EAL INSET: Reviewing vocabulary

By Pete on July 11, 2024 • ( 3 )

I put together three different EAL INSETs this year. Two were delivered to the whole high school, and one was an in-department session. Here’s a summary of the first session.

Session 1: Reviewing academic vocabulary

Why this session?

I usually base EAL CPD around specific areas for teacher development which arise from working in-class with subject teachers. In this instance, I couldn’t do that, as my timetable made it tough to get into class. I relied on feedback from my team of EAL support staff, who regularly supported in-class. They suggested that reviewing recently taught vocab was an area that some teachers could address, so we ran with it.

This did fit quite well with CPD sessions at the start of the year; we’d had some external training from EAL Inclusive on the importance of academic vocab development, so this seemed a natural follow-up.

Approach

I made this one very practical, with teachers doing suggested classroom activities themselves. I chose this approach because a) it was fun, b) it might highlight some of the challenges learners face and it’s good to be in their shoes once in a while, c) it was happening at 3.30pm so engagement levels might vary – better to be snappy!

Delivery

It was basically a much more refined version of some techniques outlined in this post on reviewing vocab from about 10 years ago (wow, I’m old). I started with a general list of vocab that had arisen across a few subject areas (science, humanities) in Year 8 so far that term:

I outlined the ‘why this focus?’ to teachers (hinting a bit at Dale, Nation, Rosenshine, and so on):

And set the staff up in groups… bearing in mind that learners had been taught this vocab whereas staff (as ‘mock learners’ here) were going in blind, so better to have some support from subject experts on each table where needed:

Then we just used those words to go through a series of activities for vocab review. Such as…

And…

And…

Etc. Which ramped up to more productive tasks I guess, like:

(note, not a fan of the capital letters, oops)

(As you can see, I don’t do snazzy slides. No biggie, it gets the message across, and we are all super busy teachers so no-one is like ‘tut, could have made that look better…’ Well, I think they’re not anyway)

So, the activities were varied. Some consolidating meaning, form, pronunciation, etc. Others delving a bit deeper to explore meaning and connections a bit more. I made sure that there was a formative assessment aspect:

And encouraged teachers to give themselves a ready-made opportunity for review activities like this by having envelopes for new vocab displayed prominently in classrooms:

After the 45-or-so fun minutes (I front-loaded the fun…), I went on a 10 minute ramble about why/how these activities would/might be beneficial for learners. Example slides for the boring bit:

I purposefully went for some older references in this, trying to highlight that the ideas in the session weren’t new. I don’t know if it’s just my hang up, but I always feel the need to mention that to subject teachers. After all, those that have been in the profession for a while will have heard a lot of this already, and I don’t want to hint that it is at all innovative.

Feedback

Our teachers are a hugely receptive audience. I received a fair few follow-up emails on this one, and some quite rewarding chats. Some staff approached me soon after to say they’d applied some of the techniques in their own classes. While I can’t say that this was a consistent thing, I love the fact that the session at least raised awareness of the need to review vocab, and got teachers experimenting and taking the leap! So, great. Long term? Not sure.

I asked for specific feedback from two staff members whose opinions I really valued. Both felt that it was time well spent, and one (a Delta-qualified teacher) felt it was pitched just right (which gave me a ‘phew’ and a bit of a glow!).

It would have been nice to follow up on this and see if any techniques stuck for certain teachers. Pffff. When would we find the time to do that?!

Session slides

I’m happy to share, just get in touch. However, you’ve seen the screen shots – this is not an all-singing-all-dancing powerpoint, and the activities are specific to the chosen word list. But you’re welcome to them!