A large, urban elementary school that Kimberly supported found that its literacy leadership team made all the difference in making word learning stick across the school. Garden City Elementary School, serving a culturally diverse and high-poverty student population in Indianapolis, created a team representing many grade levels and varied teaching and nonteaching positions to guide its vocabulary instruction efforts.
Through the team’s leadership, teachers created a common language and understanding of the importance of vocabulary acquisition and created a culture that supported word learning across the school day. With an all-in attitude, teachers and staff encouraged word learning in and out of classrooms. Word walls and bulletin boards featuring vocabulary were displayed across classrooms and peppered in hallways, the cafeteria, and the gymnasium. Partnering with school leadership, the team provided support to teachers and grade-level collaborative teams. They established expectations for vocabulary by targeting vocabulary strategies, modeling those strategies for teachers, and monitoring implementation across classrooms. They also encouraged teachers as they integrated vocabulary into their daily lessons and identified words to teach. By supporting and modeling, Garden City teachers were able to sustain their emphasis on schoolwide vocabulary development over five years, raising student achievement in the process. Additionally, the school’s state report card grade went from D to A during this time. Staff members continue to focus on vocabulary across classrooms and share their successes with their community and educators worldwide using the Twitter hashtag #WeAreWayne.
Districtwide Literacy Leadership Teams
In a midsize suburban district, vocabulary development was an integral part of an overall literacy implementation plan. This district tackled leadership in a more comprehensive manner—one that fit their needs and goals. In order to move vocabulary learning forward districtwide, district leaders developed literacy leadership teams at every school. In addition, they established a districtwide literacy implementation team made up of three or four members from each schoolwide team, a principal or assistant principal, media center specialists, and central office leaders.
The districtwide team met monthly for intensive professional development in a train-the-trainer fashion. During this time, the schoolwide teams unpacked the what, why, and how necessary for creating a culture and structures that support integrating word learning across schools. They learned how to implement a wide repertoire of both direct and indirect instructional strategies. Additionally, based on their data, they established districtwide goals as well as individual schoolwide goals.
This approach allowed schools to work on individual schoolwide goals while keeping district targets in mind. Teams were accountable to share progress and strategies both within schools and districtwide. Each time the districtwide team met, members of school teams shared their targeted schoolwide strategies, specific goals, and progress toward achieving those goals. In this case, having both schoolwide and districtwide teams kept momentum going across the many moving parts associated with large-scale implementation. Intentionally aligning the system and building goals is almost always a precursor to increased achievement in any content area, and so it is in this case.
Recap
Vocabulary work is vital in our students’ lives. To ensure you implement vocabulary instruction well, it’s important to take the time to step back, perhaps before you begin the work, to think about developing a culture that supports word learning, establishing collaborative teams, and selecting digital tools that will help sustain your work. Creating a school- or districtwide culture that generates word consciousness, provides professional learning opportunities, and uses digital tools that support collaboration as teachers implement a blended vocabulary approach is an ambitious but worthwhile goal. We suggest that schools and districts resist the urge to jump into learning instructional strategies, and instead, begin by developing literacy leadership teams that can provide the support, modeling, feedback, and collaboration necessary to create systematic and sustainable vocabulary improvement. In the long term, we believe that a thoughtful and diverse literacy leadership team provides the necessary foundation for creating, supporting, and sustaining a culture of word learning that will make a positive difference in the lives of your students.
Digital Tools for Literacy Leadership Team Collaboration
Backchannel Chat (www.backchannelchat.com): Backchannel site
Chatzy (www.chatzy.com): Backchannel site
Evernote (https://evernote.com): Digital notebook
LiveBinders (www.livebinders.com): Digital notebook
OneNote (www.onenote.com): Digital notebook
TodaysMeet (www.todaysmeet.com): Backchannel site
Twitter (https://twitter.com): Social media
NEXT STEPS
Consider the following questions individually or discuss them with colleagues or in literacy leadership team settings.
Teachers
• Do you think your school culture values and supports word learning? What could you do to encourage colleagues to promote word acquisition and word consciousness?
• How could you convince coworkers who teach nonacademic subjects or serve in another capacity in the school to become more active in teaching vocabulary?
• Think about direct and indirect instructional strategies you currently use in the classroom. How could you improve the use of indirect means to promote word consciousness?
• Which digital tools are you most interested in learning how to use to collaborate and share with colleagues?
• If you’re not familiar with Evernote and OneNote, consider learning more about their flexibility and utility to capture notes and websites. Try sharing a notebook with a colleague for collaboration and further learning.
Literacy Leadership Teams
• Gain a general idea of where your school is with vocabulary development. Discuss this with your grade-level teams, academic leadership team, collaborative teams, or building leadership team.
• Think about who you should include in a schoolwide literacy leadership team in your building. Why did you include each individual? How about in your district?
• As a team, discuss an initiative currently underway in your school and district. How does vocabulary align with this initiative? How can you help colleagues see that this is not just one more thing added to the plate?
• How could your team provide ongoing professional learning specific to vocabulary? Consider who would provide the training and what resources (time and financial) you have for training and ongoing support.
• Do you see teachers and staff using indirect opportunities to encourage word learning? If not, why not? If so, what strategies do they most commonly use?
• How can the literacy leadership team support incidental word learning across the school? What about across the entire system?
• Do you currently use digital tools that support collaboration and professional learning? Which tools do you think would best support sharing and collaborating among teachers in your school or across the district?
• Consider using digital tools for collaborating and creating a Twitter hashtag for your school or district to promote collaboration around word learning. Consider hosting a Twitter chat to foster deeper discussion of frameworks, content, and strategies.
• Become familiar with a backchannel such as TodaysMeet, and begin incorporating it into a professional development session to encourage collaboration and sharing during the learning session.
• Think about creating a shared