of academia for students. And I think what you guys are doing is so cool.
00:06:37
Speaker
I'm going to pick up on what you're saying because yes, I think you've characterized it really well. And I often give the comparison of two students. So when you think about ah student who is in Brazil, in China, in France, and you think about them being five years old, just imagine that young person who putting on their backpack, getting ready for school, their parents are taking them to school.
00:07:03
Speaker
And if they know that they're going to learn English at school, it's usually with a sense of excitement, exuberance, motivation, enthusiasm.
00:07:14
Speaker
wow, you're learning something more. I'm sending you whole with the language that you know today. And you're also learning something more. And oftentimes in the United States, that same aged person, five years old, who is going to school to learn English hasn't been met with that same enthusiasm and that same exuberance And I think that we have this example from around the world of how we can think about someone as being whole and bringing all of their knowledge to us to learn something more rather than thinking of the deficits or what a student doesn't know and how we have to fill an empty void.
00:07:54
Speaker
Thank you. You're so articulate about this. It's incredible. and Obviously, you're thinking and doing it every day and you're all about language. Most of our listeners are, I'm putting air quotes on, content people. They are writers, strategists, marketers, sometimes educators. I know some teachers listen.
00:08:09
Speaker
And I think that they all think a lot about words. What do you wish that more people outside of education understood about reading and language development?
Brain's Language Learning Capabilities
00:08:21
Speaker
Yes, I wish that more people outside of education knew two things. One is that it's completely possible for the human brain at any age to learn more than one language at the same exact time.
00:08:36
Speaker
So we have evidence from babies as young as six months old that can discern two languages. They put an fMRI machine. They use that. They have different...
00:08:48
Speaker
subtle kind of movements, eye movements. Sometimes the babies have pacifiers and they show and indicate that they can discern two different languages as young as six months old.
00:09:01
Speaker
That means that our brains are wired for language. If we're learning language later, if the second language is introduced to us later as a sequential bilingual, we will have to have explicit instruction, but we're still all capable of learning two languages at the same time.
00:09:17
Speaker
That's number one. Number two, I wish people outside of education knew how extreme the situation is in terms of reading literacy and how many of our students don't get the opportunity to learn how to read at school.
00:09:37
Speaker
If we look at the recent NAEP scores, we know that 40% of fourth graders are now performing below the NAEP basic level. The highest percentage since 2002.
00:09:50
Speaker
This is extraordinarily alarming. It's something that we should all as parents, as fellow citizens, as fellow human beings, as just people who care, should be thinking about and wanting to make sure that we fix this. OK, those are some shocking stats.
00:10:11
Speaker
What can we do to
Importance of Teacher Training in Literacy
00:10:13
Speaker
help? How can we get students more literate? Well, I think first and foremost is making sure that teachers are trained on how to teach reading. So we know how to teach reading. It can be done.
00:10:23
Speaker
And unfortunately, in many of our universities, it is not part of the courses that pre-service teachers are required to take in terms of exactly how to teach reading.
00:10:35
Speaker
So I think that's first. And then second, there's ample opportunity for professional development while on the job, just as any student can learn how to read, any teacher can learn how to teach reading.
00:10:49
Speaker
And so we've got this and we just have to pay attention to making sure that everybody knows what to do and how to do it.
00:10:59
Speaker
You've said before that multilingual learners are not behind their navigating language acquisition with huge cognitive and cultural strength. How does that philosophy shape your work at CORE?
Asset Orientation in English Learning
00:11:13
Speaker
I think the conversation around the asset orientation is really key to our philosophy. So we begin at the place where we understand that the students bring cognitive assets. They bring their language.
00:11:25
Speaker
They bring infrastructure for language that can be tapped into right away and used to help learn the second language. So that's first and foremost.
00:11:36
Speaker
In regards to learning English, it has been positioned as an intervention activity. And i think with our conversation earlier, we understand that it is in fact not an intervention activity. It's a language learning activity. We are...
00:11:52
Speaker
teaching students a second language. Learning a second language takes time. It has to be taught. It has to be explicitly taught. And so what we do is we make sure that we build in capacities for teachers to understand how to scaffold this learning.
00:12:10
Speaker
So language learning is something that the brain is entirely wired for. We are all capable of learning language and we're all capable of learning multiple languages. And so we teach that to teachers.
