Implementing SIOP in Online Teaching: Experiences from an Elementary School Teacher

This paper describes how one ESL elementary school teacher implemented the SIOP Model in her teaching when her school shifted from in person to online learning in the spring of 2020. Ms. Dulaney serves as the ESL teacher in a rural school district with 15% Multilingual Learners (MLs). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all schools in the state of Michigan were shut down for the remainder of the 2019-2020 academic year in early March, forcing K-12 teachers to shift to online learning. Ms. Dulaney met with her MLs online once a week for 30 minutes and planned lessons that incorporated The SIOP Model, a teaching approach developed to help teachers make content more comprehensible for MLs (Echevarria et al., 2023). In this paper, we focus on how the teacher integrated the following five SIOP components in online learning: Lesson Preparation, Building Background, Interaction, Practice and Application, and Review and Assessment. The paper concludes with a reflection on lessons learned and provides recommendations for teachers implementing the SIOP model in online formats.