For me, witnessing students’ progress in their learning is one of the clear joys of teaching. When I see the students I teach make progress, it helps me to remember that the time I put into my lesson planning, the energy I dedicate to providing explicit instruction, and the effort I give to sharing constructive feedback all work to help students grow in their knowledge and understanding of curriculum content.
This is the first of a three-part series of posts where I’ll share some of what I find to be the joys of teaching. The ideas for this and the proceeding posts emerged from witnessing several students whom I have the pleasure of teaching make clear progress in their learning and knowing that I performed some role in supporting their progress. This post will focus on the work I did with a group of students to help them further develop their vocabulary knowledge but will highlight the growth I witnessed in one student in particular. My hope in sharing these stories is that they help other educators reflect on what brings them joy in their teaching careers, then think of ways to use that joy to further fuel their passion for teaching and learning.
To review, in a previous post, I shared a plan to help students develop their vocabulary knowledge. In this post, I’ll share additional insights to my plan that includes the explicit instructions I provided, the constructive feedback I gave, and the impact of both on one student which brought me immense joy.
Each week for the last five weeks, I’ve been selecting 4 words to explicitly teach. The words I select come from a vocabulary wall that the students in my classes and I co-created. Our vocabulary wall is a collection of word cards. The word cards are divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant includes one of the following pieces of information: the word, a definition of the word, an image or symbol to represent the word, and a synonym for the word. Students selected the words from a series of fiction and non-fiction short stories they read earlier in the year. All the words they selected were new or vaguely familiar to them.
As I shared in my previous post, I found that simply having students select words and create vocabulary cards was an insufficient approach to helping them develop their vocabulary knowledge since I often saw students ineffectively use their new vocabulary in their writing. To rectify what I hoped would support their learning, I began explicitly teaching vocabulary words to better develop their vocabulary knowledge.
My process has been as follows. On Monday, I begin a three-part series of vocabulary lessons by sharing a learning goal and success criteria. My learning goal is, I am learning new vocabulary to support my reading comprehension and writing composition skills. My success criteria is, I can apply my knowledge of vocabulary words when reading and writing. I then introduce the four words by providing a student friendly definition of the word, identify the part of speech to which the word belongs, model the pronunciation, and review the spelling of the word by explaining the sound symbol correspondence. I then share four sentences where I include one of the new words in each sentence. Before having students work in small groups or partners to create sentences using the new vocabulary, we co-create sentences, using the new words to scaffold instructions. Once each group of students complete their sentences, I have them share their sentences with me so I can check their use of the word and provide immediate constructive feedback to further support their leaning; my feedback often includes identifying something they did well, and a next step for further improvement.
On Tuesday, the lesson focuses on synonyms for the words. Using online dictionaries, I find three synonyms for each of the words introduced on Monday. I then place the words in random order in my Google slides presentation and have students work in small groups to match the vocabulary words with their three synonyms. To provide additional support, I review the meaning of the synonyms with students prior to having them engage in the matching activity. Once most students have matched the synonyms, I review the matches with them and have students work in partners to create two sentences, either complex or compound-complex using a synonym in each to practice using the synonym and different sentence structures.
On Wednesday, I repeat Tuesday’s lesson structure this time focusing on antonyms.
By the third and fourth week, I noticed more students using vocabulary words accurately in their sentences, and the quality of their sentence structures improved.
Prior to providing explicit vocabulary instructions, I vividly recall one student experiencing challenges acquiring and using new vocabulary effectively when I had her create vocabulary cards. I now better understand that having her learn words without support was a poor approach because while she strove to understand and use words effectively in sentences, her uses only occasionally worked. While reviewing some of her written work where I asked her to use her newly acquired vocabulary, I recall telling her that she selected great words and her sentence structures were strong, but her use of vocabulary impeded her ideas. I then proceeded to review the meaning of the word and the part of speech to which the word belonged then modeled how to use it effectively in a sentence.
Once I began providing explicit vocabulary instruction and utilizing the gradual release of responsibility model, I saw vast improvements her vocabulary use.
From this experience, I am reminded of how rewarding teaching can be when I get to witness the fruits of my labour by way of student progress and that these rewards help to further fuel my passion for teaching and learning.
