I am a first year middle school, special education teacher. I am currently getting my masters in Literacy. In my self-contained classroom many of my students struggle with aspects of literacy in all subject areas, which affects their ability to learn the content. In learning about Robert Marzano’s six steps for teaching vocabulary instruction in my literacy class, I wanted to focus on improving my student’s vocabularies. Currently, my students give up when they see a word that do not know or guess at random, but do not check the sentence to see if the word makes sense. I think my students lack the confidence to learn more complex words and apply the words when they are engaging in literacy activities. I wanted my students to have …show more content…
Marzano’s process ask secondary teachers to pick content words that are critical to student’s understanding of the subject matter and engage students in a set of activities and helping students develop a robust vocabulary by engaging in conversations about the words being studied. According to McKeown, Beck and Kucan (2013) in order to develop a robust vocabulary, students need many exposures to new words in a variety of contexts. Marzano’s strategy asks teachers to be very intentional about the words they are choosing, to think about how the words relate to the content being studied and teachers should introduce the words as they are appropriate or needed in the curriculum (Baumann & Graves, …show more content…
When the instructional strategy was taught with fidelity across schools and grade levels (elementary to high school) the findings were considered statistically significant. The highest effect rate was the elementary level, and middle and high school were about the same effect rate. Because of the numerous strategies offered by Marzano for teachers to pick from it is difficult to know which strategies had the most significant effect at the each grade level, however the results of research studies and meta-analysis finds significant growth in students from all age groups when engaged in Marzano 's six step vocabulary instruction.
Question?
How could I use Marzano’s six- step strategy to improve to comprehension of and use grade level vocabulary words in a self-contained grades 6-8 language arts