Taking a Technology Approach to Vocabulary

Several years ago, I taught the historical fiction book My Brother Sam is Dead. I did the obligatory vocab chart, and while the kids did well with the quiz, it was clear that they would probably never use those words again once the quiz was passed forward. But after the bell, I watched one of my boys, in a middle school attempt at flirting, knock a book out of a girl’s hand. As he sped past me with his crush in hot pursuit, he called to her “Have clemency on me!”

That was one of our vocab words, and this boy had taken it out of class and inserted it into his vocabulary. Pedagogically, vocabulary should be looked at as a skill and not content.

I used this example from 2005 to illustrate vocabulary ownership simply because I can’t think of a more recent example of this actually happening. I don’t think I’m an incompetent teacher; it’s just that there is no magic bullet for teaching vocabulary.

I have never been satisfied with students looking up definitions for unit-specific vocab words and then spitting those definitions back at me on a quiz. I’ve tried visual vocab techniques, word walls, sentence writing, etc, but nothing ever seems to embed those words into the students’ lexicon. That’s what I want – ownership of those words.

Last Friday during a required planning day for my department, I came up with a quick-and-dirty project for my students. The state science assessment is just over the horizon, so to help my team, I decided to have them review science terms.

Each student was randomly given two vocab words. They had to define these and then provide one supplemental bit of information – either a sentence in context, an example, or a description. So far, this was a typical vocabulary assignment, but the real excitement came in the form of the assessment.

Rather than a quiz, students were allowed to choose a location somewhere on the school campus to film a visual dictionary entry using my Mino Flip video camera. These were then uploaded to our team website so students could use them for review.

The results were intriguing. It was the first time I have ever seen students take an interest in vocabulary. Even more so, students could easily recall definitions because they now had an experience to pair them with. My team’s dictionary has 183 definitions, and while I doubt every student’s working vocabulary is now 180+ words richer, this was undoubtedly a better approach to vocabulary than rote memorizing.

I think I may try this with vocabulary next year and keep a running dictionary with my students. I was rushed to get my students ready to record almost 200 video clips and in some videos it shows. In the future I would push the kids to memorize their “script” rather than rely on a note card. Regardless, a Video Dictionary has some serious potential.

If you’d like to take a peek at our Video Dictionary, click here.

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users

Is it Acceptable to Teach to the Test?

Today, my students finished the dreaded New York State 8th Grade English Language Arts exam.

We don’t score their work until late next week, but I took note of their behaviors as they took the test, and I'm hopeful as to their scores. I saw kids highlighting as they read, and the constant rustling of papers suggested that they all remembered to pre-read the multiple choice questions before reading the passages. On the extended response sections, kids were able to take the essay prompt and echo it in their introduction paragraphs. I even saw kids using my tip of going back and crossing out words to replace them with higher-level vocab. All of this leads me to one overwhelming conclusion:

I have done a very good job of teaching students how to take a state exam. I’m not sure how to feel about that, so I thought I’d weigh out my opposing views on the topic of preparing for generalized tests.

Argument Against Teaching to the Test
I remember one of my college professors standing stoically in front of the lecture hall announcing that good teachers, those who teach content and skills, will never need to resort to teaching to a test. I doubt many teachers will willingly step forward to dispute the need to focus on teaching content and skills, so this seems like a strong argument. Most district mission statements carry the underlying intent of preparing students to become productive contributors to society, and this can only be achieved with a strong foundation of knowledge and understanding.

Argument in Favor of Teaching to the Test
Much like communism, my former professor’s words of wisdom make sense in theory, but don’t apply smoothly in practice. For example, just because I have the skills to drive an automobile doesn’t exactly assure that I’m prepared to drive a tractor trailer. Skills change depending how they are applied. It’s the teacher’s job to not only teach the skills, but to prepare students for situations where those skills will be needed. The “test-taking tips” I witnessed my students using are all things that should be put into good practice when reading/writing anything – so what if they were taught in the context of a standardized test?

My Own Conclusion
A few hours before posting this I created this poll asking my 1200 Twitter followers to weigh in on the subject. So far, only 1 person has voted. Either this means I have fewer friends than I realize, or perhaps teaching to the test is something that teachers are a bit uncomfortable discussing. Do we all do it? As educators, is test prep or dirty little secret?

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users