Category: EDUC 400

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EDUC 400 Summer Reading Journal #3

 “An Ever-Expanding Universe”

Sara McManus

School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 400: Curricular Enactment in the Early Years with a Focus on Literacy, Numeracy and Fine Arts
Instructors: Dr. David Litz and Melanie Baerg
August 07, 2022

Margaret McKeown’s work continues to prompt me forward into pedagogical thinking. I suppose it could simply be because I had not thought much about the importance of vocabulary, or perhaps just that explaining words is something I naturally tend to do. (A skill I likely learned from my mother and grandmother.) I like to know the meaning behind a word. There is always a word for something, even though it can be highly frustrating when you cannot find the right one. McKeown stated it perfectly when she said, “language is an ever-expanding universe” (Lovell, 2022, 1:48:26).

It is incredibly validating when I find nuggets of researched work that support my subconscious thinking on something. I have witnessed two ends of a spectrum of educators when it comes to giving students feedback on their work. The extreme end overpraises learners for minimal effort, and the opposite end never provides feedback. One of my favourite things to do in a classroom is to challenge students that finish early is to “make it better” or “expand on ____.” I use that time to focus on those who need extra help or clarification to ensure they fully understand what we are covering.  In the Education Research Reading Room Podcast Episode #062, McKeown validated my thinking when she said, “You’ve got to help kids straighten things out…” (1:06:00). Although she is talking about vocabulary instruction, this pedagogical technique is multi-disciplinary. It is far too easy for educators to say, “yup – that’s a good job,” rather than to take the time to stop and explain the details and then expect more out of your students. I was formally trained to do this in practice when I travelled to England for my scouting Woodbeads II. Stopping to spend that extra minute to explain a vocabulary word through a different context to me is no other than needing to show a scout an alternative method to tying a knot or explaining the third usage because the first two just aren’t sticking.

I connected with and appreciated McKeown’s acknowledgement that all kids wouldn’t be able to learn new wouldn’t necessarily be able to learn new vocabulary words. She said:

“I wanna take the burden off of teachers for them feeling like they have to have all kids to know those words perfectly by the end of the week. Because even if kids are still having trouble with some of those words that’s fine. The thing is [that] you’ve given them a solid grounding, lots of opportunities. They’re going to keep learning that word. It’s not like that word is going to be stuck in that state, in that status for the rest of the kid’s life. They’re gonna [they’re] to keep meeting that word in [the] text. They’re going to keep building their understanding of it. So, it’s [it’s] ok if not every kid knows every word when [when] the week is over” (Lovell, 2022, 49:10).

I think this is true in all disciplines. A large part of our mandate as educators is based on the word “exposure.” I often think about the last term of my undergraduate degree, where I was stuck needing to find non-business elective courses to meet graduation requirements. I selected a course called, Introduction to Higher Education (UNIV 101), an easy A, right? After four years, I certainly didn’t think I needed to read a book called, Becoming a Master Student (late 90’s edition;). I was in for a rude awakening that term, and it is where I gained my biggest undergraduate takeaway. After all my hard work, I still remember it clear as day, the professor stood in front of the lecture hall and explained that when our time was done at the University, we would leave with no knowledge more important than that of how to learn. That lecture transformed my perception of education from there on out. As humans, we truly have only a “use it or lose it” capacity for being great at things in life. I was great at Macroeconomic Theory at one point in my life, but I have only the slightest knowledge of it now.  Unless you keep up with something, it will likely fade. It only makes sense that vocabulary words fall into this as well. If I don’t continue to use the term “Anthropocene,” which I had to look up in the Wild Pedagogies reading (6 Touchstones, 2021), it will fade out of my “lexicon,” which is also a new word to me this year.

I found it helpful to listen to and read McKeown’s classroom resource suggestions, such as her ideas for index cards. Still, I also thought her concept of individual word record books for upper elementary students would be an excellent idea for a grade 6-7 class (Bringing Words to Life, 2013, p. 109). In the podcast, she spoke about dictionaries several times. She mentioned that they were “another tool to use” (Lovell, 2022, 1:30:27) while also going into detail about one of her favourite online dictionary sources, www.onelook.com. She describes this website as an online dictionary that brings together a bunch of other online dictionaries and sources that can help you pull together the meaning of a word in the context you are looking for (Lovell, 2022, 44:10). I think I’ll go check it out and if it is as good as she says it is. Maybe I’ll create a blog post about it – You can never have too many handy resources for your students!

References

6 Touchstones. (2021, Dec). (E. Kazi, Producer) Retrieved from Wild Pedagogies: https://wildpedagogies.com/6%20Touchstones

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kuncan, L. (2013). In Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (2nd ed., pp. 82-102). New York: The Guilford Press.

