Success Story: Ms. Pierce

Ms. Pierce: In my second year as literacy coach, I was introduced to Vocabulary.com — some schools in the Broward County Schools had already been using it and were really successful, so it was purchased for all the schools. But I’ll be honest, when I was told we were going to be using the program and to come in for a training, I went in thinking, “This is just one more thing.”

P: In my past experience, a lot of educational resources and technology sound great in theory, but in practice the application of them is horrible. But right away I could see how Vocabulary.com teaches words with a variety of question types and by teaching the different meanings in different contexts. For me as a literacy coach, and knowing that students need to have repeated exposures to new vocab in order to have long-term retention, when I saw that Vocabulary.com exposes them to words multiple times and in multiple different ways — that’s what got me engaged.

P: The biggest moment for me when I was learning was when I realized that you could copy and paste up to 100 pages of text and that Vocabulary.com would automatically pull out the words that were contextually important for understanding. So that was my sales pitch when I brought it to the staff to roll it out with them!

I always tell them, “If I’m telling you about this, then it’s a worthwhile resource because there are very few things that I will promote!” Because, as a former teacher myself, there’s nothing worse than thinking something is going to be great and investing all that time, and then you go to implement it in the classroom and it doesn’t work. The teachers loved the fact that you could make any text — that quickly and easily — into a vocabulary list that’s directly connected to what the kids are reading.

P: Yes! They started using the VocabGrabber feature right away! We have a program called Spartan Reads where every week the students read an article that’s related to their electives class — it’s part of our initiative to improve reading skills across the content areas. We have science teachers and P.E. coaches and E.S.O.L. teachers doing this, and they’ve learned to paste the text from the article into the VocabGrabber to make their own lists.

So now, we can actually front-load the students with the vocabulary before they do the reading. Historically, many of our students have had very low vocab skills, so they struggled with comprehension. Now that they can learn the words before the reading, you’re increasing the students’ ability to comprehend the article.

This feature was a big piece of getting buy-in from the teachers, and it’s not just that it’s fast and easy. It’s also a really good instructional practice to teach words students will see in their reading and offer multiple exposures.

P: Sure! Of course a big part of getting people on board is understanding that teachers may have already invested a lot of time in whatever they were using before, or that some may have even felt like they didn’t have time to teach vocab at all. So, bearing that in mind, in the first year I would tell our staff, “Look, give it a try! You’re never going to hurt kids by having them learn vocabulary!” And now Vocabulary.com has really taken root. Teachers see that this really works, and that the kids will actually do it, and that the data is really helpful to them. The teacher dashboard makes it very easy to see who’s doing what, and what you might want to go over in class.

P: The reporting has been great for me as an administrator. It just makes it easy for me to evaluate how we’re doing with implementation. I’m able to look across the whole district and see who’s really been working a lot with Vocabulary.com and who might need some extra support. With the reports, I know where to focus my efforts and who my go-to people are in each school. Maybe I’ll work with a teacher who’s still figuring it out, and together we’ll select some of the ready-made lists, or maybe I’ll walk them through assigning a practice. I find that just giving a little extra help makes all the difference, and then most of the staff are comfortable with doing it on their own.

Also, as an administrator who really misses working directly with kids, I love that I can see how the students are doing! One way that I like to use the data is with our incentives for kids. What’s nice with Vocabulary.com is that you can pull reports differently, so just by changing the date range, I’m able to navigate the data how I want to. It’s great because sometimes you want to recognize the top students just for one day. Sometimes we offer a challenge during a break and then when the kids come back we have an award for the students who mastered the most words. It means a lot to the kids for someone to acknowledge their effort. Who doesn’t like to get a little recognition for doing a good job?

P: We are so proud that we moved up this year in the Vocabulary Bowl! And I think that’s because at this point Vocabulary.com has really become part of the school culture. Now it’s embedded in what teachers are doing because they can really see that it makes their life easier and it works. And it’s just very manageable for students. They can do it on desktop computers, on tablets, and on their phones. It’s great that it’s something they don’t have to finish all in one sitting and that they can learn independently. And again, as a literacy coach, I just love how it actually teaches words, the exposure to different question types and contexts: synonyms, antonyms, fill-in-the-blank, definition questions. All those different ways that reinforce their understanding.

P: I’d still like to increase usage of Vocabulary.com across the content areas so that our students can continue to grow and improve their literacy skills. We’re just seeing this bear fruit and it’ll be great to see the effects of this effort in a few more years. And I’d love to see Hollywood Hills be not just in the Top Ten in the national Vocabulary Bowl, but be the number one school in Broward County. We always follow our county leaderboard! That local competition is just as important to us.