Dr. Alex C. Pan

When I was little, I started picking up Chinese words (in characters) little by little, through learning with teachers, friends, and family. Very soon I was able to read easy books and newspapers. Of course I still had many words that I didn’t learn, but I was able to figure out the meaning of the passages by guessing. Amazingly most of time I could guess correctly. As I read more, my Chinese vocabulary increased incredibly fast.

When I started my college life, majoring in English, I struggled with reading English books. Our classes were assigned to read several English books in the Ladder Series books. At that point, I did not have enough vocabulary to process the reading easily. I basically would encounter about 15-20 new words on each page. My strategy was to set aside time to look up an English Chinese dictionary and jotted down words for my reference. Unfortunately after the time and effort I put in, I still had much trouble understanding the content in the book. I reasoned that most words I looked up carried more varied definitions and I would need more training to process the information adequately. I was not able to appreciate reading English books until later on I developed better grasp of vocabulary.

I realize that vocabulary power is crucial for better jobs and better future. Lawyers and physicians tend to have more vocabulary words than other professions. For average people, they probably can communicate well enough with about 2000 words.   However, to generate higher level of meaning and more precise terms for deals and decisions,  we need to build much richer vocabulary.

The best way to build vocabulary is through grasping meaning out of context. In an article “Taking delight in words” by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan, the authors introduced the text talk approach to teach children new vocabulary words. It highlights the following:

1. Contextualize the word for its role in the story.
2. Create a phonological representation of the word by asking children to repeat the word.
3. Use a student-friendly definition to explain the meaning of the word .
4. Provide extra examples in contexts.
5. Have children interact with examples of the word’s use or provide their own.
6. Use phonological representation to reinforce the learning of new words.

In reality, I found it very beneficial to use cloze passages, where you may leave out every few words (as blanks) in reading passages. This requires readers to use the context clues to figure the passages. It gives meaning to both vocabulary words and passages. I had used it on many occasions to learn to read and memorize the reading passages and found them very effective.

Ms. Johnson was a new third grade teacher, whose passion about teaching has always been discounted by a few naughty students. She brought in plenty of interesting materials to excite her students. However, she quickly became frustrated when the class management issues got in the way. Johnny was Ms. Johnson’s biggest headache. He could not calm down, as he was constantly chatting, whistling, moving around the room, or pushing other kids. Although Johnny was excited about learning new stuff, his lack of self-control always got him into trouble. Ms. Johnson considered him the most disruptive student.

Today, Ms. Johnson started teaching a geography lesson. She brought in a few talking globes, which would generate speech or pronounce names of geographical areas when buttons were pressed. After the first part of instruction, she passed along some worksheets for students to explore the globes and find answers. Johnny started pushing buttons one by one and hearing all the speech entries from the globe. He was laughing out loud and was very much obsessed by the globe. He refused to let others touch his globe by physically pushing other students away. Even after Ms. Johnson demanded him to pass the globe to the other students, he still would not cooperate. With resentment, Ms. Johnson contacted the principal’s office and sent Johnny over to the principal.

Johnny was shocked and scared. He felt terrible and miserable at first. The secretary pointed a “time-out” chair for him to sit in. At the end of the hour, Johnny was sent back. Nobody questioned or reprimanded him and the principal did not even talk to him. He felt fine and triumphant when he returned to Ms. Johnson’s room.

At the end of the day, Ms. Johnson chatted with her next door teacher Mrs. Smart, another third grade veteran teacher, about the difficult Johnny and her decision to send for the principal this morning.

“That’s not a good move,” Mrs. Smart said, “Johnny would get away with it. He is not afraid of the principal any more. The next time you send him to the office, he would feel even more proud. However, this will make you look bad and stupid. The principal would think you don’t know how to manage your students. This could affect your annual review.”

“What should I do?”

Mrs. Smart continued, “If I were you, I would have a good conversation with Johnny. He is curious and sometimes out of control. If you give him some attention and demand him to follow certain procedures to take control, he could easily become your support. Or you can even assign him some responsibilities to help calm down other disruptive students.”

“I think I am going to give it a try.”

