All Kids Doing, All the Time

by Sally Barnes

Strategic Inclusion & Consistent Engagement To Increase Motivation

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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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!

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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.

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SLIFE Are Valuable Members of Our Learning Communities

by Dr. Carol Salva

In this blog post, I am going to reflect on how I changed my mindset about SLIFE, or Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education. But first, I need to recap a bit about the demographic SLIFE. I want to explain what is meant by the acronym and a bit more about these learners.

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Applying the Q in QSSSA for Mathematics

by Diane Kue

When I was young, I watched my uncle bend his neck to walk through the doorway only to then hit his head on my parents’ light fixture. I had never seen someone so tall in my life, and I asked, “Uncle Mike, how tall are you?” What wasn’t apparent to me then but is now is how annoying it was for him to be constantly asked about his height. He responded:

“I am 1 yard, 2 feet, and 20 inches.”

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Short Structured Role-Play

by Dr. Lora Beth Escalante

My son’s favorite page, and also his favorite voice to do (Mama Worm).

Have you read Diary of a Worm (Cronin, 2003)? I have enjoyed it, possibly a hundred times, with my kids. It’s one of our favorites. I have even eyed it across the couch and picked it up to thumb through by myself. Yep. I find it endearing and whimsical, imagining what life could be like as a worm. I have no legs, yet my best friend is a spider with eight of them! I was cozy underground but forced to abandon my home in haste when a torrential rain threatened to drown us. Seeing the nuances of how a worm uniquely performs everyday tasks, such as holding a pencil (with a tail), sleeping (with leaves as bedsheets), and dancing the hokey pokey creates a silly connection with my everyday tasks as a human. There are other books in this series and countless other titles written from unique perspectives. (I often choose my own books based on the perspective from which they are written, too. When narrators shift each chapter, I look forward to how each character reacts internally and externally to the events in a story.)

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Help Newcomers Tell Their Stories

by Elise White Diaz

It is March. Your class is settled and you are either gearing up for (or in the midst of) State Testing. You have been working with your multilingual students all year, and they are ready. Just as you breathe a sigh of relief and find your footing, the announcements come: a new student from out of the country is waiting in the office for you. Then another, and another. Now the question becomes, how do we integrate these newcomers into the class and curriculum when they are so far behind the language levels of their peers (who have been here all year)? The answer is so simple and intuitive it almost feels too easy: allow beginning language learners to express themselves through pictorial representation, then leverage co-created text to engage them in all four language domains.

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