3 C's of Vocabulary: Building Connections, Categories and Context

In our National Literacy Month lesson, we talk about three ways teachers of any subject can help students better understand and utilize the vocabulary words in the class.

No more having students memorize a word for a test before forgetting it forever! SREB Coach Deb Cullen sits down to give us all her proven techniques for helping students build connections between words, create categories and use the words in context.

Make sure to download our handout with a summary and instructions for what we talk about in this episode. 

The Southern Regional Education Board is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with states and schools to improve education at every level, from early childhood through doctoral education and the workforce.

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Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to Class Act Coaching, a podcast for teachers and instructional coaches. Welcome back I'm your host, Ashley Shaw, and so we are officially launching. We are going to have new episodes. It's going to be very exciting. And in our first episode, our sample episode, Daniel Rock came in to help me. figure out some AI issues. Make sure you go listen to that if you haven't already. Each week, he's going to come back and he's going to help me find a different coach for new issues that I have. And hopefully they'll help you too. After we listened to our coach of the week, walk me through an issue. We're going to talk to Daniel about what they did as a coach and how you can use those techniques if you're an instructional coach. So with that, let's get started with our episode. Hi, Daniel. How are you? Hey, Ashley, I am great. How are you doing? I am great. I'm so excited that you're willing to come back each week and help me because you did such a good job in our first sample episode. It's my pleasure. You know, we have at SREB. Dozens of some of the best coaches and I would love to hear some things that you're working on and some things you're trying to improve maybe I can find somebody who will you just the right help that might take your teaching to the next level. How's that sound? That sounds exactly what I'm looking for. And so do you want to know my first issue that I have for this week? I want to know something that you want some help with, that you really think, if you just got a little bit of help, you could really improve. Okay. So this month, I'm sure you already know this, but September, is National Literacy Month. So I was thinking, what a perfect time to start working on some literacy skills in my classes. And I thought specifically an issue that I know I struggle with, but every teacher I know and every subject also struggles with, and that is vocabulary. I want to get some help this week figuring out some vocabulary lessons that will actually help students not just memorize words for a test and then forget the words completely, but actually come in and learn the words and learn the terms that they're going to use in that subject in their life. Got some advice for me? I do. I remember as a kid, we got the list of words on Monday, wrote them in a sentence on Tuesday, wrote them in a paragraph on Wednesday, we had a review on Thursday, and then we had a test on Friday. And then I forgot all the words the next Monday. So, what I want to do is connect you with a lady who has been working with teachers across the country. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama. And not just English teachers, because we think literacy is English. But she works with content teachers and CTE teachers. And Cullen is from West Virginia, she used to be, and she'll tell you about, being a teacher at a career tech school. And she understands the importance of vocabulary in every class. And I think she can give you some strategies that you can use to really make students think and understand about vocabulary. Well, that sounds perfect. Sounds good. All right. So I want you to talk to Deborah. And once you finish, we'll come back and we'll think about some reflections on what she said. hello, Deb Thank you so much for coming today and helping me out. Hi, Ashley. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. First, before you get started helping me with my vocab lesson here, can you just tell me a little bit about you and how you came to SREB? Absolutely. I live in West Virginia with my three children and I was a former high school English teacher and I left actually for five years to have babies. I was a stay at home mom for five years, and then I came back and became an English teacher at a technical center. So I've run the gamut of different kind of schools that I've taught in. I have an elementary degree, I have a middle school degree, and I have a high school English degree. And then at the end of the time that I taught at the CTE center I was hired by SREB to become a literacy coach. And I've been with SREB now for around eight years. Okay, it sounds like you have the perfect background to help me with my literacy themed lesson on vocabulary. