Conversations with Educators: Carmen Sieleni on reading instruction for MLs

By Hannah Haynes

Carmen Sieleni grew up in a multilingual home in a small town in Minnesota. Her father immigrated to the United States from El Salvador. Carmen’s upbringing influenced her career path. Today, she’s an MLL teacher at an elementary school in the Roseville Area School District in Minnesota and she works with the district coordinator to build systems and support at all the elementary schools in the district.

Carmen recently worked with Hetal Ascher, professional learning curriculum specialist at WIDA, on engaging students’ home literacy experience in the classroom. Her work is featured on the new Reading with Multilingual Learners webpage.

She sat down with Tim Boals, WIDA executive director and founder, and Merideth Trahan, WIDA chief of staff, to discuss co-teaching and her expertise on literacy.  

The conversation below has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Merideth Trahan: Could you share some information on your background?

Carmen Sieleni: I grew up in Minnesota. My dad is from El Salvador and my mom is from Minnesota. My dad came here when he was around 26. He has an accent, is brown and was one of the few minorities in the smaller town I grew up in. That's where I got the passion to work with multilingual students. Although I should speak Spanish fluently, I don’t, because my dad felt it was more important for us to speak English at home. I often tell students my story and I tell them to continue to cultivate their home language so they don’t lose it. My dad really believed in education, and he knew that education was the way to success. When I was in college, I knew I wanted to teach, but in my hometown, they didn't have ESL or ELL. So, once I started teaching and learned about those roles, I knew that’s what I wanted to teach. I went back and got my license in ELL. I was initially a math teacher, then I taught sheltered content math, then an ELD class and then I was the middle school coordinator. Most recently, I moved to the elementary level where I’m teaching a combination of small groups and co-teaching, and helping our district MLL coordinator as the elementary MLL lead.

Timothy Boals: I see you have a lot of interest in literacy. And I take it that's how you ended up getting connected with Hetal Ascher from WIDA and working her. Tell us a little bit about that and how it came to be.

CS: I taught with Hetal in Roseville at the middle school level. I was the sheltered content math teacher, and she was the English teacher. That's where the relationship started. We had a lot in common, similar experiences and similar views on things. We both really understood how much relationships with students mattered and the importance of students seeing themselves in literature. When I switched from teaching middle school to teaching elementary school, we got a new ELA curriculum. I ended up teaching a lot more reading at that level. I got more interested in figuring out the best ways to help MLs catch up and the most effective way to serve them. Is it pull out groups, or is it pushing in? Is it more rigorous content? Is it more differentiated content?

MT: And what have you learned? How do you answer all those questions?

CS: [laughs] Oh, I don't know all the answers!

TB: What are your hunches?

CS: My hunches are that oral language is very important when it comes to literacy, and getting them interested and discussing the content, even if they can't read it, and even if they can't write what is required, yet, is very important.

This year was my first year co-teaching with the new curriculum. I had a pullout group. I would pre-teach, do some background knowledge, the anticipatory sets with them to get them engaged. I was also co-teaching in that class. Hetal came and videotaped that. It was great to see, because the students who maybe normally wouldn’t speak up in class would join the conversations. They understood what everyone was talking about, and they were really excited about it. They were having academic conversations. They were talking about Galileo; they were talking about the topography of the ocean.

TB: I think your hunch is exactly what the research is showing. You need this combination of solid literacy approaches that a lot of people refer to as the Science of Literacy, Science of Reading, but also paired with the really strong component of oral language development in the case of multilingual learners. You must pair these two things together. You don't do one or the other, but you must do both to be successful.

What other things are you observing? I'm sure teachers want to know what kinds of strategies and activities you're finding that work for literacy development, for example.

CS: There are three literacy components that come together and groups of educators working on each one. The students get about half an hour a day of basic phonics work, like sounds, letter combinations and spelling. Then I spend time with the multilingual students to fill in any holes and the background knowledge. Then the students also get the mainstream curriculum with their classroom teacher.

But I think what really engaged them was that we moved past simple books that weren’t all that interesting. These students are at a basic reading level, but there isn’t the same interest, discussion or high-level questions. So instead, they had a place to really work on the basic phonics, but we worked on filling in the vocabulary. So then, when they started to be able to read the words, they knew what they meant.

TB: That makes sense. In the case of multilingual learners, especially in the early stages of their language development continuum, if they don't know the words orally then it doesn't connect when they see it in print.

