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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The Versatility of Talking Chips
by Diane Kue
Step 3 of Seidlitz and Perryman’s (2021) 7 Steps to a Language-Rich, Interactive Classroom is all about randomizing and rotating student responses during whole-class instruction and group tasks to maintain engagement and accountability. Although I spend more time training other steps, the Step It Up! differentiation for Step 3 on page 40 is my favorite page to present to educators (Seidlitz & Perryman, 2021). In lieu of teachers randomizing and rotating which students speak, students self-regulate using Talking Chips. The purpose is to engage all participants within a group with the opportunity to express their thinking.
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Seidlitz Education 