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay I know I am not the only one, and this is something that teachers of all subjects relate to. But I sometimes struggle with getting my students to understand the vocab. They might technically know it enough to pass a class, but that's about it sometimes, or to pass a test. So that's about it sometimes. So I actually have three different questions for you that I'm hoping you can help me with. And how about we start with connections? I need help figuring out how to get students to not only understand each individual vocab word, but figure out ways to connect them together and realize there's a reason I put those words in a lesson plan together. Do you have any tips for me? I sure do. Ashley, that's one of the things I think is a leveler for any educational content or grade level. We all need our students to know vocabulary and to be able to make those connections. So it's something that every teacher struggles with. So I want to make you feel better about that right away, that's something as a coach, I see teachers struggle with all the time and, frequently in the classrooms when we go in, you'll see teachers teaching vocabulary the way they were taught, right? They teach it by giving students a list of words and making them write down definitions and then remembering them for a test. And research really shows that's one of the worst ways we can do it because it's a very quick way to get it over with, but it's not a way to make our kids be able to make connections. Ashley, if you've taught that way, it's okay, because once again, that's just the way that we were taught. But to help your students make connections, I love to use semantic mapping with vocabulary because it really is a visual process that helps our students see connections with new words and words or phrases they already know and they can understand. So you might be about to do this anyway, but just in case, before we get too far, can you tell me exactly what semantic mapping is? Absolutely. Semantic mapping is really just a way of making our thinking visible. So your students would be able to put a word in the middle, like if it's whatever category, so if you're talking about Having words that maybe an elementary classroom, one of the elementary classrooms I was in, the students were having trouble with bigger words of emotion. They knew sad and happy, but they were struggling with those bigger words or those more intense words of emotion. We made something visual, we put emotions in the middle of the board and then we kind of spider webbed out. So if you can picture a spider web you have emotions in the middle and then you might put out the word happy. And then if you have words like elated, then that goes off of happy. So it's really making a big spider web for kids to see those similarities in between and the connections with those words. Okay, great. I sometimes call that just for the people that might also call it other things, mind mapping or clustering. For those that might also call it those words, that's I think what we're talking about here. That's exactly what it is. Yes, or it could be a context map. So there are a lot of things that it's called, but it's basically any kind of visual map that you can show the relationship between vocabulary words. And I like that here we are learning about how to teach vocabulary, but we're also learning vocabulary ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. That's very true. I love that. We are always going to be learning new vocabulary words in our life, right? Right. Absolutely. So this method I really like because it can work with any content and it can work with any grade level. So I've used this in career and technical classes in programs in career technical high schools where students were trying to learn about welding electrical circuits. And so there were so many of those technical words that kids really had to do those tier three words, that are very specific to their content. All right. But also it helps kids with those tier two words as well of words that we hear across the content areas. Okay, so tip number one for me, use semantic mapping as I'm teaching vocab. All right. So that's great, but I have more questions for you. Absolutely. Shoot. Okay, so the second thing that I struggle helping students with is categorizing words. So not only can they maybe not figure out how to make connections, but they can't figure out how to group words into maybe distinct categories things like that. So have you seen this problem and do you have suggestions? I have seen this problem and I do have some suggestions because I love the fact that you're not only wanting to help your kids learn these words, but you're wanting to help them really bring those words into their vocabulary by making connections and seeing relationships. So I want to commend you, Ashley, on that. That is exactly how we teach students to be able to really make those words their own. So categorization is absolutely one of the best ways that we can teach vocabulary. It helps students to have to understand the actual definition instead of just being able to memorize it for a test. So one of the things also, if you notice as we go through, I like to use different modalities. I want the students to be able to see things and I want them to be able to hear things and I want them to be able to have a hands on experience with even things like vocabulary. So for instance, in categorization, one of my favorite activities is having students to do an essential vocabulary word sort. So you as a teacher are going to love this because it doesn't require a lot of work, To get ready for this activity. How does that sound? That sounds perfect. I love activities like that. So really all you have to do is either give students a list of words and definitions, or you can have them look up words. Let's say they're highlighted words in a chapter. And so you can say any highlighted word in the chapter between pages one and 15. So it's just that they have the words and the definitions. You're going to put your kids in groups of. Three and four, I generally like to keep groups around three