00:12:23
Speaker
We teach how to scaffold the language, I should say English, so that the students can learn it and that our learners are completely capable of learning how to read, write, and speak in two languages at the same time.
00:12:40
Speaker
So it's really just about the approach. Thank you. I want to switch gears a little bit. I want to talk a bit about brand building and thought leadership, which I suppose is also very related to reading and writing.
00:12:53
Speaker
But your LinkedIn presence is really clear and grounded. You show up as a leader and an educator, but you're also bringing your perspective in a very human way. I know some leaders are, it can be uncomfortable to put yourself out there.
00:13:08
Speaker
And I'm curious about what your internal experience has been
LinkedIn Authenticity and Connections
00:13:13
Speaker
about posting on LinkedIn. Has anything surprised you?
00:13:18
Speaker
Well, honestly, I resisted it at first. I was nervous about posting on LinkedIn and sharing my experiences and my thoughts.
00:13:29
Speaker
I will say what has surprised me is the response from educators and leaders who are wanting to have real talk about literacy and about building something mission-driven.
00:13:44
Speaker
So it's fun to connect. I was nervous about the performative aspect of LinkedIn. And, you know, what I'm realizing is that there is a lot of real human connection.
00:13:58
Speaker
That's interesting. I think a lot of people feel that way. You seem to me like an academic and an educator at heart, but you've also built and scaled hugely popular businesses and a product.
Entrepreneurship Journey with Christy
00:14:12
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about what it was like moving into the entrepreneurial side of things? Maybe for anyone who doesn't know this part of your story, can you elucidate a little about the products you've built and sold?
00:14:24
Speaker
I'd love to just hear what that entrepreneurial side of the journey was like for you. It was easier, harder, more fun, more brutal than you expected. There's a lot of facets to it. Number one, I entered into the entrepreneurial journey with my best friend.
00:14:41
Speaker
So I think that's really important to the story. Her name is Christy Shelley. And we were both classroom teachers. And then we both entered into the publishing world. And that's where we met originally professionally.
00:14:55
Speaker
And creating a businesses, creating products, creating the entrepreneurial journey with someone for me was the most thrilling part because it is terrifying and it is really hard.
00:15:09
Speaker
And so having a constant companion on that journey and someone who is, you can divide and conquer the work, but also the ebb and flow of the ups and downs emotionally, it to be able to share that with someone is really important.
00:15:27
Speaker
In terms of me personally, i really love translating research into products. It's like my nexus. It's what I consider to be my calling. I love reading research.
00:15:38
Speaker
I love thinking about research. I love listening to scientists and hearing about their work and their findings and then thinking about how that translates into day-to-day strategies and things that we can do to improve our experience in the classroom.
00:15:57
Speaker
For me personally, I would extend that to our experience in life, but specifically for the businesses, thinking about how we improve our experience in the classroom. What you're saying, Maya, really resonates with me. And I think it's cool that you found that special, really specific and powerful niche.
00:16:17
Speaker
Right back to a question. So I'm always so interested in co-founder relationships. Whenever I talk to someone or guests come on, I love to ask about it. So Christy is the chief product officer.
00:16:31
Speaker
At core, what advice would you give to anyone thinking about starting a company with a friend? and Because sometimes you hear horror stories, like someone starts out with their best friend and like fell apart they don't even talk anymore.
00:16:44
Speaker
But you two seem to be so connected. What has helped you navigate that and stay really strong as co-founders, collaborators, and also friends?
00:16:54
Speaker
I think I'm going to channel my inner Christy and I'm going to start with the process. I'm the process person. I'm the big picture idea, touchy feely person.
00:17:05
Speaker
But so in order to take those big things, you create processes around them and What we did early on is we literally created T-charts.
00:17:18
Speaker
This is what Maya's going to do This is what Christy's going to do. And so we would know what our strengths were, where we have opportunities for growth, and we would help each other.
00:17:31
Speaker
And then we also basically just divided and conquered the work. and So that's key to knowing what you're good at and where your opportunities are and where the other person is good. And hopefully those are different and you can work on those things together. So that's in a practical way how we started.
00:17:52
Speaker
And then over time, of course, I learned things from her and she learns things from me. And we're both getting better. better at a lot of different things. So then we still come back to that T-chart and divide up the work because basically there's too much for any one person anyway.
