Success Story: Mr. Jaramillo

Mr. Jaramillo: When we started looking at the vision for our school and our district over five years ago, we met with stakeholders and business leaders within our community. We asked them, “What are you looking for when you hire people?” The response we got was that they’re looking for young people who are articulate, who are strong problem solvers, and who can write. And for many years, we’ve had our own career day. Business leaders from different industries come in and they’ll tell the kids, “Make sure you can read and write.” So that dovetails with our long-standing commitment to vocabulary instruction, and ultimately that led us to Vocabulary.com.

J: Teaching vocabulary is an established norm for us, and has been for a long time. Since I started as a teacher here back in the mid-80s we’ve been teaching vocab, starting with workbooks. But there came a time when the kids were simply not engaged with the workbooks any more, and they were merely compliant with that approach. So then we started looking at the digital resources, and that led us to Vocabulary.com.

J: We did evaluate other products, but in the end more teachers were happy with Vocabulary.com, so that’s what we went with. What worked is that it’s really pliable for them. It genuinely allows them to customize the work and modify the assignments to support their curriculum and their students.

J: So, all of this has been a natural progression for us. First of all, if you get hired as a teacher at Etiwanda, you know vocabulary is a must. So the commitment to vocabulary was already there — Vocabulary.com is just a new vehicle that we’re driving!

Also, we’re very well-equipped here in terms of devices, with a one-to-one ratio or even better in some classes. So our teachers have been willing to embrace digital learning because we have the tech to support it. We also make sure that it’s not a barrier to our students outside of the classroom, so we open our library early to give kids access, and nowadays so many students have phones to access their learning.

So the teachers have embraced it, they’re on the same page, and now our students come in as freshmen and they’re using Vocabulary.com right up through.

And do see we results in our classrooms? Yes. We have seen our students become better readers, writers and communicators. But what I’m really looking forward to, because this is year three for our implementation, is to see improvement on our AP scores and our state tests for this group of 11th graders in the spring.

J: And this need to prepare kids for testing does not only pertain to the teachers in our English department. 70% of the questions on the state reading and writing test are nonfiction, so the vocabulary is not focused on literature. It’s more general, academic vocabulary.

J: Yes, the importance of vocab is reinforced by our mission statement which is based on what our community stakeholders have told us is important to them: articulate students who can read and write.

J: The kids are aware of the Bowl, but that really isn’t anything that we ever put in the forefront. But the element you do see here is that our teachers are very close to each other on this campus, and they love to have competition between their own classes. So you’ve got Teacher A and Teacher B who are good friends and they’ll say to their classes, “OK kids, let’s see if we can catch them this month!” And if the teachers are having a great time with it, and the teachers believe in it, then the kids are going to do the same thing.

The Vocab Bowl has been incredible for our community and for our kids. Do they love the recognition? Absolutely. Especially when they get those medals around their necks. But to be honest, that’s just gravy. If the Vocab Bowl didn’t exist, our kids would still do extremely well on Vocabulary.com because they work hard, they’re engaged, and our teachers are committed to it. For them, it’s really about learning for its own sake.

J: This is 21st century education, it’s the next generation of learning. Vocabulary.com has been really good for our kids and we’re seeing results because of it.

And I just so enjoy the partnership we have with you folks at Vocabulary.com. We’ve always been treated very well. Any time that our staff has had to reach out, your folks have always been there to support our teachers — which ultimately supports kids. You’re leading the way.