GREAT IDEAS FROM READERS
Starting with our Word of the Day feature, students in a Virginia middle school “learn to think like linguistic ethnographers” as they explore language.
To help us celebrate Vocabulary Week here on The Learning Network, we asked the English teacher and writer Rebekah O’Dell to share an idea that has transformed instruction for her middle school students at St. Michael’s Episcopal School in Richmond, Va.
She writes that creating what she calls language field guides has made her students into “explorers, mining words for nuanced meaning” instead of passive recipients taking in basic definitions.
We like her idea so much that we’ll be challenging students all over to create their own versions next spring, and we plan to publish some of the best examples.
In the meantime, have a look at how Ms. O’Dell frames the idea and weaves it into her classroom routine.
— The Learning Network
by Rebekah O’Dell
Here’s what vocabulary instruction has looked like for me in the past:
I write the New York Times Word of the Day in the top right corner of a board, making sure to use my prettiest Expo marker — aqua with a hint of teal.
The ink swims as I pen “obtrusive” and its definition as the bell rings and the classroom crescendos with laughing, high-fiving, exclaiming, complaining, whooping.
Making Vocabulary Instruction Active With Language Field Guides
For the most part, “obtrusive” just sits there, largely unnoticed. One or two pairs of eyes glance at the Word of the Day. Jack shouts, “You know what’s ‘obtrusive’? Nick. Nick is ‘obtrusive’.” Classmates giggle; Nick playfully swats in Jack’s direction.
And that’s it.
As you can probably tell, my biggest obstacle in vocabulary instruction over the years has been its passivity: students peeking at a word written on the board each day, or copying lists of words and definitions, or matching words and definitions in a workbook, or even creating their own sentences with words they only half understand. I’ve tried it all. And without investing far more instructional time than I can spare, it seems that vocabulary instruction is something I’ve done to students as they sit back and wait for knowledge to land on them.
But this isn’t how learning works.
For students to learn new words and retain that knowledge, they need active engagement in which they generate ideas rather than memorize definitions. They need to learn highly relevant words used frequently in the real world (like the New York Times Words of the Day). Deep learning requires connection-building, question-asking and meaning-making. In other words, learning new words requires action.
But how can we do all of that in a few minutes per week in the midst of all the other instruction?
It might help us to think like naturalists.
While bird-watching hobbyists might use a field guide of North American birds to identify what is in their backyard, ornithologists create field notes and build field guides to record the observations and discoveries they make as they study birds in their habitats. What if we could train our students to do the same with vocabulary “in the wild”?
One of my former students, Michelle Kirchner, is a Ph.D. student in entomology and biology at North Carolina State University. Her specialty is ants.
Whether 70 feet up in a tree or digging a hole to find them, Michelle learns about ants by taking careful notes in her field notebook, building a record of her discoveries — precise GPS measurements of each habitat’s location, the weather (including humidity and temperature), the type of tree or plant on which an ant is found, neighboring animals that are present, interesting ant behaviors, pictures from the field and her hypotheses about the species of ant she is collecting.
These field notes, created through an alchemy of persistence, patience and wonder, construct new understandings of various ant species, how they interact with their environment and how human development affects them.
“My field notes are valuable to me because they’re the record of all of my work,” she said, “and while they are very useful to me, the notes may also be useful in 100 years for future scientists.”
With naturalists as our mentors, my students have been creating their own field notes to record their discoveries about words in their natural habitats — words we find in our reading, but also words they are learning in history class and geometry and music and at dance rehearsal and baseball practice. Collected together, these notes construct students’ understanding of language, how it works, how it evolves and how they can tap into its power.
Each “note” is essentially a one-pager, exploring a single word from myriad angles. It relies on a combination of words and images to explore the nuances of a word’s ecosystem. When we compile these over the course of the year, we have made a field guide for language itself.
Like notes about a rare species of ant, language field guides help readers and writers better understand how words behave: how they work in authentic sentences, where to find them, what other words or phrases they hang out with, what they sound like and how to use them.
Creating field guide entries for words about which students are curious requires active learning — activating prior knowledge, synthesizing definitions, evaluating a word’s etymology, analyzing its usage. Each entry is a deep dive, not only into “what does the word mean” but also “how has that meaning changed”? “Why do we use this word?”
And because students are engaging with the word in a variety of ways, the learning is more permanent.
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