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| Issue 34: Week of January 26, 2009 |
The LEARNING-FOCUSED Connections Newsletter is a weekly link to exemplary practice and ideas that will help you as an educator to increase achievement in your classroom and school. Some weeks there will be a mix of articles in the mailer; other weeks we will follow a theme. We are all working with the same goal in mind, continuous improvement in student achievement.
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Previewing Vocabulary: Who, When and How
by Cindy Riedl
A retired eighty-six year old teacher, my mother, admonished me, insisting emphatically that previewing and building background knowledge have always been strategies of effective teachers that needed to provide additional support for their struggling learners. Previewing is nothing new, yet it is distressing that many teachers continue to be overwhelmed by the prospect of planning for and implementing these strategies as essential components of instruction. Therefore, it is important that we put previewing into perspective, not only for our at-risk students, but also for ALL students.
Previewing is a major component of acceleration for students who are two or more years below grade level, but it is also an immensely valuable practice as a pre-reading strategy for literature or expository text reading. If students require knowledge of 95% of the words to comprehend what they read (Marzano), it simply is not conceivable to not prepare students with the knowledge of new or difficult terms or concepts before a reading assignment at any grade level.
Previewing In Acceleration Settings
Classroom and special education teachers, who are committed to acceleration practices, are previewing vocabulary and building background knowledge for their students who require these practices in advance to successfully access standard-based curriculum in the classroom successfully. These practices affiliated with acceleration occur two to three days before the lesson in acceleration labs, during center time and early morning meetings, after school 'Academic Clubs' and scheduled special education sessions. There are unlimited possibilities of when these students receive the 'double dose' support they need, but the how never changes. Two or three days before the lesson, students preview essential vocabulary using a variety of memory devices and word strategies. They also develop background knowledge on the topic being studied and preview any graphic organizers or note-taking tools that will be used during classroom instruction. Let me emphasize the time frame - two to three days, not two or three weeks, before the lesson. Keep in mind what we know about retention. Excessive time between previewing and re-teaching words in the context of the content erases the value and impact of the time spent so far before the lesson. Think about what would happen if I shared with you my secret luscious chocolate lava cake recipe. Then, two or three weeks later, I asked you to recall the ingredients and steps in the recipe and to make the cake. It is just not going to happen. The information you were exposed to was not put into application right away, and you did not have a chance to practice with feedback before demonstrating your knowledge. The goal of acceleration is to provide students with a preview of concepts, skills and vocabulary in order to prepare them for the lesson or unit - to give students the experience of being able to start lessons and units in the classroom realizing that they can be successful. They can do it!
Previewing as a Pre-Reading Strategy (ELA and the Content Areas)
Research and exemplary practice also support vocabulary instruction as the preparing to learn time that is so important to ALL learners. Previewing, linking/building prior knowledge, activating thinking and having a focus or purpose for learning are all important instructional and learning strategies for preparing students for learning. Words are previewed out of context before the lesson and then continuously taught and experienced during the lesson. Previewing content vocabulary is a way for teachers and students to assess students' background knowledge of the words and concepts they will encounter in a specific reading assignment. Janet Allen, in her book, Inside Words: Tools for Teaching Academic Vocabulary Grades 4-12 (2007), recommends:
(1) The teacher introduces the chapter or text title to students and then has them brainstorm words they think they will encounter in reading the text with this title (activating prior knowledge).
(2) The teacher presents a list of words taken from the text students will read and in groups students discuss and determine their level of knowledge.
(3) After students discuss and categorize the words based on their level of knowledge, the teacher is able to determine the level of understanding of a word and their general background knowledge concerning the concepts in the unit of study.
(4) Words that most students classify as unknown (never having seen or heard) should be words focused on for pre-teaching prior to students reading the text. With the time constraints as they are, it is important for the teacher to focus quickly on the least known words before instruction.
Allen used the four levels of word knowledge cited in Dale's research (1965).
Stage 1: I've never seen the word before.
Stage 2: I've heard it, but I don't know what it means.
Stage 3: I recognize it in context and know that it is connected or related to ______ (words or concepts).
Stage 4: I know the word and can use it appropriately.
