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Integrated & Designated ELD - YouTube Video

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Integrated & Designated ELD - YouTube Video

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Illustrates Integrated ELD and small group Designated ELD building upon thematic “Products and Services” social studies content in an English-taught 2nd grade classroom

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Designated ELD with Collaborative Practice: 2nd grade

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Essential components / top priorities for reconnecting to the SEAL classroom. Be sure to download first.

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Beginning of Year Activities Resources/Ideas with links

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Beginning of Year Activities Resources/Ideas with links

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These are resources you can use starting day one to welcome and affirm your staff and support them in reconnecting with SEAL.

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For Admin/Principal Welcome Back Staff Tools

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Principals and Site Administrators School Start Up

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Beginning of the Year Staff Retreat/ Meeting Slides 

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Beginning of the Year Staff Retreat/ Meeting Slides 

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Strategy write-up outlining the steps for an OLA

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Oral Language Analysis for Designated ELD

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Welcoming and Affirming Communities Website

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Welcoming and Affirming Communities Website

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After what we know has been an incredibly challenging year for students, families and educators, the time has finally arrived! SEAL is excited to offer this Welcoming & Affirming Community (WAC) Toolkit as you begin to welcome students back to in-person learning.

All research and policy guidelines for returning to school emphasize the importance of prioritizing the nurturing of students' and educators' social emotional well-being to support academic progress . It is always important to enter a new school year with a focus and commitment to attending to relationships, first and foremost. Feeling seen, developing a sense of belonging, and connecting with each other are all essential elements of a vibrant learning environment, this year more so than ever. To that end, we have revisited our previously shared "Return To School Virtual Toolkits" with the goal of centering relationships and providing engaging and relevant content, while continuing to centralize the needs of Multilingual learners.

We recognize the thought and care you have already invested into the start of this school year, and we are so very glad to support your site with purposeful, rich and meaningful units, resources, and guides. We have similarly worked to provide you with timely, useful, and relevant materials, meant primarily for in-person instruction, although we have included some virtual considerations. In particular, the strategies provided within the units support and scaffold the learning of English Learners, as it is clear that despite best efforts, equity gaps exist in distance learning practices. As always, we encourage you to adapt the units and resources to your needs and contexts.

It's important to underscore that these Toolkits (and instructional units) are meant to set the tone for welcoming, affirming and inclusive schools and classrooms, where students' socio-emotional needs are prioritized and their unique identities are valued and respected. The units are based on the Learning for Justice Standards, the History/Social Science Standards & Frameworks, the ELA/ELD Standards & Frameworks, the Health & Education Standards, as well as the ISTE (Tech) Standards. In addition, this work is aimed toward achieving the SEAL Mission: To prepare all English Learners in California to learn, thrive and lead.

The WAC Toolkit is organized in three major categories:

Within SEL and Family Partnerships , you will find resources, readings, student activities, and staff activities designed to meet the needs of your students, their families, and your staff as we return to school after this unprecedented year. Continuing to build on the partnerships that were established with families last year will deeply support the student's ability to learn and thrive. The WAC Units are the heart and soul of our Toolkit and are meant to launch the new year with compassion, thoughtfulness, and a focus on our collective community.

The Toolkit is organized by theme rather than role (i.e., Coach, Administrator, Teacher), because we hope that all will explore and find useful each area. As usual, our units are English Learner centered through the integration of language development in and through all learning activities and content.

The is the full set of paper items for the WAC Units that should be printed to support teachers with implementation.

The SEL Staff Meeting is a fully prepped, ready-to-go staff meeting session, focused on SEL, for you to lead.

Please remember that your teachers will need sufficient time to review the material and prepare to implement the WAC Units.

We recommend that at least one day be dedicated as a Unit Development Day so that teachers, coaches, and principals are well-informed and prepared to teach for the first month of school.

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After what we know has been an incredibly challenging year for students, families and educators, the time has finally arrived! SEAL is excited to offer this Welcoming & Affirming Community (WAC) Toolkit as you begin to welcome students back to in-person learning.

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Coach Support for Planning Unit Preparation Day

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Coach Support for Planning Unit Preparation Day

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Coach resources to deliver Welcoming & Affirming Unit Preparation session with staff.