Lovell, O. (2022, February 24). ERRR #062. Margaret McKeown on Robust Vocabulary Instruction. Ollie Lovell. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://www.ollielovell.com/errr/margaretmckeown-vocab/

 

 

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EDUC 400 Summer Reading Journal #2

Robust Vocabulary Instruction – My Future Practice

Sara McManus

School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 400: Curricular Enactment in the Early Years with a Focus on Literacy, Numeracy and Fine Arts
Instructors: Dr. David Litz and Melanie Baerg
August 02, 2022

This week’s reflections have me thinking a lot about my future practice. During the long weekend, I had the opportunity to spend time with my sister and my two-year-old niece. I have found it very interesting how much this program has been weaving its way into all aspects of my life. It is changing my lens, and I was not expecting that to happen as much as it has.

When talking with my niece, I found myself modelling rich vocabulary and phonemic awareness skills for my sister to use with her daughter. For example: when I played fetch with my puppy, I would say, “Iris, get Yoda,” and my niece would say, “/ō/d/.”  I would repeat. “/yū/, /yū/, /yū/, Yoda. /yū/, /yū/, /yū/, Yellow. /yū/, /yū/, /yū/, Yo-Yo, /yū/, /yū/, /yū/, Yoda.”  She is at the perfect developmental stage where she wants to parrot everything you say. We did this all weekend long with any beginning phonemes she skipped over.

With my new lens, I could identify the difference between her truly understanding a word’s meaning and simply stating a word.  Although it might be particularly easy to identify this lack of vocabulary comprehension with a toddler, I suspect I will be more attuned to listening for it now with students.

On Friday morning, I received the news that the English teacher at the Alternate school had chosen her retirement date. The idea of applying for the position after completing my certification was initially extremely exciting. My brain filled with all the literacy for social justice issues we have discussed in our classes and what a tremendous impact I could have in that position utilizing what I have learned. My thoughts drifted to my former math students who struggled to read. However, today I paused again after reading Chapter 5 of Bringing Words to Life (Beck, McKeown, & Kuncan, 2013), as I realized I wasn’t the teacher who had to help those same students through English12 to graduate. That would be a tremendous responsibility to bear.  I have witnessed the struggling classroom teacher trying to find ways to help their illiterate student after so many teachers before them.  Those students are angry at the world, and I don’t blame them. They have slipped the cracks, have trauma, or often both.

Taking on that classroom with what I know now would be daunting. The current and former teachers are fabulous and mentor educators to me, but as it has been said many times in our courses, “you can’t undo what you know.” I couldn’t go there and have the students continue with the status quo. The entire structure of “how-it’s-always-been-done” would need to be ripped down to rebuild a new science-for-reading-based classroom with a foundation of structured literacy that builds students towards graduation goals through a robust vocabulary and writing rich, authentic text in an inclusive manner for all students.

On my drive south, as I couldn’t read this week’s reading, I thought it wise to skip ahead and begin listening to next week’s podcast, ERRR #062: Margaret McKeown on Robust Vocabulary Instruction (Lovell, 2022). I was only able to get about halfway through, but I did have one of my – Ah-ha moments where I needed to pull over and jot a quick note down so I wouldn’t forget to come back to it because I loved it so much. Margaret McKeown said, “I think the whole concept of synonyms is bogus because it gives kids, even teachers, the idea that there’s going to be some other word that means the same thing” (37:37). I thought about how much I sometimes struggle to precisely find the right word when I am writing.  I often use a thesaurus and have found www.WordHippo.com extremely helpful because sometimes you need to be very specific in your writing. I instantly gravitated toward the concept of “word associations” because every word does have its own meaning.

Page 93 in Chapter 5 of Bringing Words to Life changed everything for me all over again. One portion of a paragraph connected all the dots.

“But the synonym approach, although handy for providing a quick anchor point for a word, is a bankrupt way to teach word meaning. Building understanding of language comes through developing knowledge of both the similarities and the differences among words and the precise rules they can play. A focus here is on exploration of complex dimensions of a word’s meaning and the relationships that exist to other words along some of those dimensions-how the word may be related to others through some components but not others” (Beck, McKeown, & Kuncan, 2013).

I went instantly from “YES! I can teach English at the alternate school and synonyms are not a good teaching point, word associations are better,” to “oh my goodness, I would be out of my league trying to teach English 10, 11, and 12 all in the same classroom plus other courses with all the intensity in an alternate program.” I’m not a strong reader; I struggle with my own grammar. I was using a dictionary to look up words for a reading in this course only four weeks ago.  REALITY CHECK!  As much as I would love to be there again, I need to spend at least a few quality years in the elementary school system developing my foundational teaching and curriculum skills.

I suppose this leaves me a little sad, and I will need to mourn the idea of returning to the alternate setting, but if I don’t, I worry that the temptation will be too great, and I will forget the lesson of reading this chapter in Bringing Words to Life. (Beck, McKeown, & Kuncan, 2013)  I’m not ready to teach high school English as a continuing classroom teacher. I will need to carry the little voice of “/ō/d/” with me and remember that I have some big learning to do too.

References

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kuncan, L. (2013). In Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (2nd ed., pp. 82-102). New York: The Guilford Press.

Lovell, O. (2022, February 24). ERRR #062. Margaret McKeown on Robust Vocabulary Instruction. Ollie Lovell. Retrieved July 28, 2022, from https://www.ollielovell.com/errr/margaretmckeown-vocab/