to easily add hyperlinks, webpages, tags, audio notes, and much more.
These virtual notebooks are perfect tools for team collaboration. Team members can easily share notebooks and pages, and no saving is necessary—changes to notebooks and pages save and sync automatically. As teachers learn and explore vocabulary strategies, they can easily share websites, tools, lesson plans, word lists, and more.
Teams can take advantage of online collaborative tools such as Twitter (https://twitter.com) to share ideas and celebrations along the journey. For example, we encourage teams to create a Twitter hashtag (#) using the name or initials of the school district, such as #Waynevocab or #ZSDvocab, to aggregate tweets from teachers. Across your school or district, teachers can tweet hyperlinks to strategies, vocabulary games, and digital tools. Additionally, they can tweet images of word walls and photos that show how they are integrating vocabulary learning across classrooms, schools, and the district.
Another way the leadership team can use this social media is to host a Twitter chat at a designated time. Leaders can use a hashtag such as #vocabchat to aggregate tweets, and facilitate the chat by posting questions such as, What is your number-one go-to vocabulary strategy for EL students? Participants introduce themselves at the beginning of the session and tweet responses to questions, including the hashtag #vocabchat following each response. Leaders can also invite vocabulary experts such as Kimberly or Angela to share insights, collaborate, and provide feedback to the instructional community. (Be sure to use the hashtag #blendedvocab to join in our ongoing discussion of this book and its concepts on Twitter.) If you are new to Twitter, we recommend downloading the popular Twitter Cheat Sheet (Tyson, 2012e) that helps teachers get up to speed quickly.
Backchannels
Backchannels are another popular way to collaborate, share thoughts and links, and receive feedback during professional learning. Think of backchannels as a means for participants to have background conversations that take place at the same time as the professional development session. Teachers can ask the presenter or other participants a question during the session without interrupting the flow of the session. Within the backchannel, participants can also easily share links, as they think of them during the presentation, to websites that may benefit other participants. There are several websites you can use for backchanneling. TodaysMeet (www.todaysmeet.com) is free and easy to use, and it’s the one that we have used most frequently at conferences. Other similar sites include Chatzy (www.chatzy.com) and Backchannel Chat (www.backchannelchat.com). We encourage you to learn more about backchannels by viewing the YouTube video Todays Meet for Classroom Backchannels (Brent @ EdTech.tv, 2015) and setting up your own backchannel to support professional learning.
Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) is a social curation network that allows users to share and categorize images. Users “pin” images, videos, and other visual information to categorized boards. Users can browse and discover what other users have pinned as well. In its simplest form, Pinterest is a huge, online bulletin board. Teachers could save and share ideas about word walls and vocabulary strategies on the site to support implementing vocabulary across grade levels and content areas.
Wikis
Wikis are websites that allow all users to create, edit, and alter information; how it’s presented; and how it’s structured. A school or a system could create a wiki as a storage and collaborative space for instructional strategies, templates, and bulletin board ideas, all with the intent of improving vocabulary instruction.
Google Docs and Google Sites
Many teachers use Google Docs to create, edit, and collaborate among colleagues. While sharing and collaborating with Google Docs is simple, educators can quickly and easily set up a Google Site to support vocabulary implementation. The site can serve as a common place for embedding documents, lesson plans, presentations, videos, links to websites, and more.
Examining Literacy Leadership Team Exemplars
In the following sections, we provide examples of both a schoolwide literacy leadership team and a districtwide literacy leadership team we’ve worked with, detailing how they worked together and the success they were able to achieve.
Schoolwide Literacy Leadership Teams
A large, urban elementary school that Kimberly supported found that its literacy leadership team made all the difference in making word learning stick across the school. Garden City Elementary School, serving a culturally diverse and high-poverty student population in Indianapolis, created a team representing many grade levels and varied teaching and nonteaching positions to guide its vocabulary instruction efforts.
Through the team’s leadership, teachers created a common language and understanding of the importance of vocabulary acquisition and created a culture that supported word learning across the school day. With an all-in attitude, teachers and staff encouraged word learning in and out of classrooms. Word walls and bulletin boards featuring vocabulary were displayed across classrooms and peppered in hallways, the cafeteria, and the gymnasium. Partnering with school leadership, the team provided support to teachers and grade-level collaborative teams. They established expectations for vocabulary by targeting vocabulary strategies, modeling those strategies for teachers, and monitoring implementation across classrooms. They also encouraged teachers as they integrated vocabulary into their daily lessons and identified words to teach. By supporting and modeling, Garden City teachers were able to sustain their emphasis on schoolwide vocabulary development over five years, raising student achievement in the process. Additionally, the school’s state report card grade went from D to A during this time. Staff members continue to focus on vocabulary across classrooms and share their successes with their community and educators worldwide using the Twitter hashtag #WeAreWayne.
Districtwide Literacy Leadership Teams
In a midsize suburban district, vocabulary development was an integral part of an overall literacy implementation plan. This district tackled leadership in a more comprehensive manner—one that fit their needs and goals. In order to move vocabulary learning forward districtwide, district leaders developed literacy leadership teams at every school. In addition, they established a districtwide literacy implementation team made up of three or four members from each schoolwide team, a principal or assistant principal, media center specialists, and central office leaders.
The districtwide team met monthly for intensive professional development in a train-the-trainer fashion. During this time, the schoolwide teams unpacked the what, why, and how necessary for creating a culture and structures that support integrating word learning across schools. They learned how to implement a wide repertoire of both direct and indirect instructional strategies. Additionally, based on their data, they established districtwide goals as well as individual schoolwide goals.
This approach allowed schools to work on individual schoolwide goals while keeping district targets in mind. Teams were accountable to share progress and strategies both within schools and districtwide. Each time the districtwide team met, members of school teams shared their targeted schoolwide strategies, specific goals, and progress toward achieving those goals. In this case, having both schoolwide and districtwide teams kept momentum going across the many moving parts associated with large-scale implementation. Intentionally aligning the system and building goals is almost always a precursor to increased