CS: Working with Hetal was really exciting, because she was able to take much of what I was seeing anecdotally and match it up with the research that she and others are doing at WIDA. Research is really important because it’s a way that we can teach other teachers and get them on board with the process. For example, helping educators understand that having conversations with students isn't a waste of time. We're activating everyone's brains, and we're getting them ready to read. If I’m reading something and I have no context for it, that’s boring. I'm going to disengage quickly. I think we need that engagement to get them to want to read and learn more.

Relationships are so important. I grew up in a multilingual home and I present pretty white, so I used a lot of code-switching strategies to blend in. I've realized I do better work and am more comfortable when it's a more relationship-based environment. So, if I, an adult, works better in a relational environment, I know it must also be true for students.

MT: Can you give me some examples of a relationship-based environment?

CS: It's more of a feeling — I feel like the teacher actually cares about me, or is willing to connect with me or is willing to hear my perspective, even if it's not exactly what she was looking for. I think it’s educators caring about the students. I think we've all had people or teachers that you felt connected to versus teachers that you're learning from but not connected to. It’s about valuing what these students have to say. A lot of our ML students have skills and strategies that other students might not have.

TB: It sounds like you're promoting authentic conversations where the students' points of views are valued. You're engaging them through interactions and conversations. And you're building upon that background knowledge as they talk about their own experiences.

TB: Tell us a little bit more about the co-teaching that you do. I'm really interested in what the day-to-day looks like as you work with other teachers.

CS: Obviously we never have enough time to do everything that we want to do, so we're working with some constraints. But the co-teacher I work with, we would meet once a week, and we would go over what was coming up. She would usually have the base lesson plans for the week, and she would talk me through it. And then if I had any suggestions, I would add them in. Oftentimes I would add a discussion activity to the plan. And then I could create my small group lessons based on what I knew the students would be doing in class.

We'd create these lessons together. Then, in class she would lead more than I did, but there would be days where I led a lesson, too. One of us would teach the lesson and the other would support. She was a great collaborator. We would both feel comfortable leading and talking. A lot of times when she was talking, I would kind of jump in and collaborate, or give an example or try to make a connection with the students. I was also in the classroom during work time and that's when I could help the students that needed some more assistance.

We’d often have students tell us the story or tell us about what they wanted to write, and we would do some dictating. We would listen to their story and then write it. And then we were able to step back more and more as the year went on. There were a couple of students that started with very basic reading and writing skills, but they would still participate in the conversations. I'm not sure if that's a noted practice, but we saw success with it.

TB: Have you read any of Kathy Escamilla's work? Because her work on biliteracy development talks about dictation as a strategy. You'll find some things that she recommends that I think you might already be doing, and you might also get some new ideas.

From what you described, it sounds like when you do the small group work, you're actually doing some pre-teaching that helps kids in the larger group to have more success. And that's also something that's supported in the research.

CS: A lot of the mainstream curriculums that we see kind of assume that students have a base level of knowledge they would have just picked up at home. For example, the lesson that we had observed was about space. The space race was a big part of American culture. Maybe some students would have heard about it. But there’s a lot of background information we can add to help them understand why it was important or what the motivation was. That type of pre-teaching prepares the student to participate in a conversation about that topic.

I think a lot of the conversation when I meet with my co-teacher is about what do our students need to know to access this conversation or to access this information. We discuss how we can fill in some of those gaps for them. And you can do it lots of ways. A lot of the time you can find a video, or you can tell a personal story. Sometimes I get the impression that, in mainstream culture, people think that if we're telling stories, we're just wasting time; but I don't think it's wasting time. I think teachers revealing personal things about themselves helps students connect to them, and then it allows them to open up about themselves, and it makes it more memorable.

TB: I really like your emphasis on building relationships, because I think that's what master teachers do. They understand the importance of the relationship and the importance of having those conversations. It's not time wasted, it's time well spent.

CS: In my mind, I think of it as I'm building the relationship and I'm opening the door. But then I also need to be ready to follow it up with good content. I need to be able to work on the phonics. Then they will learn how to read these words and then we can follow up with the next steps. I've got your attention, and you're engaged, now I need to follow it up with the content and teaching.

Bonus learning opportunity:

Carmen and her classroom are featured in a new WIDA Self-Paced Workshop, Reading Comprehension Across Content Areas with Multilingual Learners. It is now available to educators in participating member state education agencies.