00:18:10
Speaker
And then aside from that, we have a lot of trust within ourselves. We trust one another to mean what they say, do what they say they're going to do. And if there is a conflict, which I have to be honest is really rare,
00:18:27
Speaker
I think because we have so many processes, like Christy has developed for us. So if we come up to something, then we're very honest with our feelings. And sometimes that honesty is very vulnerable and we create safe spaces with each other to be able to talk things out.
00:18:46
Speaker
But that's super rare. And I think it's because we've just developed over time this way of working together.
00:18:56
Speaker
That's really, that makes sense. And it's really interesting. And I really admire the approach that you two have taken and seeing two women create a really positive, high impact tech product is also so, so cool.
00:19:12
Speaker
I want to talk a little bit about leading research and impact work. So
00:19:19
Speaker
Core is operating at scale. How do you all stay really connected to what's happening day to day in schools while also growing a national platform?
Staying Connected to Classroom Realities
00:19:30
Speaker
That's an excellent question because kind of pinpoints something that we have to be really intentional about.
00:19:37
Speaker
It is very easy to spin out in the orbit away from classrooms. And so we think about it a lot and make sure that we tether ourselves back to the classrooms.
00:19:50
Speaker
Knowing that, we create opportunities for ourselves to get into the classrooms. Sometimes we visit classrooms that are using be product that we've created.
00:20:02
Speaker
Sometimes we visit other classrooms just to see what people are doing. So there's opportunities to watch teachers, see students, and see where we might be able to help improve the student experience.
00:20:15
Speaker
And then we attend conferences where scientists are speaking, where teachers are speaking, where others in the education space are speaking. And then we also create opportunities for ourselves to have speaking opportunities where we share the data and what we're working on. So it's really important to our work to have that symbiotic relationship with what's actually happening in the field so that we stay in touch with the students that we're trying to serve.
00:20:46
Speaker
Is there anything that you've observed, perceived or learned recently, whether it was like data research or some of that on the ground connection with educators that is shifting or evolving your approach to anything you're working on right now?
00:21:01
Speaker
So I think that we're still thinking about and wondering how to get the message across that the more the students are engaged in conversations in the classroom, the better results in almost everything regarding ELA and even content one will get.
00:21:23
Speaker
So often we're trained as teachers to be the ones who are doing the talking and managing the learning. And learning is a bit more messy than that. It's louder than that.
00:21:35
Speaker
It's more, you know, should be more vibrant and, like you know, in student involved. And so creating these opportunities for speaking practice for the students.
00:21:48
Speaker
It still seems like something that teachers really want to do They intend to do it, but aren't quite sure exactly how or what it should look like. And so the invitation is to keep trying, to keep adding in more minutes where the students are the ones who are actually engaging in conversations with each other, intentional conversations on purpose.
00:22:11
Speaker
They're talking about the content area. Trust that will happen if you develop some scaffolds and create the atmosphere. The invitation is to keep trying to create more opportunities for students to engage in speaking practice in the classroom.
00:22:28
Speaker
Is that, can I ask if there's anything super tangible or practical? How would you advise the teacher to really want to work on that aspect of their teaching?
00:22:41
Speaker
There are a couple different things that a teacher could do. And i noticed that I did say in the last segment, speaking practice. So I am speaking about students who are multilingual learners, of course. In order to learn a language, you have to speak the language.
00:22:57
Speaker
So that's a basic core tenet. But speaking, having engagement with oracy is good for every single student in the classroom, including your monolingual students.
00:23:09
Speaker
The more experience someone has with language, with creating language, the easier it's going to be for them to engage with the text and also to write.
00:23:21
Speaker
So this opportunity for speaking out loud is really very important for all the students in the classroom. Number one. Number two, if you're not sure what they should be talking about, you can actually take a look at your curriculum and you can take what the objective of any lesson is and turn that into a conversation.
00:23:43
Speaker
So rather than the teacher talking about the lesson, thinking about how we can get the students to talk about the lesson, so to speak. One example that I often give is the example of a third grade math lesson, asking the students to describe the attributes of plane shapes, like a triangle, a square, ah circle.
