Tier 1, 2 and 3

    My teammates and I are receiving modules for transition to the Common Core. This past week our module was on vocabulary instruction. The Common Core focuses on three tiers of vocabulary - tier 1, basic everyday language, tier 2, academic language that appears across numerous texts, and tier 3, content specific academic language. As I sat through this module, I thought back to our class discussion on word study and how important it is to make activities and the words in them authentic and meaningful. A point that was brought up in the module was how it is important that we, as educators, find the balance between telling the students the vocabulary terms before reading and letting them have a healthy struggle to figure out meaning through context clues and other strategies.

   It was also said in the meeting that the most important tier of vocabulary, and the most difficult, to explicitly teach are the tier two words. These are words that the students will encounter frequently, yet are not always given enough context clues to fully find the meaning. I left the module feeling like I had a lot of homework to do.

http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com/2012/09/commoncoreunpackingacademicvocabulary.html

I found this site with information on the vocabulary focus in Common Core. It gives an overview of each tier and goes into helping the educator with ideas for tier two words. I particularly liked how the site provides many technology based activities that are not time consuming, yet meet the needs of the educator. I think that using technology with vocabulary instruction would make the students more engaged as often times explicit vocabulary instruction is not the most enthralling activity for students.