1. PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
Cedartown Middle School:
PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
Get out your iPads and visit the following link to describe the vocabulary strategy you brought today:

2. PLC Lesson Plan for 9/17/14 Effective Vocabulary Instruction
Cedartown Middle School:
PLC Lesson Plan for 9/17/14
Effective Vocabulary Instruction
What works (and what doesn’t) with vocabulary
Marzano’s approach to vocabulary
Instruction of new strategies available for implementation
Sharing of effective strategies
Vocabulary assignment for September

3. PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
Cedartown Middle School:
PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
WHAT
NOT
TO DO

4. Vocabulary Instruction is not…
Having students look up words in the dictionary so they can copy the definition down verbatim even though they still don’t know what it means.
Overwhelming students with 50 new words per week especially when they couldn’t possibly retain everything.
Telling students the definitions to words without giving them adequate practice using them.
Believing that because a student does well on a vocabulary test that knowledge transfers immediately and remains permanent.
Getting through a vocabulary unit so we can check it off our list.

5. Vocabulary Casserole Ingredients Needed:
20 words no one has ever heard before in his life
1 dictionary with very confusing definitions
1 matching test to be distributed by Friday
1 teacher who wants students to be quiet on Mondays copying words
Put 20 words on the board. Have students copy then look up in dictionary. Make students write all the definitions. For a little spice, require that students write words in sentences. Leave alone all week. Top with a boring test on Friday.
Perishable. This casserole will be forgotten by Saturday afternoon.
Serves: No one.
Kylene Beers makes an analogy we can all relate to in her book When Kids Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do. Here we have the “vocabulary casserole” which combines 20 unknown words, a typical dictionary, a weekly matching test and a quiet, structured, teacher-centered classroom.
Adapted from When Kids Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers

6. PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
Cedartown Middle School:
PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
THE RESEARCH BEHIND
MODERN DAY APPROACHES

7. EIGHT RESEARCH-BASED CHARACTERISTICS
OF EFFECTIVE VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION
Effective vocabulary instruction does not rely on definitions.
Students must represent their knowledge of words in linguistic and nonlinguistic ways.
Effective vocabulary instruction involves the gradual shaping of word meanings through multiple exposures.
Teaching word parts enhances students’ understanding of terms.
Different types of words require different types of instruction.
Students should discuss the terms they are learning.
Students should play with words.
Instruction should focus on terms that have a high probability of enhancing academic success.
(Adapted from Building Academic Vocabulary by Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering, 2005)
This slide reveals the eight findings from years of vocabulary research. Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering took the eight findings and developed a six step process for teaching academic vocabulary.

8. 3 Tiers of Words
Tier 3 – Highly specialized, subject-specific; low occurrences in texts; lacking generalization
E.g., lava, aorta, legislature, circumference
Tier 2 –Abstract, general academic (across content areas); encountered in written language; high utility across instructional areas
E.g., vary, relative, innovation, accumulate, surface, layer
Tier 1 – Basic, concrete, encountered in conversation/ oral vocabulary; words most student will know at a particular grade level
E.g., clock, baby, color
Show participants an example of the 3 tiers of words. Tier 2 words are the words that are called academic vocabulary.
Common Core State Standards, Appendix A, page 33
Content contained is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

9. Choosing words Jose avoided playing the ukulele.
Which word would you choose to pre-teach?
Which word?
Ask participants what word in the sentence is explicitly taught by most teachers? Many participants may say “ukulele”. While this “Tier 3” word can be quickly defined, the academic word that needs explicit instruction is “avoided”.

10. Avoided Why? Verbs are where the action is Why not ukulele?
Teach avoid, avoided, avoids
Likely to see it again in grade-level text
Likely to see it on assessments
We are going to start calling these useful words “Tier 2 words”
Why not ukulele?
Rarely seen in print
Rarely used in stories or conversation or content-area information
Discuss with participants the reason why “avoided” should be explicitly taught.

11. Implications for Instruction
Teach fewer words.
Focus on important Tier 2 (high utility, cross-domain words) to know & remember.
Simply provide Tier 3 (domain-specific, technical) words with a definition.
Increase independent reading time.
Facilitate read-alouds.
Keep vocabulary in circulation.
Keep vocabulary interactive.
Use graphic organizers.

