A Focus on Vocabulary

Yesterday, we had a professional development day at my school. (We're closed today for Cesar Chavez Day, which is why I'm writing this at ten in the morning.) We spent the morning on teaching vocabulary. A couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues, Nancy, and I spent a Wednesday at a middle school where we received the training that we then taught yesterday to the rest of the teachers at our school. It went really well. I was worried because a lot of our professional development time is not well-spent, and we don't look forward to these days. But Nancy and I put together a pretty good morning training, if I do say so myself. And I did get some good feedback as well. The other fifth-grade teacher at my school said we did a good job, and my student teacher said he learned a lot. If you're interested, you can see the research article, A Focus on Vocabulary, that was one of the resources we used in our training.