because it seems like everyone is busy in a group of three and you're going to give your students post it notes and something to write with. So you're going to have your students just simply write down the words. So let's say you have 21 words. Vocabulary words that you want your kids to learn. You're going to have your students all write just one word per post it note. So you can have, if it's three, you can have each child write down seven words. But you want them just to write the word on the post it note. So one word per post it, 21 post its. They do not have to write the definition. So you've already got them on the hook, yeah? Okay, and just, I want to stop really quickly because that sounds like a lot, and you gave me a handout to post with this, so if anybody listening, you're like, oh, that sounds really good, but I'm gonna forget these instructions, that you will have a handout, so you'll be able to get it then. Yes. A handout. Absolutely. So then you're going to have your students you're going to instruct your students to put those words into five different categories and they get to make up the categories. So they can be humorous. They can be serious. Yes. But, they just simply have to put those words in categories by the definitions. And you want to make sure you say that. You want to make sure that you tell the kids that they can't put them in categories based on how many letters are in the word, or by what letter the word starts with. You want it to be based on the vocabulary definitions. I was just going to say, you just reminded me of something that I never would have thought of as a way to teach vocabulary. But have you ever seen the game Codenames? That's what it sounds like to me. I feel like you're teaching me how to play the game Codenames, which is a game my family and I like to play a lot. And I'm like, oh, I could probably do exactly what you're saying, but like in the form of Codenames, where for people that haven't played the game. There's a bunch of words on the table, and you have a partner that doesn't know what words you have, or a team that doesn't know what words you have, and you have to give them three animals, and they have to figure out what words on the table are animals. I'm like, now I'm like, oh, how could I turn code names into a vocabulary lesson? That's a great game to do with vocabulary lesson. You absolutely could do that. Absolutely. So you're going to have them put them in five categories. And what I like to do to keep everyone engaged is I'm going to have students present out. So they might be able to tell me I might go to one group and say, tell me your five categories or go to another group and say, tell me your five categories and give me words under one of the best. That is the context that you think, but I keep the other students engaged by saying, Listen, you can challenge them. If you don't think that, that word goes into that category you can challenge. So that keeps everyone engaged as they're going through. So then we, after we go around the room and ask kids to share, then we're going to say, okay. Now I want you to put those words, same words. into four new categories. So you can't combine categories. They have to be four new categories. So the students are going to do the same process. They're going to start putting them, and you're going to start noticing as a teacher this round is going to go a little faster. Do the same process, have them share out. Finally, you're going to have them put them in three categories. So it gets to the point where kids are becoming more creative with their categories, but they, at this point, have worked with the definitions three times to categorize, and you'll be surprised. You could almost give a quiz at the end of this little activity, and students are going to know those words. Ashley, I actually did a training session with a group of teachers as a professional development and to model this activity, I use words, they're called 21 words only teachers would know. Now these words are actually made up so it offers a lot of hilarity with the session itself. So you'll have words like parent, a parent who wants to come in and tell you how wonderful their child is. Or it could be deskaster. That's when a desk is such a mess that it's a deskaster. It's a deskaster. So we worked on those work and some of the teachers put their categories into things that involve the students, things that involve the parents, things that involve academics, things that involve sports, and things that involve administration. So we would then pare those down. So let's say under administration, some of those words were deskaster and parent because those are some of the things that administrators have to take care of. We pared it down even further. So it might've been things that are fun about teaching, things that can make you crazy about teaching, things that make you want to become a Walmart greeter, and so we would then change those words around till finally we got down to some, just, just some basic categories. Okay. That clears it up. That actually does help me a lot. I feel like I, I can visualize it with those, with that as an example. good. Okay. Okay. So basically the tip for this is to use categorization activities. Have your students put your words that you want them to know on post it notes so that they can manipulate them with their hands. They're making categories. And even if you want to differentiate and your students are having a hard time making up categories, you could actually come up with the categories for them so that would help them do that too. Okay. I think that sounds great. And I'm definitely