Ep238. ft. Laura Morales - Beyond Native Fluency: What Great Bilingual Teaching Actually Requires (Part 2)

Speaking a language does not automatically qualify someone to teach it and holding a teaching certificate does not automatically guarantee that someone understands how children learn. Part 2 with Laura Morales goes much deeper. We move from the architecture of the reading brain into the systems surrounding it: bilingual teacher preparation, native-speaker assumptions, literacy knowledge, classroom management, student autonomy, professional training, teacher reflection, and educational responsibility . Laura explains why educators do not necessarily need to speak every student's home language but they do need enough linguistic knowledge to recognize when a reading difficulty comes from language transfer and when something deeper may be happening. We confront one of language education's most persistent misconceptions: Native fluency is not the same thing as literacy expertise—and neither automatically equals pedagogical competence. From there, the conversation expands into teacher training itself. Why do educators attend countless workshops yet still feel unprepared for the complexity of real classrooms? Why can disconnected professional development create cognitive overload inste...