Student Portfolio

at the end of the memory table recording, participants were asked about the usefulness and implementation of these strategies.

At end of audio, students were asked about the usefulness or most helpful part of the memory table and responded.

At end of audio, students were asked about the usefulness of memory table.

As evidenced in the audio/video of word mapping, my participants all felt that using Word Mapping in teaching vocabulary would be very helpful. During my initial presentation, the college professor felt that this strategy would be very helpful to teach to her students for vocabulary such as Phonological, Phonemic, Orthographic....and additional content specific vocabulary.  She felt that by using this strategy with her students, they would then learn it and have the skill set to use it with their students when they student teach or have a permanent position.  During the second video taping (since my first one was lost in the cloud), the participants all felt that this would be very helpful to prepare for SATs, for such professions such as nursing and social work and more. 
During the video, I do believe that you can hear the participants discuss the benefits of using this strategy.

If you look at this like a hard-copy strategy it can be difficult to instruct- we need to stress this is a strategy to help with independent word learning.  It is fascinating to learn about how words are put together and the research support breaking words into smaller parts, and linking morphemes to generate a better lexical inventory. 

As LETRS trainers the "guessing" component in difficult because students could potentially remember the "wrong" definition, so there was a discussion about using this as a review- after the definition was taught  

Participants shared in discussion that creating a student created resource of word maps and memory tables would increase ownership in learning and attacking unknown words.  Teachers were particularly interested in trying the additional practice of working with multiple words with the targeted prefixes and integrating the words into a paragraph. Teachers are hopeful that this will increase independence in word learning. 

What are the benefits to students;
Helps students learn new words.
Helps students figure out the words themselves.
Helps students learn to study.



What are the benefits to teachers:
Teachers learn how to explicitly teach vocabulary.
Teachers organize their lessons through vocab work . 
Teachers have a strategy to help struggling learners. 

I asked Alicia two questions after the assessment: 

1. How do you feel this would help students? 
(Paraphrase) I really think the visualizing of the memory table would be loved by students. As well as folding the paper with the self-test.  That would be ideal.  The Word Maps would be a good way to learn at an early age; prefix, suffix, and roots.  

2. How would this strategy support teachers in delivering instruction to students?  
(Paraphrase) Especially with vocabulary, from what I see it is a lot of, OK.  let's write down the word and write down the definition but they don't learn it or touch it again.  Students are going to struggle to remember that. There is nothing fun or interesting in doing that. Where as this is totally different.  It is something that kids are going to enjoy doing and remember. 

(For complete responses please listen to the audio)