going to try that. And also maybe my own version of code names. Exactly. I think you should. So I do have one more area that I know everybody. Has trouble with so they can memorize words, right? Like they know how to memorize a bunch of words and pass the test. Most of them do anyway, I can't say everyone, but they pass the test and then they forget the words completely because they don't care about the words. They don't know how to use them outside of just, I learned the word, I learned the definition. What I want them to be able to do is actually use the words in context and realize how they relate to the class. That's my final area that I need help in at least for today. I'm sure I have lots more areas. So can you help me with that? I sure can. And that, once again, is a very common problem. Students are really good at memorizing lists of things. They really are. They do a lot to remember how to play certain video games or to manipulate some different kind of social media tasks. But we really do want them to be able to use those words in context. Something I do with students, and I've done this with multiple different grade levels and contents, is I simply employ asking questions about words. So for instance, in a high school history class, students were really struggling with words such as empire and democracy and civilization in context. Which is understandable. So we use three levels of questions to help the students use these words. The first kind of question is a simple yes or no. So just asking kids questions or students questions about yes or no, we use questions like this. Is democracy a form of government where the entire population governs the state directly? So kids can either say yes, they can say no. You can do this individual students. You can have them have whiteboards where they hold up yes or no. And so that you can get a very quick formative assessment about how many kids know the right answer to that. And that gives you as the teacher an opportunity to reteach right in that moment. So that's the first kind of question. Does that make sense to you? It does. And I like that you can do it live like that. It's easier. I think when you realize they don't know what's happening as it's happening and not when you get the test back and you're like, Oh wait, they didn't understand this. So I think that's really helpful. it is because it's real time feedback for you. So that you can immediately fix that certain vocabulary word. So the next type of question is going to be an either or question. So for instance, let's use one of those two types of governments and an either or question. So you may ask the students, In a certain country, all laws are made and all key decisions are decided by the king. He has final say on matters ranging from tax policies to international treaties, and there are no general elections held. Is this an example more characteristic of a democracy or a monarchy? And so once again, yeah, very good. Yes. So kids have the idea they have to do a little deep thinking. They have to know the definition of the word in order to do that. But then they're going to be able to decide between either or. And this helps students to, once again, get that word a little more deeply embedded, because they really have to think about the characteristics in order to answer that question. Okay. All right. And then you said there are three levels. So what's the third level? The third level is open ended questions. So let's stay right in the example that we've been using about the different governments around the world. So how might the daily life of citizens be different in a democracy compared to an autocracy? And so you could just simply ask students to explain the difference. Now you've gone from yes or no questions. Then you get a little deeper into the either or, and now you get into an open ended question where students are taking their own words to explain, and if students can't explain it in their own words, they've got it, Ashley. All right. And that sounds good. I like that you don't start with that top level and they're not ready for it. You have to work up to it. Ashley, my tip for that one is to challenge students to use your words in context by answering various levels of questioning, starting from the bare minimum going up to the open ended questions. All right, that sounds perfect. So you've given me, we've covered the three C's of vocab chaos. Great way to say it. connections, categories, and context. And to sum up, can you just remind us the three tips you gave us today? Absolutely. So my tips are using semantic maps or mind maps in order to show connections between words. Categorization by having students be able to take words, Put them in different categories based on the definition. And finally, to be able to ask students various levels of questioning in order to really be able to explain and understand the definitions of those vocabulary words. Okay, and that bell that you just heard that means that we're almost out of time, Oh, no, okay, great. Ha before you go, did you bring me homework? Ashley, I wouldn't be a true teacher if I didn't bring you some kind of homework, right? Exactly. I really commend you for being able to ask questions and sometimes it's hard to admit as teachers that we don't know how to do something or we're struggling with something. So I really want to commend you, Ashley, because that's the way that we get better together and really be able to support our students. So I would like to challenge you, Ashley, to let's just start with a semantic map. I would like for you to do a semantic map with your students on the next set