Thinking about Vocabulary

When I was a classroom teacher, vocabulary instruction and assessment was always a challenge. What was the best way to teach content-area vocabulary? What was the best way to assess it? Were my students really learning new words to the point that they were owning them, or were they just learning them enough to pass a vocab quiz, never to think about them again?

After much research and thinking about this, I must confess -- I'm not sure I have all the answers. (Sorry! It would be sooooo much easier if I did, I know!) But I have learned some tried and true lessons when it comes to vocabulary instruction and assessment.

Here are my "biggies," my vocabulary non-negotiables:

• Focus on vocabulary depth versus vocabulary breadth. A more meaningful approach to learning certain key words well can have much more impact than "covering" a list of 20-30 terms at once.
• Focus on building a conceptual vocabulary with your students. This means choosing to teach vocabulary that is content-specific and is essential in understanding major concepts (in a literature course, this might also mean teaching a conceptual vocabulary within a literature theme). 
• According to Janet Allen (amazing author of Words, Words, Words: Teaching Vocabulary in Grades 4-12), the best impact on learning (and owning) vocabulary is repeated exposure to 5-10 useful words per week. This exposure must, however, be meaningful -- words need to be used in a meaningful context 10-15 times in order for students to master them (this does not include writing definitions over and over again, something I remember doing throughout my own education).
• Give students a vocabulary pre-test for a unit (if the unit has a large number of vocabulary words, think about breaking up the unit in terms of vocabulary -- take a smaller chunk at a time, including for pre- and post-tests). Let this pre-test inform your instruction (this might cause you to differentiate vocabulary studies for students with varying vocabulary knowledge).
• Create and actively use a word wall in your classroom per unit. (I could write an entire post on how best to actively use word walls so that they don't get forgotten about!)
• Be sure to deliberately teach the vocabulary words throughout the unit. Also, be sure these words are used by both yourself and your students multiple times throughout the unit (there are lots of ways to do this I am happy to share with you!).
• Finally, give students the vocabulary post-test. Let's see how they did!

I get pretty excited about vocabulary instruction and assessment these days. If you'd like to try out some new methods with your students, just let me know -- I'm here to help!

Food for Thought

I hate to "pass the buck" on my own blog, but thanks to numerous snow days of late, I have limited time this week to share with you my thoughts/reflections/ponderings/ideas.

Instead, I'm sharing with you something I came across recently on Edutopia (a great online resource that always gets me thinking!). It's a presentation on effective elements of a lesson. If you click here, scroll down to Professional-Development Resources, then click on the first one listed -- Interactive Learning -- you can check it out.

You might have the same reaction to this presentation that I first did: Yeah. No kidding. I already know all this stuff.
But after a little while, I started thinking about how easy it is to list all of these non-negotiable lesson elements, and how simple they all sound. But putting some of them into practice, especially if it's not an established habit of yours, can be easier said than done.

So, if you've checked out the presentation, and you'd like to explore some of the lesson elements discussed, please let me know -- I'd love to explore with you!

Have a great February vacation!

Instructional Coaching: A Success Story

Each week as I contemplate the topic of my blog post, I usually get so overcome by what instructional strategies I'm currently over-the-moon excited about trying out in the present or future that I forget to stop and reflect about past work with the teachers I collaborate with. This week, I'd like to share a success story (don't worry -- I won't be naming names -- confidentiality is important with instructional coaching!).

This story involves a teacher I've worked with for a bit of time now. He and I have gotten to know each other well and have developed a routine and a rapport that works for both of us.

Like many of the ambitious and dedicated teachers I work with, when I first began working with this teacher, he had a dozen goals, all kinds of areas of his teaching he wanted to work on. Upon my observing him teach and having structured conversations about his classes and his students, we were able to narrow his focus by prioritizing a few goals at a time. This was a key first step. Just like we wouldn't give our students too many areas to focus on improving at once, we can't bog ourselves down with too many goals, either! Through our time together, this teacher has developed mastery in several of his goal areas, allowing us to add in other goals to work on. Even though we had placed those goals aside for awhile to focus on our top picks, we hadn't forgotten them.

One area this teacher expressed a lot of interest in working on -- an area that would have high impact on his students' learning -- was his questioning techniques. He was struggling (as many of us have and continue to) with adjusting his questioning strategies so that he wasn't always calling on the same students. He knew he wasn't checking for the understanding of all his students. That's where I came in. As a second set of eyes in his classroom, I was able to make suggestions he could incorporate fairly smoothly into his teaching style. We worked together on his comfort level with "cold-calling" on students. I acknowledged his concern (a concern many teachers share) that he'd be putting students on the spot, and we worked on ways to scaffold a student toward a correct answer if he or she were struggling. We also worked on turning a student's question over to the rest of the class as another way to check for understanding, instead of it always being the teacher's job to answer questions. Eventually, when this teacher had vastly changed the way he asked questions in class (over 90% of the questions he asks now are "cold-calls" and his students are really rising to the occasion!), we were able to analyze when and why he sometimes falls into his old habits (typically when he was feeling rushed, nervous about getting to all of his lesson) and we worked on ways to prevent that from happening.

Nothing I've written about above is ground-breaking. These are effective, but simple, ways to change one's questioning techniques for the better. But the beauty of instructional coaching is the on-going, job-embedded professional development. If this teacher had merely read an article or attended a one-shot workshop about questioning strategies, he may have tried some new ideas out for awhile. But, as we all know, he may have eventually lapsed with this goal, becoming distracted by all the other aspects of one's day as a teacher. Instructional coaching can help, as I've been told by the teachers I've worked with, because it's more consistent, it involves conversations and observations and goal-setting, even because the teacher knows she's got an appointment with me coming up so she needs to get going on some of the things we discussed during our last conversation. It's a judgment-free, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again," pleasant method of professional development that I think can help teachers to make big and small changes in their classrooms.

If you're interested in exploring your own questioning techniques (or any of the other myriad of instructional strategies out there!), just let me know!