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Robert J. Marzano: One of the more interesting characteristics about effective vocabulary instruction, from my perspective, is that students should play with words. And at first it's not obvious why that's important, but it is for a number of reasons. First of all, when they play with words, they're being exposed to words multiple times, so the more we can loop through words, the better. But the other [reason] is that they're fun. And we've got a lot of games that we can be adapted to vocabulary instruction.
Classroom scene
Adrian Leday: They got excited. They wanted to get things right. I think that it was effective because of the fact that they were learning without actually using pencil and paper. It wasn't drill-and-kill and practice. They were enjoying themselves, and they were actively participating in the lesson.
Marzano: If they associate having a good time with a word, then actually the processing of that word is something they tend to gravitate to. Now, if we associate a positive emotional with something, we like that, and we're not even sure why. So I mean, you could even say, we might be getting that motivation here by having students play with words, using games that are easily adapted to vocabulary. And the benefits are gonna be strong on a lot of fronts.
Classroom scene
Narrator: Kathleen Shipman's Algebra II students play with manipulatives to get their partners to guess mathematical concepts they learned in a previous lesson.
Kathleen Shipman: When we're coming up with new vocabulary, what I do is the first day that we're gonna look at it, we usually do a matching activity, and they had to match it up, using context clues. They can't use a book. They can't ask me Then, the next class, we do this little vocabulary building activity, where they are doing their pictorial and doing their discussion. Then, when I come to my lesson on it, that's actually the third time they actually have been introduced to that word. So it's building, over and over.
Marzano: If they're playing with the words in the form of games that the teacher has constructed, and if we did that with selected words, over time, students would understand very complex concepts in very, very sophisticated ways, and they'd probably have some fun doing it.
—An excerpt from Building Academic Background Knowledge, an ASCD video-based professional development program.
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