David Lai is the Director of English Language Learner Policy and Research at the Council of the Great City Schools, where he has worked since 2016. He leads and supports initiatives related to ELL policy, professional development, and program leadership across member districts. Before joining the Council, David taught middle school science and STEM in Prince George’s County Public Schools as a Teach for America Corps Member. During his teaching career, he advised award-winning STEM teams, contributed to ELL curriculum development, and earned multiple teaching honors, including “Teacher of the Year.” David holds a B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of Maryland and an M.S. in Education from Johns Hopkins University, and he is currently pursuing a doctorate in Education Policy at George Washington University.

Gabriela Uro is a nationally recognized leader in English learner education with over 25 years of experience advancing policy and practice for multilingual students across federal, state, and district levels. As former Director of English Learner Policy and Research at the Council of the Great City Schools (2007–2024), she led landmark national initiatives that elevated expectations and instructional quality for English learners, resulting in widely used frameworks for literacy and mathematics instruction. Her federal policy work at the U.S. Department of Education helped shape key ESEA reauthorizations. Currently, Gabriela serves as Program Director for English Learner and Migrant Education Services at WestEd, where she supports systems approaches to multilingual education. A multilingual herself, Gabriela holds a Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia University and a B.A. in Social Science from UC Irvine.

Natalia Alvarez Benjamin taught high school Ethnic Studies and Multilingual Learners in Rochester, Minnesota, where she currently works as the Director for Multilingual Learning. She is dually licensed in K-12 ESL and reading, and was named the 2021 Minnesota Teacher of the Year. She also holds a National Board Teaching Certification in English as New Language (Early Adolescence through Young Adulthood). Natalia is passionate about the liberation of marginalized students and focuses on advocacy for multilingual/multicultural education, identity work, Heritage Speakers, language justice, and student-centered humanizing pedagogies. She is committed to teacher development, has taught a course for educators on Race and Ethnic Studies in Heritage/Bilingual education at UW-Whitewater as a guest professor, and a course on Planning, Assessment, and Instruction for Multilingual Learners. She collaborates with other educators of the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition to organize ways to support educators in implementing and learning ethnic studies pedagogies in their classrooms. She shares many practical examples for teachers to enact these practices in the book she co-authored: Language of Identity, Language of Access: Liberatory Learning for Multilingual Classrooms (Corwin, 2024).