McKay School of Education > Project SEEL > Introduction > SEEL Approach

SEEL Approach

How Does SEEL Combine Multiple Classroom Settings, Playful Practice, and Meaningful  Instructional Conversation?

The three parts to the SEEL approach create an effective blend of literacy experience.

1. Using multiple classroom settings throughout the day in order to maximize opportunities to practice new learning
2. Incorporating playfulness along with meaning to increase engagement of students
3. Orchestrating interactive social conversation to make skills practice meaningful.

The SEEL approach allows children multiple experiences with a variety of literacy activities over an array of classroom settings. Teachers engage children in SEEL activities during the daily routines of the classroom. In addition to large and small group instruction, meaningful literacy activities are infused throughout the school day, including times not traditionally used for instruction, such as transitions and snack times. This increases the frequency of exposures to target skills and ensures greater opportunity to learn them.

Why Do Teachers Find the SEEL Approach Effective?

1. By embedding meaningful instruction into a variety of regular classroom contexts, SEEL promotes and reinforces literacy skills by calling children’s attention to literacy target patterns during motivating and purposeful activities. Teachers learn to arrange frequent reasons to use and highlight literacy skills or targets as they interact with children.  In addition to the traditional large and small group instructional settings, SEEL also uses snack time, transitions, and center activities to slip in extra practice. 
    
2. To make literacy learning both engaging and meaningful, students are engaged in activities that capture their imagination as well as their attention. Attention is enhanced when learning is embedded in playful practice. Meaning is supplied through themes or situations that are interesting and motivating. Play is the "work" of children. Activities may be as simple as filling a paper backpack with snacks or as sophisticated as acting out a story (complete with costumes and props). Teachers learn to combine playfulness with meaning by trying  lesson activiites located in the database of SEEL resources on the Web site.
    
3. To create a social interactive conversation with students, a teacher learns to acknowledge and elaborate on students' responses and ideas. Effective interactive conversations use questions to request information and action from the students, creating a stream of talk that is engaging, enjoyable and effective for teaching and evaluating learning. The socially constructed conversation is orchestrated around literacy targets within the context of a theme, a story from a book, or a student interest.

How Do Teachers Learn to Apply the SEEL Approach?

The Seel Approach is best learned through professional development conducted by the SEEL team from the McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University. SEEL can also be learned through self-study of SEEL materials and  use of SEEL resources located in the teaching resources database on this Web site.

If they implement SEEL as a grade level team, teachers can draw on each other for support. There is a formal process for guiding this team collaboration called Lesson Study, which is described under the Collaboration menu item in the Implementing SEEL menu.

Either individually or as teams, teachers learn to meet instructional objectives by providing children with frequent meaningful examples of literacy patterns throughout the school day. 

• They become capable of finding ways to fit examples of targets into existing classroom contexts. 
• They become sensitive to ways they can use events and interactions that typically occur in classroom contexts to point out or use literacy targets. 

What Does the SEEL Approach Look Like in the Classroom?

The following examples teach students to read word families (words created by changing initial sounds).

In teaching word families during transitions, for example, teachers may call children by "word family names," give them words on stickers, or let them select a word that rhymes with a piece of clothing in order to obtain permission to line up or change activities. The manner in which instruction is integrated into a particular context depends on the options and constraints that are inherent in that context.

In addition to helping teachers embed instruction into an array of contexts, SEEL gives them instructional strategies that provide functional reasons to highlight and use targets. 

During a pretend shopping trip, for example, the children take the roles of workers and shoppers and encounter word family words and phrases as they set up the store, sell objects, and place orders. For example, they might "stay to pay," "stay or pay," "pack a backpack," "stock blocks" or "socks in blocks," "sell bell," "stack tracks," or "pack tracks." While the children act on the examples, the facilitator highlights and repeats the word family word pairs and comments on their similarity. ("Pear and bear sound alike," for example). Instead of practicing specific linguistic elements in isolation, without regard to the social context, the pattern is highlighted in the context of dramatic play.

In these activities, children find reasons to signal target meanings as they interact and manipulate the props (Kovarsky & Maxwell, 1997, p. 224). When teachers select specific linguistic skills to practice within meaningful situations and embed them into other meaningful contexts, children are supported in understanding the relations between language form and meaning.

The SEEL approach cannot be a program in the traditional sense because it draws on student responses and experience, incorporates current classroom interests and themes, and spreads instruction throughout the classroom settings. Applying principles through the teacher’s own personality, skill, and experience is the underlying foundation of the pedagogy.

 Click here to see an a graphical summary of SEEL methods.