Module 5 – Reflection
The texts, videos, and exercises within Module 5 required us to grapple with the practical challenge of identifying and specifically teaching to essential vocabulary. While selecting essential vocabulary seems the first obvious step, actually, the first step is determining how to go about the process of selecting those words. The six selection criteria provided in chapter 3 of Improving Adolescent Literacy provided a useful initial screen for identifying words that might be worthy of special attention, including starting with disciplinary word lists available online. The Effective Content concept of binning words into four categories of criticality was helpful in framing the work.
Throughout the readings and texts, the message was repeatedly stressed,
explicitly and implicitly, that knowing a word is more complex than just learning
the dictionary definition and that techniques to achieving true knowledge will
include multi-modal learning techniques. The many short video and audio clips
within the Iris module provided plain-language, practical advice and
demonstrations that I found helpful.
If there is one lingering concern for me about vocabulary instruction, it is simply the prospect of how challenging it will always be to determine how much new vocabulary a particular group of students can handle in a particular period of time.
I agree that the big take-away is that screening words before selecting them is an important part of preparing to teach a text effectively, and appreciated learning about developed and tested strategies for doing so. I've done vocab selection as part of lesson planning before, and it has always been entirely intuitive, so these tools are clearly very important. I agree that being able to judge what your students already know is a blind spot. As a student, I always hated being taught vocab that I already knew. Also, we both did Roman Empire-themed lessons! Great minds and all that.
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