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Coaches - Welcoming and Affirming Community

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Graphic Organizers with Sentence Frames (TK-3)

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Graphic Organizers with Sentence Frames (TK-3)

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TK - 3rd Graphic Oganizers with Sentence Frames

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Graphic Organizers with Sentence Frames (4-6)

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Graphic Organizers with Sentence Frames (4-6)

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4th - 6th Graphic Organizers with Sentence Frames

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PPT-- Multilingual Environments & Language Diversity 

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PPT-- Multilingual Environments & Language Diversity 

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Use this focused mini session to have a staff discussion/meeting on how to increase language presence in classroom

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SEAL_Multiligual Environment & Language Diversity (1)

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This presentation will engage your staff in exploring ideas for how to incorporate home language in and out of the classroom.

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Whole School Multilingualism - Taking Stock.docx

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Five Major Components for Affirming and Elevating Home Language

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Five Major Components for Affirming and Elevating Home Language

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New Evidence from Elementary Math Classrooms

school systems Must decide how to help students catch up from covid-19. New evidence suggests learning acceleration is the right approach.

Research suggests more students have experienced more unfinished learning over the last year than ever before. With the COVID-19 pandemic waning, school systems are facing a critical choice about how to respond. Should they use the traditional approach of reviewing all the content students missed, known as remediation? Or should they start with the current grade's content and provide "just-in-time" supports when necessary, known as learning acceleration?

New data from Zearn, a nonprofit organization whose online math platform is used by one in four elementary students nationwide, provides one of the first direct comparisons of these two approaches-and compelling new evidence that school systems should make learning acceleration the foundation of their academic strategies next year and beyond.

Findings include:

Students who experienced learning acceleration struggled less and learned more than students who started at the same level but experienced remediation instead.

Students of color and those from low-income backgrounds were more likely than their white, wealthier peers to experience remediation-even when they had already demonstrated success on grade-level content.

Learning acceleration was particularly effective for students of color and those from low-income families.

This is strong evidence that learning acceleration works, and that it could be key to unwinding generations-old academic inequities the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated. System leaders have an important opportunity in the months ahead to start providing teachers with the resources and support they need-and to start building the skill and belief that's necessary-to help every student engage in grade-level work right away.

To learn more about how to accelerate learning in your school system, download our Learning Acceleration Guide.

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Bring TNTP to your school system

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New Evidence from Elementary Math Classrooms Research suggests more students have experienced more unfinished learning over the last year than ever before. With the COVID-19 pandemic waning, school systems are facing a critical choice about how to respond. Should they use the traditional approach of reviewing all the content students missed, known as remediation?

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A Better Equation: New Pandemic Data Supports Acceleration Rather than Remediation to Make Up for COVID Learning Loss

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A Better Equation: New Pandemic Data Supports Acceleration Rather than Remediation to Make Up for COVID Learning Loss

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Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for The 74's daily newsletter.
As educators plan how they will address lost student learning during the next school year, they should forgo the traditional remedy of remediation in favor of a strategy known as acceleration, a new report recommends. The analysis was performed by TNTP, formerly known as The New Teacher Project, and the nonprofit Zearn, whose online math platform is used by one in four elementary students nationwide.

If they are coached on missing skills required, students complete 27 percent more grade-level work than if teachers try to back up and fit in unfinished material from prior years, the researchers found. Yet the children who are likely to return to school in the fall with the biggest learning losses are twice as likely in many instances to get ineffectual remediation.

The researchers hope states and school districts will consider the new data as they decide how to spend their American Rescue Plan dollars, which come with a congressional mandate to use a portion of the money to address academic gaps, both for summer programs and for the 2021-22 academic year.

Teachers are trained that remediation, the practice of focusing on missing, below-grade-level material - covering all lessons in second grade before moving on to third, for example - is the chief method for helping students who are behind catch up. But past research by TNTP and others shows it's not effective.

Teaching grade-level material, while stopping to supply missing, underlying skills as they become necessary - acceleration - is a strategy some researchers have found promising. TNTP and Zearn say the new data is the most concrete yet to support this notion.

"It's a counterintuitive difference," says Shalinee Sharma, Zearn CEO and co-founder. "The simple idea [behind] remediation would be that if a child is struggling, you go back all the way to where everything is easy again and you bring them back gradually.