of vocabulary words, and I would love to see a visual of what you come up with. Okay, I'm looking forward to doing this homework and I will share when I come up with everybody and anybody that wants to do it with us, please feel free to share. I'm going to tell you our social media handles in just a second. But before I do that, I just want to say thank you so much for coming today, Deb, and for teaching me this and being our second coach and for helping us through literacy month by giving us a literacy lesson. And joy to my heart. I can't wait for you to come back and teach me something else at some other point. Oh, Ashley, I love too. You are so much fun to coach. Thank you. So Ashley, what did you think about what she shared with you? What were some of your biggest takeaways? I thought she did a great job. I love how she's working with me to help me make connections in my vocabulary lesson. I'd like to think about what she was doing, but I want to look at it from the perspective of somebody who's trying to coach teachers. And one of the thing as a coach is there's certain questions you can ask, right? so if I'm trying to help teachers make connections, I love how she was asking, how does this connect with what you already know? Right? How does this build on prior knowledge? is that, something that you ever do in your classroom? It definitely is. I like them to realize that I'm not teaching them something because I'm being paid to teach them that thing, but because they're actually going to need to know that Yeah. And you, I'm sure as a teacher, constantly are trying to get them to connect what they're learning today to what they learned yesterday. And that's what I saw that concept map doing. And as a coach, constantly reminding the teachers to make that connection is going to be very important. So, sounds like what you're telling me is that she made these connections for the vocab lesson in this lesson, but that coaches and leaders can use it outside of vocab. They can use it in all sorts of lessons, because it's always good to make connections. That's right. The other thing that she talked about was using categories. And one thing I see coaches do is help teachers. Build what are called word sorts, where they have to take words and, and put them into two different columns. And they can very easily use things like AI to make these lists. And I've seen a lot of coaches take all kinds of concepts in any class. It's not even a vocabulary lesson and think about how to create. two different categories and have kids sort them into column A or column B. So that's a way that all teachers any class learning any concept can do that and I recommend coaches to look into that. And if you've ever Read the book. I think it's called Why Fish Don't Exist. Do you know that book? I don't. It's really good. I'm making a book recommendation right now. But one of the things they talk about is that fish aren't real because if you think about the things we call fish, some of them might be more related to a human than another fish and yet we call them all fish. It'd be like if we called everything that walked on land a human. It's like, it doesn't matter if it's a bear or a horse, it's a human because it's on land. And so fish don't actually in the science field exist. Right. But the reason I'm saying that is the reason we call them all fish is because humans have to categorize things. Like it's just naturally our reaction is to categorize, oh, this is in the water, it must be a fish. And so that's kind of what I hear you saying, I think, is this idea that categorization works because it's the way the human mind works, right? exactly right. That's exactly right. So I hope that our coaches out there think about how we can help students do that. That was a great way of saying that. That sounds like a great book. And that gets to exactly what I was saying. We want to teach students the way the brain learns. And as coaches and instructional leaders, thinking about categorization is a great way to do that. The last thing I want to look at from a coach's perspective is how to help our teachers build retrieval practice into their lessons. She talked about Doing yes, no questions and open ended questions and this or that questions right about vocabulary and as a coach, the question I want to ask my teachers is how can we get all of our students doing this? How can we make every kid engaged in answering these questions so we get A lot of formative assessment what I'd recommend to coaches and instructional leaders is show your teachers how to use these tools like Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Menti, or Kahoot, and Show them how to get every single student responding to those questions that Debbie was using. I love that tip because I know formative assessments are necessary, but they can be so boring sometimes. And I love that you just gave ways to make it stand out a little bit more, to make it a little bit more engaging when you do have to do that formative assessment portion of your lesson. So thank you so much for those tips to our coaches out there. Oh, it's my pleasure. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you next week. I'll be there. All right. And I bet you're going to have a great coach picked out for me. So I'm looking forward to whoever it's going to be. See you there. Thank you all for listening. Please make sure you subscribe to the Class Act podcast so that you don't miss any of these great lessons. And in the meantime, follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook at SREB SchoolImprovement or on Twitter slash X or Instagram, both at SREBeducation.