12. Vocabulary Treat: Partner Task
Ingredients Needed: Directions: Serves: Many
Now let’s have a look at a recipe for a “Vocabulary Treat”. We are taking a smaller amount of words, an active approach to learning and teaching and incorporating user-friendly resources. A thesaurus, or dictionary that provides student-friendly explanations is more appropriate than traditional dictionaries for student vocabulary growth. Actively participating in illustrating the new words involves the use of multiple senses and learning styles which results in greater student learning.

13. PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
Cedartown Middle School:
PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
NEW & ENGAGING APPROACHES
TO VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION

14. Idea #1: Morphology
Teaching morphology (the study of roots) to students is beneficial because when you teach a root, you give the students the meaning to hundreds of words in the process.

16. Idea #2: Semantic Word Analysis
Semantic word analyses can be used to teach students the nuances of words and really get them thinking about how one word differs from another. Semantic word analyses leads to a powerful discussion about the way we tend to view people that we don’t know. This works well for topics that have complicated issues and themes.

17. Idea #2: Semantic Word Analysis
Student
Example
Family
Friends
Strangers
People We THINK We Know
Acquaintances
Prejudice -
Hatred
Judgment +
Negative Bias
Dislike
Stereotype

18. Idea #3: Pictures
Use pictures when teaching vocabulary so that students can have a visual that aids them in remembering what the word means. Have students draw three pictures/contexts where the word could be used and then include the meaning of the word on the back of the page. You can hang up their pictures on a classroom word wall so students can refer to them later.

20. Idea #4: Word Sorts
Once you’ve taught students a word, you can use word sorts to help review the words to ensure students remember them and to deepen understanding. Divide the words you’re working with into two separate piles—let students choose what two categories in which to put the words. After talking about the sorts as a class, have students re-sort the same words into two different categories without using any categories that we talked about as a class. This forces my students to think about the words in a different way each time.

21. Idea #4: Word Sorts Chided Surreptitiously Mortified Chagrined
Lucrative
Insatiable
Gouged
Prodigious
Defunct
Insidious
Tipple
Students sorted these words into categories like helpful/non helpful, descriptive/non-descriptive, scary/ not scary, good/bad, loud/ not loud describes ninjas/ doesn’t describe ninjas.

22. Idea #5: Review Activity Solving Analogy Problems
One or two terms are missing. Please think about statements below, turn to your elbow partner and provide terms that will complete following analogies.
Inch is to ruler as word is to ______.
Decibel is to sound as _____ is to _____.
Identify the common relationships between two sets of items or also known as identifying relationships between relationships.
Analogical thinking is perhaps the most complex activity involving similarities and differences and requires in-depth analysis of the content.
Can be either oral or written.
Analogy problems with 2 missing terms provide opportunities for students to think beyond the obvious relationships, gaining new insights. Rhythm is to music as words are to books.
Allow time to discuss and share aloud.
Work in pairs or small group.
Make sure they include a description of the relationship that both sets of terms have in common.
Like in the first example, students would explain that a bone is a part of the skeleton; thus the first item in the second part of the sentence (a word) must be part of whatever answer they provide as the second item.
To help understand analogies, can use a graphic organizer that has space for relationship to be written. In these analogies “as” is the relating factor.
See David Hyerle’s book Visual Tools for Constructing Knowledge.

23. Vocabulary Websites http://www.wordsift.com/ Word maps, word clouds
Make flash cards & games
Academic vocabulary games
More games, including games using Latin & Greek roots
Definitions, history and short essays on words
Visual thesaurus
This slide provides teachers with additional websites that provide vocabulary games, activities, strategies, and much more.
Content contained is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

24. PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
Cedartown Middle School:
PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
SHARING OF
TEACHER ACTIVITIES

25. September PLC Focus
Implement a new vocabulary strategy in your class that was shared today. Check back for more shared strategies!
Document your performance and upload to your TLE platform by 9/30 using the following steps:
Log in to TLE
Select the container Teacher Assessment on Performance Standards
Select Documentation of Performance
Add
Type in response
Select standards
Select DONE
Attach assignment, picture(s), and/or video
Upload a photo to your Online Classroom

26. PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
Cedartown Middle School:
PLC: Best Practices for Vocabulary Instruction
NEXT WEEK PLC:
USING TECHNOLOGY TO
ENHANCE VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION
(featuring Wes Astin!)