so it is in this case.
Recap
Vocabulary work is vital in our students’ lives. To ensure you implement vocabulary instruction well, it’s important to take the time to step back, perhaps before you begin the work, to think about developing a culture that supports word learning, establishing collaborative teams, and selecting digital tools that will help sustain your work. Creating a school- or districtwide culture that generates word consciousness, provides professional learning opportunities, and uses digital tools that support collaboration as teachers implement a blended vocabulary approach is an ambitious but worthwhile goal. We suggest that schools and districts resist the urge to jump into learning instructional strategies, and instead, begin by developing literacy leadership teams that can provide the support, modeling, feedback, and collaboration necessary to create systematic and sustainable vocabulary improvement. In the long term, we believe that a thoughtful and diverse literacy leadership team provides the necessary foundation for creating, supporting, and sustaining a culture of word learning that will make a positive difference in the lives of your students.
Digital Tools for Literacy Leadership Team Collaboration
Backchannel Chat (www.backchannelchat.com): Backchannel site
Chatzy (www.chatzy.com): Backchannel site
Evernote (https://evernote.com): Digital notebook
LiveBinders (www.livebinders.com): Digital notebook
OneNote (www.onenote.com): Digital notebook
TodaysMeet (www.todaysmeet.com): Backchannel site
Twitter (https://twitter.com): Social media
NEXT STEPS
Consider the following questions individually or discuss them with colleagues or in literacy leadership team settings.
Teachers
• Do you think your school culture values and supports word learning? What could you do to encourage colleagues to promote word acquisition and word consciousness?
• How could you convince coworkers who teach nonacademic subjects or serve in another capacity in the school to become more active in teaching vocabulary?
• Think about direct and indirect instructional strategies you currently use in the classroom. How could you improve the use of indirect means to promote word consciousness?
• Which digital tools are you most interested in learning how to use to collaborate and share with colleagues?
• If you’re not familiar with Evernote and OneNote, consider learning more about their flexibility and utility to capture notes and websites. Try sharing a notebook with a colleague for collaboration and further learning.
Literacy Leadership Teams
• Gain a general idea of where your school is with vocabulary development. Discuss this with your grade-level teams, academic leadership team, collaborative teams, or building leadership team.
• Think about who you should include in a schoolwide literacy leadership team in your building. Why did you include each individual? How about in your district?
• As a team, discuss an initiative currently underway in your school and district. How does vocabulary align with this initiative? How can you help colleagues see that this is not just one more thing added to the plate?
• How could your team provide ongoing professional learning specific to vocabulary? Consider who would provide the training and what resources (time and financial) you have for training and ongoing support.
• Do you see teachers and staff using indirect opportunities to encourage word learning? If not, why not? If so, what strategies do they most commonly use?
• How can the literacy leadership team support incidental word learning across the school? What about across the entire system?
• Do you currently use digital tools that support collaboration and professional learning? Which tools do you think would best support sharing and collaborating among teachers in your school or across the district?
• Consider using digital tools for collaborating and creating a Twitter hashtag for your school or district to promote collaboration around word learning. Consider hosting a Twitter chat to foster deeper discussion of frameworks, content, and strategies.
• Become familiar with a backchannel such as TodaysMeet, and begin incorporating it into a professional development session to encourage collaboration and sharing during the learning session.
• Think about creating a shared vocabulary notebook in Evernote or OneNote. Grade-level or academic teams may wish to create their own notebooks and collaborate within them. Invite teachers to add lesson plans, videos, websites, and more to the notebook. The YouTube video Evernote Tips: The 11 Amazing Features That Make Using Evernote So Freaking Awesome (Evernote Scott, 2012) provides great tips for new users. Microsoft OneNote Tutorial (Cox, 2014) will similarly get teams up to speed with OneNote. Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for live links to these resources.
• What digital tools described here do you currently use? Which tools do you think would best support sharing and collaborating among teachers in your school or across the district?
CHAPTER 2
A New Model for Effective Vocabulary Instruction
Many esteemed educators and researchers have proposed models for (or components of) an effective vocabulary program. While instructional strategies are important, models allow educators to think conceptually about what components they must include in a comprehensive approach to vocabulary. This chapter summarizes some of the most widely used models and proposes a new one we have synthesized from them, combined with areas of need that we have seen in school settings.
A Review of Existing Models
Before we propose our blended model, we first want to share some background information on three extant models from which we have drawn various aspects. We’ll highlight the benefits and some of the struggles we’ve seen educators encounter in their use of these models.
Marzano’s Six-Step Model
Robert J. Marzano (2004) recommends a six-step process for teaching vocabulary in his book Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement. The steps are as follows.
1. The teacher provides a description, explanation, or example of the new term.
2. Students provide a linguistic explanation by restating the new term in their own words using an example, description, or explanation of the term.
3. Students create a nonlinguistic representation of the term, which may include constructing
