The Vocabulary Hack That Changes Everything: Why Morpheme Instruction Works

by Michelle Yzquierdo

Picture this: Your tenth grade student is reading her biology textbook. She’s navigating dense paragraphs about cellular processes when she hits the word “photosynthesis” and stops cold. “I don’t know this word,” she mutters, and skips ahead. You’ve seen this pattern many times: students shutting down the moment they encounter unfamiliar academic vocabulary.

So what do you do? Spend the necessary instructional time pre-teaching all the academic vocabulary words? Have students dutifully copy definitions? Maybe even make flashcards? Furthermore, you have 150 students across five classes, reading anywhere from third-grade to college level, and the gaps in academic language and vocabulary are as diverse as your students. How do you differentiate vocabulary instruction for that range?

Continue reading →

Our Favorite Seidlitz Blog Posts of 2025

by Sarah Welch and Mark Cotham

The season of reflection and renewal is upon us! This new year, we’re looking back at some of our most-read posts of all time. We’re pleased to see that some of our oldest posts are still valuable to educators.

Continue reading →

All Kids Doing, All the Time

by Sally Barnes

This year, there’s a new rule in classrooms across the United States: Many state legislatures or local districts have banned cellphones and related devices in schools. With this change comes so many benefits, but also a few challenges. What do we do with students who were compliant (quiet, nondisruptive) because of their phones, but now don’t have their device at their disposal? What does this mean for classroom behavior, free time, peer-to-peer socialization, and expectations for bell-to-bell work? The truth is, I don’t want my kids to be compliant. I want them to be engaged in our class. So, how do we move kids from compliant to engaged? What does that mean day-to-day?

Continue reading →

Beyond the 7 Steps: Discovering a Trauma-Informed Approach for Multilingual Learners

by Elise White Diaz

For years, the 7 Steps framework had been my Bible—my gospel for teaching language to some of the most challenging students: timid newcomers and discouraged multilingual learners struggling with disabilities.

But one day, I was sitting beside a newcomer of 2.5 years who refused to participate. She was well past the silent period, so expecting her to verbalize “repeat, please,” didn’t seem unreasonable. We were on Step 1: What to Say Instead of I Don’t Know. I had broken down each phrase and ensured understanding, and now it was her turn to repeat after me. She opened her mouth, paused, and simply said, “No.”

The finality in that single syllable said everything. Her eyes narrowed in defiance. I knew there was nothing I could do to coax her into speaking. My mind jumped back to other students who refused to speak (although they most certainly could), and to students who resisted walking into a classroom.

Something deeper was happening with these students—something I couldn’t reach with strategies alone. The crisis team, the administrators, even the parents were at a loss. The special education department called it culture shock, but decades of experience told me that wasn’t the whole story.

Continue reading →

Bridging Worlds: Supporting Maasai Teachers in Tanzania with the 7 Steps

by Marie Heath

Just outside the Linjani tribal village, about three hours from Arusha, Tanzania, down a long stretch of dusty, rutted roads, sits Promise Village Academy.

Inside its classrooms, the air doesn’t buzz with projectors or the tapping of laptop keys. Instead, it echoes with the sound of chalk on crumbling plaster, voices reciting lessons in unison, and the soft scratching of worn pencils against well-used composition notebooks. Add to that the high-pitched screech of metal chairs dragging across concrete floors from an automatic response each time an adult entered the room as every student stood tall and greeted in chorus, “Welcome, teacher.”

In this remote region, where the Maasai children live and learn, I found a classroom unlike any I’ve seen before, primitive in resources, yet rich in potential.

When I first visited in February 2024, I came to offer something I had spent years delivering in schools across the United States: the formative training based on the 7 Steps to a Language-Rich, Interactive Classroom book. But what I didn’t realize was how much I would learn in return.

Continue reading →

Education Is Still the Answer

by Dr. Carol Salva

Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.

– Nelson Mandela

Without a doubt, the 2025-2026 school year brings great challenges for some of our most vulnerable students and their families. Current US government policies put some immigrant students and families at a greater risk than they have faced in years past. Many educators, like me, are worried and have significant concerns such as deportation, a fracturing of our students’ home lives, fewer support services, and significant interruptions to our students’ education.

As educators, we can feel overwhelmed by this reality. This post offers support to the teachers who support these immigrant learners.

Continue reading →

Downtime Do-Nows: Easy-to-Implement Language Rich Strategies for Those In-Between Moments

by Dr. Lora Beth Escalante

What do students do right away when they walk into class? Are there a few minutes when they sit idly while you take attendance or get papers and materials organized from the last class? Maybe the lesson ended early, and you find your class with a glorious 5-10 minutes of “free time.” Maybe you read your audience half-way through a lesson and realize you’ve lost them due to too much sitting. How can we utilize these in-between moments to provide students with low-stress opportunities for meaningful language practice?

Continue reading →

Utilizing Objectives During the Lesson

by Allison Hand

When I first started teaching, one of the requirements at my campus was writing and posting content and language objectives. I am a rule follower, so I posted objectives daily on my board…in the back of the room. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, and the only person who looked at them or talked to me about them was my administrator. They stayed in the back of the room for far too long, and not one student looked at them.

Continue reading →

Scaffolding for Success: Sentence Stems That Prompt Thinking

by Marcy Voss

Ask educators what are two things they lack, and in unison, they will say, “Time and money!” So, I am sure you will agree that any strategy that helps us “work smarter and not harder” is worth checking out. The good news is that there are some strategies for working with multilingual learners that save teachers time by helping them simultaneously accomplish multiple purposes, and they have great benefits for all students as well!

Continue reading →

Learning to Read as a Secondary ML: How ’bout Them Phonics?

by Natalia Heckman

It happened about 17 years ago. I took home some decoding cards to prepare a lesson for ESOLI class. One of the pictures showed a watermelon with the letter S at the bottom. And there I was, staring at a watermelon like a deer in the headlights, trying to figure out the connection between the watermelon and the sound the letter S makes. The best I could come up with was S is for sweet and S for slice.”

My 10-year-old daughter (a native English speaker) ran up to me, looked at the picture, and said, “Mom, S is for seed!” She pointed at the picture and added, “This is called a seed!” Of course, I knew the word seed, but that word would never naturally occur to me, and I doubted any of my newcomers knew that word. They probably knew student, sleep, and Sonic, but …seed? Truth be told, I wondered if any of my students would find those cards truly helpful. I knew from personal experience as a language learner and a language teacher that learning to read as a secondary ML was different from learning to read as a native speaker of English or an elementary student.

Continue reading →