When teaching a class with much information to cover, the instructors tend to fall into a trap that spoon-feeding information continuously. No matter how enthusiastic the instructors are, students will be overwhelmed. Some of the strategies may be of help as follows:

1. Highlight the most important key points in the information.
2. Simplify the information and build fun and relevancy so that all students can understand the meaning of the information.
3. Use charting tools, Venn diagrams, concept mapping tools, outlining tools, and other tools to organize information visually.
4. Help students learn and memorize the information. Use free association, songs, mnemonics and games to help students memorize the information.
5. Use visuals, audio, videos, and games to make the information interesting and unique to learn.
6. Use music, themes, or art to instill new meaning.
7. Assign students into groups and have them organize information to disseminate to others. In this fashion, students take charge of their own learning and process information to share.
8. Use cloze passages to get students’ attention to process the information.
9. Provide challenges so that students can apply the information for other tasks. Engage students in debates, act out in skits,

The fifth grade teacher shook her head and said to the two student teachers in her room, “I hate it when this happens. It’s definitely not my responsibility. The half of my fifth grade students don’t know the multiplication tables. Now we are about to do two-digit multiplications and divisions. Why did they not learn the basic multiplication facts in their second, third, and fourth grades?”

It seems the fifth grade teacher has lost patience with these students. It certainly is tough. If students don’t even have the basic math skills, how can we expect them to do well on the upcoming assessment tests, meeting up on the current fifth grade level? While we don’t know who should be responsible for this, we realize that many students in this group were newly transferred from the outside schools. Since they are here, we’d better take good care of them. If we don’t help them, they are going to stagnate and make no progress.

Is the teacher in trouble?

Not really. These two student teachers and I came up with a plan. We prepared a cheat sheet of multiplication tables for students to use so that these students who were ignorant of the multiplication facts could still participate in the new learning in class using the cheat sheet. We then developed a plan to patch up what they have missed.

We decided to spend 20-30 minutes each day for a week to help these students master the multiplication tables. We explained the basic notion about multiplication using manipulatives, in that they understood that 3×4 meant 3 groups of 4 and became ready to memorize the facts. On Day One, we focused on 0’s, 1’s, 2’s and 10’s facts. That was easy. They also learned that counting by 2’s will yield the same results as the 2’s facts. On Day 2, we did a quick review first, and then focused on 3’s, 4’s, and 5’s facts. They learned that counting by 5’s was very easy, while counting by 4’s would be similar to skipping every other number in counting by 2’s. However, they needed to spend a little more time to memorize 3’s facts and that was not painful. On Day 3, we reviewed facts from 0’s to 5’s, and then we added 6’s and 7’s facts. On Day 4, we were able to complete all the facts between 0’s through 10’s. On Day 5, all of them were able to memorize all the multiplication facts between 0’s and 10’s. We stepped up the challenges by adding 11’s and 12’s facts in the table.

The teacher was now calm, and all students were ready to move on after only one short week’s remedial training.

Here is a scenario that occurred in a classroom:

Student teacher: I am asked to plan a unit and schedule two weeks to teach about the unit. Would you suggest a good topic for my unit?

Cooperating teacher: That will not be done till the end of the semester. Right? Let me start thinking and I’ll get back to you  as soon as I figure out how it can fit in my current schedule and curriculum.

The student teacher waited and waited until it was very close to the time for unit teaching and she got really panicked. She was hesitant to push because she did not want to jeopardize the good rapport with the cooperating teacher.

When working with the cooperating teacher, this student teacher should really take charge of her planning and take a pro-active approach. Of course, she should not be too pushy. However, she should be more organized and proceed with caution and strategies. She could propose some possible unit ideas and seek her cooperating teacher’s feedback, instead of leaving everything to the teacher by asking an open-ended question.

She could come up with a more specific proposal, with several options in terms of topics, lessons, and activities. She could even map out the date and time for the proposed unit lessons to be taught. When the plan is reasonable and concrete, her cooperating teacher will most likely accept her proposal.

Similarly, if you want to set a time to discuss something with someone, don’t ask, “Could we meet sometime to discuss about this?” Instead, give a specific request, “Let’s meet and discuss about this matter in detail. Does Tuesday morning, at 9 am work for you?” The former question was intended to ask the other party to accept the invitation for chatting; while the latter set the tone that it’s essential to discuss about the matter, and go directly to set the schedule.

If you think about this situation in a question-answer term, most people would be able to respond to the multiple-choice questions easily while they would have to agonize a good answer for an essay question. My advice is that you should make it simple for people to make a quick and easy decision.