There were three questions to choose from to answer and the question I chose was
Please describe the methods by which your past teachers (either college professors or K-12 teachers) tended to teach core vocabulary words in your discipline. What did typical vocabulary instruction look like? To what extent did this vocabulary instruction help you to develop rich and enduring understandings of core concepts? How did this type of vocabulary instruction compare to the types of vocabulary instruction recommended in the Harmon, Wood, and Hedrick reading? Do you want to replicate your previous teachers’ practices, or do you want to teach vocabulary in a different way? Please explain.
Well my major is Biology, and the most memorable way that teachers tended to teach vocabulary was always through worksheets. Another method that I remember is copying from the textbook and writing the definitions by hand. In my high school experience those were the only two options that I encountered, but I was lucky one time my science teacher was teaching us all about cells and rather than teach us the exact definitions we talked about what each organelle did and related that to a specific word. So for example perioxomes clean up the cell and how you remember that is the word peroxide is it. I thought that was the best example and my teacher did that for every organelle in the cell. That for me made the test a lot easier to take and I still remember what most of the organelles do even now because of that lesson.
When I look at the question "To what extent did this vocabulary instruction help you to develop rich and enduring understandings of core concepts". I would have to say that the normal vocabulary instruction that I usually received I really did not develop a rich enduring understanding. I remember learning words and their definitions for the test and then the next day forgetting all about them. The reason I did this was because the vocabulary was unnecessary for everyday conversation. Of course that changed when I got to college and I remember the vocabulary because I wanted to rather than I was forced to learn.
Basically the way I was taught vocabulary did not have much if at all of the Harmon, Wood, and Hendrick. In the reading it talks about strategies to help understand the vocabulary words and these included prediction, questioning, summarizing, inferring and clarifying word meanings. Also in that reading it talks of a few specific things that were not used in my classroom setting very well. We didn't really use instructional time to do vocabulary words or rather the teacher did not teach the vocab words to us rather we had to look them up on our as well as we did not read very many background informational text that explained our vocabulary words at all.
In my opinion the way that the teacher taught me was not all wrong I did learn how to look up words and how to be able do work on my own. All that being said I think I would try to teach in a little different way just like how the one teacher I had that taught me the organelles of a cell in a slightly different way. I would like to find my own way of teaching vocabulary and make the way I teach help the students to remember it for a long time after I teach it, unlike how I was able to forget it the day after the test. I am still not sure of how I would be able to teach like that so I am going to start thinking of a way to do that from now on.
I like in your post how you used the part about using instructional time to help with core vocabulary. You are teaching it in class in a lectures so why not use the key terms in your lecture and have some way for students to record what is being taught down. I think that is a strong way to help do the core vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteI like Wyatt's suggestion that you use the vocab words in you instruction time so the students hear them being used and can try to evaluate their meaning from context. I would suggest, as we have already learned, using an activity to help drive this home for them. It will help them retain what they have heard and quite literally be able to envision the words they are learning.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the fact that you didn't completely throw your teachers under the bus for their lack of vocabulary instruction. While I admit that it is important the kids learn to find information on their own, I believe that it is a teacher's responsibility to help students not only find information, but also understand the information well enough that they are able to succeed when asked to perform an assessment.
ReplyDeleteI like your example of the teacher who gave you ways to remember the parts of a cell and the role that each organelle plays in the cell. It shows that the teacher did his/her part to help create an enduring understanding because you still remember the lesson:)
I think that it is hard to learn by writing words down and then writing the definition. So I think that as teachers we need to come up with creative ways to teach our students vocabulary. Sometimes we need to think outside the box and teach our students with the best teaching strategies that we can come up with.
ReplyDeleteI was in an aid in a biology class a few years ago and something amazing I learned from this teacher was that he never used the book unless he had a substitute for the day. He wrote everything down on the white board and he was always drawing examples or having his students come up and draw diagrams while he would explain. Your teacher was very smart in showing you guys instead of just coping the vocabulary and definitions. It gets old fast!
ReplyDeleteI had a lot of classes just like what you described. The teachers rarely talked about vocabulary words but rather would have us just look up the definitions. At that point it became a matter of going through the motions and just copying down the definitions as fast as possible. Even though we were copying the sentences down on the worksheet, the meaning of the word was not sticking. It was a waste of time when it could be a great opportunity to become more familiar with the discipline. Thank you for your post.
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