Developing Language in Every Classroom
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 “Our Favorite Seidlitz Blog Posts of 2025”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 “Downtime Do-Nows: Easy-to-Implement Language Rich Strategies for Those In-Between Moments”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.
Continue reading “The Versatility of Talking Chips”
Seidlitz Education 