"Acceleration says, 'Nope, the human brain is plastic,'" she continues. "You start with something really specific, like how do you add fractions. You drop down and teach that skill and then pop right back up."

Because it is an app, Zearn's math platform automatically gathers data every time a student opens it. Because of this, it has drawn the attention of researchers at a number of organizations. The new report analyzed information gleaned from 2 million students in 100,000 classrooms during the current academic year. It's possible to tell who, in socio-economic terms, the students in any given classroom are and whether they are working on grade-level materials or covering ground lost last year.

The same two-way flow of precise information, complete with demographic data, compelled the economists leading Harvard University's Opportunity Insights team to incorporate Zearn into their interactive pandemic tracker. At the same time, the platform's effectiveness has spurred education leaders in Louisiana, Delaware and other places to create incentives for schools to incorporate it in their plans to address learning losses.

Zearn and TNTP found that pupils in classrooms where acceleration was used for addressing early pandemic learning losses not only completed more grade-level lessons than their peers, they mostly regained their pre-pandemic success.

By contrast, students in classrooms where remediation took place struggled to complete lessons 10 times as often. And children of color and those in high-poverty schools were often twice as likely to be in classrooms where remediation was the primary strategy for closing academic gaps.

"This is in some ways a field-flipping idea," says TNTP Vice President Bailey Cato Czupryk. "It feels counterintuitive because we are saying to teachers, 'The thing we taught you to do isn't working.'"

When students give an incorrect answer or otherwise show they don't understand a concept, the Zearn app - without signaling to the students that they are failing - supplies another example or equation, or suggests an alternative means of solving a math problem. If this cycle repeats more than a couple of times, the app sends a "struggle alert" to the teacher, who then has the right information to provide what academic diagnostic experts sometimes refer to as "just-in-time" intervention.

The new research found that even when students of color and those from low-income backgrounds had been successful with grade-level academic content, they were more likely than their white, wealthier peers to experience remediation. In schools with mostly students of color, nearly one in six students were remediated, whether or not they previously had met grade-level standards. At the same time, acceleration was particularly effective for these disadvantaged students.

The new report bolsters existing TNTP research. In 2018, the nonprofit released The Opportunity Myth, a report on the experiences of 4,000 students in five public school systems that found they spent hundreds of hours each year doing work that wasn't challenging enough for their grade level. The lower their exposure to lessons geared for their grade, the less likely the students were to master the academic material that was being presented, TNTP found.

The Zearn data, the new report notes, "reaffirms our finding from The Opportunity Myth that remediation can become a vicious cycle: as gaps accumulate year after year, students miss more and more grade-appropriate content in favor of review of content from previous grades and become increasingly less likely to ever make it back to grade-level mastery."

The researchers say the pandemic year findings underscore the need for several fundamental shifts. Teachers need to be brought up to speed on the perils of remediation and trained to let go of longstanding perceptions that missing skills mean a student is not ready for challenging material.
Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provide financial support to Zearn and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provide financial support to Opportunity Insights and
Acceleration also calls for high-quality classroom materials, support for teachers in using those materials and, in some instances, for more instructional or tutoring time that's closely tied to the strategy. Educators should expect truly catching students up to be a multi-year process, the researchers add.

"With the help of funding from the American Rescue Plan, school systems have an opportunity to invest in the tools, training and support necessary to successfully implement learning acceleration next school year and beyond," the report notes.

Submit a Letter to the Editor

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A Better Equation: New Pandemic Data Supports Acceleration Rather than Remediation to Make Up for COVID Learning Loss

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Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for The 74's daily newsletter. As educators plan how they will address lost student learning during the next school year, they should forgo the traditional remedy of remediation in favor of a strategy known as acceleration, a new report recommends.

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Beginning of the Year Administrator Checklist

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Beginning of the Year Administrator Checklist

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Are you a list writer? We have created this list as a starting point to thinking about supporting SEAL implementation as districts return to in person instruction.

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A great resource for refreshers on a multitude of SEAL topics and strategies

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Piloted within the Sobrato Family Foundation, the Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL) model works across multiple levels--- policy, research and practice- to address the needs of ELs in California. SEAL's mission is to change the paradigm in California so that the needs of English Learners are central to our education systems with the aim and commitment to eliminating the achievement and opportunity gap.