New Testing; New Vocab

This school year will be the first year of the new generation testing. The computer based common core PARCC assessments. I am not looking forward to this transition, but it's not up to me or anyone I personally know. We all have to adjust.

The common core standards in themselves are a good thing. I enjoy what they expect, and I like what I'm teaching. I enjoy the collaboration and speaking and listening focus in the standards. I think these standards lend themselves much better to how I was trained as a teacher.That being said...

The testing is beyond anything that should be expected of middle school (and elementary) students. I don't believe that one test should measure the growth of a child, and I really don't think that the results should be linked to how well I teach the material! There are so many complex issues that come along with a student. How can we be pressured to differentiate all the material for students, but when it comes to this testing, it's one size fits all? As I said before, we must adjust.

One issue that I have found with students is the vocabulary of the standards. The "I Can" statements and even some of the organizer I used sometimes used language that students were confused about. I am not talking about all those lofty ACT words. I am talking about main idea verses central idea. They are the same term, and the standards use central idea more often. My students thought of central idea as "theme." That surprised me, because I thought that main verses central would be an easy transition.

That situation got me thinking. How many other students had this same problem, but didn't ask? That would be quite a few once I started looking for this problem when circulating. For the upcoming year, I am going to adjust further, because there are more words (tier 2) that need to be explicitly taught.

I had to rearrange several other word study components to make this happen. I would teach vocabulary (for context, antonym, and synonyms, and word origins) for two weeks then one week of spelling. In addition to this I taught one root word each week. I decided to take these critical academic words to teach each week. That meant shifting the root word study to someplace else. I had to come up with a new root word system, which I will share later.

I derived my Critical Academic Word Lists from a new book called 55 Words that Make or Break Student Understanding. I found this book on Amazon.

The book has a lot of good ideas on how to explicitly teach the words to students. I created lists with two words and no more than four words a week. After two or three lists, I built in a review week, which ends with a short assessment. I created a note-taking worksheet for my students will a place for notes, mnemonic devices, and a list of activities completed.

I have never done a word wall, but I plan to use one this year for these words.
I didn't think I would need to teach some of these words, so I left a few out. For example, retell seemed a very simple word for seventh grade. I was very surprised to learn out of the first 30 words--29 should be mastered by sixth grade! Again, these words are not highly cerebral. However, they have do need to be taught just for the understanding of the questioning that will appear in the new tests. A word like analysis or analyze would probably stump some of my students. They have heard it, but do they really "get" what steps they must take to analyze? I wasn't sure they would know what to do with that.

 We'll see how it goes this year!