00:24:05
Speaker
And so there's ways that you can have the students do the describing and talking about those plane shapes rather than answering a question ah to the teacher or having the teacher describe them.
00:24:19
Speaker
There are ways that we talk about in our online language and literacy academy and how to use language frames in particular to do that work and scaffold that talking.
00:24:30
Speaker
But even without really deeply understanding that, the intention to have the students do more talking will hopefully also generate initial ideas for the teacher.
00:24:43
Speaker
That's really interesting. And that makes a lot of sense. Looking ahead, what are you most excited about what you're building, either for core or for yourself as a leader in education?
Addressing Secondary Literacy Skills
00:24:54
Speaker
Well, right now we're working on our secondary literacy work. So we have the Online Language and Literacy Academy for secondary. There is the idea that perhaps students who are older don't need to think about ah word recognition skills. So for example, you know, how to do the grapheme phoneme connection.
00:25:17
Speaker
That means the sounds that I make. And the letters that I see on the page, how are they connected? Oftentimes we see that older students don't know how to decode or read the words.
00:25:28
Speaker
That's one aspect of it. Or maybe they need more listening comprehension work, like they really need to understand words better. And so knowing where they are and being able to pinpoint and target the need for an older student so that we can help get them reading is really important.
00:25:46
Speaker
There are those fourth graders who are below performing level on the NAEP scores. They grow up and then they go to middle school and high school and then they become adults.
00:25:58
Speaker
So unless we change that trajectory along the way, those children become adults who are not able to read. And that's something that we can fix.
00:26:09
Speaker
That'd be fun. All right. So i'm going to ask some quick rapid fire questions here. What is a book that you think every educator should read? I think every educator and every person should read The Wise Heart.
00:26:23
Speaker
It's a guide to the universal teaching of Buddhist psychology by Jack Kornfield. It is a book that teaches about ourselves and how to connect with our highest, best intentions.
00:26:39
Speaker
And I think everyone could benefit from that. I know I did. I love reading about book design. I will definitely check it out. It's funny that you've brought that one up because when you're talking about how there's and sometimes this perception that it may be the literacy field, there's like different factions who are like, think different things are the right way forward, but we essentially do know how to concretely teach book how to read.
00:27:07
Speaker
I actually was thinking about, you listen to Dan Harris's podcast, 10% Happier? Absolutely. I love that one. And there's one I listened to recently where Some Buddhist guy was on there and he was saying like, yeah, it's funny when you really get into Buddhism, there are actually a lot of fighting factions with different ideologies.
00:27:24
Speaker
And that's what I was thinking of when you mentioned that about educators. all right. Next question. What is one thing you believed about education early on that you have since changed your mind about? Oh, yeah. I mean, i was definitely indoctrinated with thinking that learning English was an intervention activity.
00:27:39
Speaker
I used to speak that way. And when Christy and I sold our company to Rosetta Stone and Lexia at the time, we were working with engineers, speech recognition engineers, who were building products for 32 languages.
00:27:56
Speaker
And one of them was English and the rest were other languages. The others were never referred to as intervention activities. Only one was referred to as an intervention activity, and that was English.
00:28:08
Speaker
And that's when it became crystal clear. And that's when I knew for sure that learning English is an additive activity and it's never an intervention. What is the best feedback you've ever gotten from a student, teacher, or educator?
00:28:27
Speaker
I think the best feedback I've ever gotten is really just that sort of bright-eyed, excited idea that i can see my students and all their assets and really look at them from a positive point of view. And just sometimes we need permission for things that we know are true. If you had a magic wand you could wave and you could change one thing about how we talk about literacy in America, what would it be?
00:28:58
Speaker
I would love to remove the deficit lens and just start asking what's possible. And I think Maya, thank you so much for joining this conversation.
Further Resources and Contact Information
00:29:09
Speaker
For folks who are super interested, they want to learn more about core or follow you in your work. Where should we send them? They can go to corelearning.com or follow me on LinkedIn.
00:29:22
Speaker
right, we'll put your LinkedIn and the website in the show notes. And is there anything that I didn't ask that you feel like you wish I had or any final thing you'd want to say? Just to restate that we know how to teach students how to read and it's completely possible for all of us to learn how to read, write, and speak in two languages.
00:29:42
Speaker
And the sky's the limit. All right, thank you, Maya.