The disagreement in class started over something small, off-topic: the meaning of a particular acronym. Voices rose, classmates took sides, and Tanja, a sixth grade ELA teacher, hit pause. She saw this as a moment to reinforce class norms, reminding her students they could build on each other’s ideas and agree to disagree. Then one of the students connected the moment to a word from their unit. He described how his peers were responding to each other with “preconceived” ideas.
“It was really cool,” Tanja says, “because it’s telling me as a teacher they’re understanding the definition and how you apply that.”
Tanja’s observation raises a critical question: What separates a student who can define a word from one who actually uses it? And what instruction practices get students to the latter? Traditionally, vocabulary became its own block of the day: a list, a quiz, a task done for homework. At her previous high school, says Jessenya, who teaches seventh grade ELA, vocabulary was taught “almost separately from the story,” through SAT prep and Greek and Latin roots.
Tanja and Jessnya know from experience, like so many other literacy educators, that teaching skills in isolation doesn’t lead to meaningful learning.
At Clovis Global Academy, a K–7 Spanish dual immersion school in California, both teachers point to the transformative shift that happens when we teach differently, when the learning connects. This is the second piece in a series following the school’s first year with Inquiry by Design’s Middle School ELA curriculum: what its teachers are noticing and how they’re responding with students at the center.
In IBD’s ELA curriculum, vocabulary and grammar instruction sit inside the lesson, tied to the text students are reading. That’s Connected by Design in practice: reading, writing, discussion, and language development built into every lesson as one experience. Jessenya describes the routine: pull the word from the text in study, look at its roots and parts, name its part of speech and how grammar works in context, and, on the day we spoke, talk about connotation. “I loved that it was all together within the lesson,” she says, instead of “this separate amorphous entity that they do for homework or as a separate lesson.”
Tanja notices the words coming back across the unit: “I’m able to revisit vocabulary words across a unit, which really helps them stick. It’s how I’ve always taught vocab because it works.” She keeps a word wall in her room, too, and says the words aren’t “just these isolated words on the wall.” Instead, “we’re using them daily.”
Jessenya teaches the same students ELA, social studies, math, and science, so she can watch where a skill travels. One day in math, a student offered an observation using “pensively,” the word from that morning’s ELA lesson. “It’s so great seeing them use it in context, even outside of ELA,” Jessenya says, “because they got it, they understood it, they heard it.” The student is a multilingual learner, which made the moment especially exciting for Jessenya.
The words travel in Tanja’s room, too. In an article about September 11, another student tied prejudice back to “preconceived.” “They’re making that connection,” she says. “We’re learning all these skills for writing and characterization, but at the same time, we can apply it to history and then just real life.”
None of this happens on its own. The curriculum put the words in the room, and they landed because teachers reinforced. That’s the balance Ruth Kaur, Learning Director at Clovis, describes: “When the curriculum carries the structure, the teacher has more room to actually teach.” And, as she puts it, we read and write “not simply to complete an assignment, but to make sense of human experience.”
This is the power of connected learning. Students don’t just recite the definition of “preconceived,” like Tanja’s example, but they use that new vocabulary as a more precise and sophisticated way to make meaning of the world and their experiences in it.
We’ll continue to follow Clovis’ implementation of Inquiry by Design’s print-first ELA curriculum, sharing insights, observations, and curiosities along the way. We hope you’ll stick around and share your own experiences, too!
Inquiry by Design is a print-first English Language Arts (ELA) and Spanish Language Arts (SLA) curriculum provider for grades 6–12, serving 40+ districts and nearly 500,000 students nationwide.