These stages can be arranged in a matrix with designated columns for the words and the four levels of knowledge for student use. Keep it simple, i.e.:
(1) Never Seen It Before
(2) Heard But Don't Know It
(3) Recognize/Know It Is Connected To
(4) Know and Can Use
See tab 'Resources' page 5 'How Well Do I Know These Words?' in Vocabulary Instruction for an example of this matrix.
Summary
Previewing vocabulary before a lesson and content reading is a powerful tool to assure student success. Think of the impact on student achievement, if the special needs teachers previewed key vocabulary before the lesson, and the classroom teacher pre-taught the key vocabulary before re-teaching it in the context of the content. The implications are staggering! Try it out, and then share the results with all of us in a newsletter.
| To learn more about Catching Kids Up with Acceleration click here for information about the workshop and here for information about the book.
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Walkthrough Advantage by Carol Brewer
When was the last time the
Kindergarten teachers in your school were in a 5th grade
classroom? When was the last time your 5th
grade teachers were in a Kindergarten classroom? One of the advantages of a Walkthrough is
that teachers get to visit other classrooms throughout the school. The great thing about these visits is that
they can be scheduled for the beginning of a staff meeting.
For example, "The next staff
meeting will begin in the Kindergarten hall in Mrs. Smith's room. We will visit all the Kindergarten rooms
and then take five minutes to reflect with our partners. The focus of the reflection for this week
will be how the Kindergarten teacher displayed the Student Learning Map. Next week we will begin our meeting with our
3rd grade classrooms. They
have been working hard on how to display their student work to show the
evidence of the understanding of the Essential Question."
Walkthroughs can be structured to
meet many needs. They are typically set up
for the Administrators and Leadership Team but can also be useful for new
teachers, as well as grade level teachers acquiring an understanding of a
particular implementation. Think of the
power of a grade level visiting another grade level and then reflecting on the
observation. This allows teachers to
learn from the observation and implement what they have observed. The following format is suggested:
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| Acceleration - Who's doing it? by Toni Enloe
Nestled in the mountains of Lincoln County, West Virginia sits Duval Community School, a K-8 school with an enrollment of a little over 560 students. The middle school teachers have made it their mission to build confidence through acceleration. After attending the Catching Kids Up workshop, these teachers returned to school determined to make an even greater impact on student learning.
What is Acceleration?
"Acceleration is an instructional model that addresses the 'root causes' of learning difficulty for many students - the lack of prior knowledge, vocabulary, and experiences that are necessary to connect to new knowledge and skills."
Catching Kids Up with Acceleration moves students forward by previewing upcoming new concepts and skills and provides scaffolding for new learning. Acceleration is done prior to students learning these concepts and skills.
What did Duval do differently?
Duval has one "flex" class period each day that had been allocated to reading. During this time students in these classes usually read novels together and worked on vocabulary development. The middle school teachers decided that "flex" period could be used to accelerate those students needing more support.
After attending the Catching Kids Up workshop in early October, the middle school teachers saw an opportunity to address the needs of their struggling students. Their goal was to have the new structure for "flex" time in place by the beginning of the 2nd quarter (end of October). Through many hours of collaboration a plan for acceleration was drafted.
The first step was to identify those students who were scoring "novice" or "partial mastery" in math and ELA on the state test and to determine how many of the "flex" time teachers would be needed for acceleration classes. They determined that they would need two math and three ELA teachers. The middle school team, approximately 16 teachers, redesigned "flex" time. Placing their struggling students with content specific teachers, they created small groups (10-12 students). To accommodate all of the students needing acceleration, an alternating schedule (every other day) was devised.
What are they accelerating?
Teachers are using the Student Learning Maps developed last summer in the Power Curriculum workshop to identify which lessons and/or skills need to be accelerated. They report that collaboration has been the key to their successful implementation.
Are they getting results?
At the end of the second week of implementation teachers were already beginning to see the benefits. One teacher stated that she ran down the hall to the acceleration teacher's class and said, "I don't know what you did, but they got it."
Others reported that they were seeing increased participation and confidence among the accelerated students. "I see a big difference in the "esteem" of certain students that normally don't participate much in class."
In Days 1 and 2 of Connecting Strategies, we talk about the things that influence student achievement with 50% of achievement being directly attributable to students' Self-Efficacy and Self- Esteem (Competent and Confident). Acceleration can build confidence.
To learn more about Catching Kids Up with Acceleration click here.
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Past Connections Articles
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