Portrait of a cycle

A T3 Scenario

A cohort group of new and developing teachers was identified in partnership with the school and the Brown district leadership. The T3 Coach was assigned to work with these teachers every day for one month at the start of the school year. The team will be re-evaluated at the end of the month. 

There are three new 6th-grade teachers at Smith Middle School, each in a different content area: science, social studies, and language arts who have been identified as the cohort group.  Sixth graders at SMS have shown little growth with progress monitoring in the past years and two of these teachers are fresh out of college, the third has two years of teaching experience, but has not demonstrated much growth in her practice as indicated through classroom observation data. 

GOAL SETTING:

The T3 Coach and the teachers formed a Professional Learning Community with norms and began building a partnership. Through discussion, the new teachers decided that vocabulary instruction was an area of need that they could all focus on and improve. 

In each content area, the teachers typically write the words on the board for students to copy, students look words up in a dictionary and record the definition in a notebook and have a quiz in a few days.  The teachers are confused as to what constitutes academic vocabulary, domain-specific vocabulary, general vocabulary, and tier 1, 2, & 3 words. They are unclear as to how to identify which words should be instructed and so they usually focus on the "bold-faced" words in their text but they notice that many students struggle with other words also.   An added area of concern with these teachers is the growing number of English language learners that are in their classrooms who struggle with vocabulary acquisition.   The teachers and T3 Coach developed a SMART Goal for the acquisition of vocabulary for their student group. 

The district offered a PD session on various ways to teach vocabulary but it was only for one hour and included a variety of graphic organizers, games, and strategies but that is where it stopped.  One teacher attempted to implement something new into her methods but it didn't work so she gave up, the other two were not hired at the time of the PD. The traditional copying of words in the notebook continued, even though the data collected through common district assessments indicate that students' vocabulary is not improving. 

LEARNING: 

The teachers met with the T3 Coach in their PLC during their planning time to examine Cluster 3: Vocabulary Acquisition and Use standards in the Language Strand of the LAFS.  The teacher and the T3 Coach unwrapped two standards that were specific to the instruction of vocabulary in their content areas:  LAFS.6.L.3.4 and LAFS.6.L.3.6.  The teachers examined verbs and nouns and the cognitive complexity level of the standard.  The teachers and the engineer developed enduring understandings and essential ideas as well as a learning scale for each of these standards.  Through this process, the teachers gained a clearer understanding of exactly what their students needed to know and by developing a scale they were better able to design activities so they would be able to determine how they would know if students were mastering vocabulary. 

With the assistance of the T3 Coach, the teachers engaged in an activity of pre-reading their text and selecting tier 1, 2, and 3 words that might cause students issues with the content.  The engineer guided each teacher through this process as a group, each using their individual materials.  The T3 Coach assisted teachers with identifying academic vocabulary and domain-specific vocabulary.  Through the PLC process the teachers identified that the word "analyze" was common to their content for these first units.  The teachers decided that the word "analyze" would be a targeted word for explicit instruction.   The T3 Coach worked with teachers to introduce a strategy for improving language acquisition for ELL students including word walls, the use of cognates, and pictures for targeted vocabulary.  The T3 Coach and the teachers designed a vocabulary card with the word, its Spanish Cognate, and a picture that would correlate with the word. These cards were put on a word wall in each class, as well as displayed in the 6th-grade areas of the building...hallways, library, and cafeteria.   The teachers also recognized that the affix "poli" was also common to their unit content.  The T3 Coach assisted the teachers with developing a ROOT family tree of words using a graphic organizer and choosing words from all three content areas to use on the graphic.  The students would be exposed to all these words in each class ultimately writing sentences and drawing pictures for these words.  

The teachers and the T3 Coach worked in partnership to write a script for the word "analyze" using the Marzano 7 Step-Strategy for explicit instruction.  The team decided that this word would be introduced and explicitly taught in ELA. The other content areas would incorporate intentional teacher talk into their classrooms using the word "analyze" and referring to the definition consistently.  The T3 Coach modeled the instruction of the 7 steps to the ELA teacher and over the course of two other teaching blocks gradually released the instruction back to the teacher.  The other two content area teachers chose tier 3 words from their texts and wrote scripts for those words.  The T3 Coach modeled the strategy on different days for those teachers, gradually releasing them to take over the strategy themselves.   The teachers chose several other words from their units to explicitly instruct with the Marzano 7-Step strategy, created vocabulary cards with Spanish cognates and pictures & added them to their word walls. 

Reflection (Embedded):

Over the course of this cycle, the teachers were videotaped using the Swivl camera to compare their traditional "notebook/dictionary/quiz" vocabulary cycle and the new strategy of word walls, pictures, graphic organizers, and Marzano 7-Steps.  The teachers met one-to-one with the T3 Coach to discuss and reflect on their teaching, ways to further improve and refine the strategy as well as to reflect on their thoughts on student engagement.  

The teachers developed a common formative assessment for the word "analyze" and the affix "poli" and met to discuss the results with the guidance of the T3 Coach. Remediation, practice, and enrichment activities were developed as a result of this data. 

The T3 Coach and the teacher engaged in this process of selecting vocabulary, writing scripts, and incorporating other vocabulary strategies over the next several weeks.  Eventually, the art of instructing vocabulary with these strategies became part of the natural palette these teachers incorporated into their daily lessons.  Their confidence level rose to engage in this process because they had regular guidance, modeling, and reflection opportunities, in close concert with the engineer. 

Over the course of the first semester, the T3 Coach assigned to this team, assisted them with several other artful strategies including close reading of non-fiction texts, student response rates, and teacher/student talk ratio.  As a result of this sustained coaching with a targeted group of teachers, the student assessment results were increased within and across content areas.