Tom Waters

Pinterest TeamTomWaters Vocabulary Board They just don't understand a word I say! They act like we have never done this before! Ugh...did anyone in the lower grades ever teach this? Ever heard this before...maybe in your own head? I know I have. Weeks after a unit, a student is asked to do a summary. She meekly and tenderly responds, "What is a summary ?" We just spent a whole unit working with summaries! You don't know what that is!?! The Problem is Vocabulary The problem is not the student. The problem is not the planning or teaching. The problem is vocabulary. Academic vocabulary instruction needs to be taught systemically across the district from year to year. This is the single most important spiral practice and teaching we can do. It builds the necessary background knowledge, so students aren't confused or lost when we say, "summary." Or when we say any other academic term. Teaching and Monitoring Vocabulary We can teach academi...

The principal calls you in for a meeting.  She pulls out your recent Common Assessment scores.  Everyone questions the quality of the test. You had no input on creating the test. O nly 30% of your students met the standard.  She then pulls out your team scores and shows that two other teachers' are 3 points higher than yours. What in the world is wrong with this scenario? Big Problem with the Common Assessments First, the statistics are horrible. Not the scores, but the actual mathematics. The single largest problem with these assessments is their lack of statistical reliability or correlation to anything.  Read more on the Dangers of Assessment Data . No more research terms, but essentially the same exact student can take the same exact test tomorrow and score 10 to 20 points higher or lower. That's what I mean by reliability - it is not measuring "pure" learning over time. Other major problems persist in the scenario above. But let's lo...

How much time should I spend teaching vocabulary ? How much does it really benefit students at different ages? What are best uses of my time if I do teach vocabulary? Recent research gives us a lot of evidence for the answers. Here's a quick summary from recent years: If you're reading texts in science or social studies middle school or high school, directly teaching content words helps students! From a 2012 Study . Middle schoolers (grades 6-8) benefit a lot! From a 2009 Study . Combine direct instruction of academic and content words with other strategies to get the biggest results. Vocabulary plus these tasks is really good: deep reading student discussions students developing and supporting arguments developing persuasive essays Students can learn curriculum vocabulary best if a combination of strategies is used: explicit teaching teacher-structured pairing of students use of videos to prompt student discussion prolonged use of graphic organizers (over 9-...

After a quick pause, the 4th grade teacher realized she kept saying the words paraphrase, summarize, and retell, but she had never taught the students these academic words. So she put the summarizing lesson on pause, created a quick three-way foldable, and said let's talk about these words. Two or three questions into asking students what they knew about these words, and she realized - they don't know these terms. Most students thought paraphrase meant a definition. Others misconceived summarize to be the same as a retell. This was a goldmine...and the students needed this 5 minutes of direct vocabulary instruction in order to understand the rest of the real lesson. Are you teaching academic vocabulary each week? Reviewing these words periodically to deepen student understanding?  Team Tom Waters tweeted today: #academicvocabulary . 5 minutes of time every other day, can yield huge dividends. #teaching — Tom Waters (@teamtomwaters1) April 25, 2016 The conversat...