I spent last year as a teacher-vagrant, lugging boxes of resources from room to room, teaching in spaces unsuited to my subject and struggling to set up routines with classes who I taught in four different places. I imagine this experience is familiar to many teachers working in small schools, but I think the impact of it is often underplayed. 

This year, finally gaining a home, I saw immediate improvements in my lessons: the pace is faster because routines have been easier to embed; students are calmer and unsurprisingly more punctual; even their books are tidier because they know where to find resources. 

Crucially, I have also been able to work towards creating a more word-rich environment for teaching English in. I love Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered and all of Alex Quigley’s work on vocabulary and have found, like them, that teaching vocabulary is much more effective when students are surrounded by the words they’re being encouraged to use. Yes, I’ve loved finally sticking up some pretty posters and the obligatory connectives underground map display, but I’ve also worked hard to use displays as interactive places for us to collect vocabulary in order to use it in our talk and writing.

Tier 3* Vocabulary Flipchart:

This really simple idea is the one I think has the most impact on my lessons. I’ve pinned a flipchart to a noticeboard at the front of the room and I use it to keep track of key tier 3 vocabulary for each class, each term.

All of our schemes of work include lists of tier 3 vocabulary, like the one pictured below, to teach and review where relevant in the unit. As we come to each, I record it on the flipchart, so it gradually fills with this learning over the course of the term. If you look at the example above, you’ll notice that it also includes tier 3 vocabulary that isn’t on the scheme of work; I think this flexibility is crucial to good vocabulary teaching too. My year 7s identified a flashback and were excited to learn the term ‘analepsis’, especially when I told them that my year 13s keep forgetting it. 

This display is great for quick retrieval questions and helps to remind me as well as students what we’ve covered. Because it’s a flipchart, it’s easy to flip quickly to the next class as well as to turn back to the last term’s vocabulary too to aid spaced practice, rather than filling the walls with terms that are only relevant to some groups. 

* For a quick explanation of tiers of vocabulary and why it’s a useful way to think about vocabulary instruction, see here. 

Other displays of tier 3 vocabulary: 

I love these key term posters generously shared by @Matthew_Lynch44. I’ve displayed them in the awkward space above the windows in my room which isn’t otherwise very useful. Year 11, in particular, have found them helpful reminders of terms they learned lower down the school and can now apply to Macbeth. 

I also occasionally create other interactive, temporary displays for tier 3 vocabulary if we’re working on the same term for a few lessons, like the one below of student examples of foreshadowing. 

Tier 2 words of the lesson:

On the display board at the front of the classroom with my flipchart, I have a small chalkboard that I bought at a pound shop years ago and found so useful that I brought it to Kathmandu with me. 

I currently use it to record a tier 2 word that each KS3 class has come across in each lesson. These might have arisen from a text that we’ve read or from student writing, but before they go on the board we define them together. At the start of the next lesson, I ask students to use the word in a sentence as they come into the room or to give me a synonym, antonym or action for it. Again, I like the flexibility of this and can see students adopting these words in their own writing regularly. 

Vocabulary for Writing: 

I inherited this display of active verbs for writing analysis from the room’s previous occupant and kept it because I like the discussions it provokes among students. I remind them frequently that they need to select carefully and demonstrate this for them when I live model too. “I’ve already used ’emphasises’, so maybe I’ll use ‘highlights’ here since it’s quite a close synonym.” 

Literary Love:

I love collecting quotations with students, not just for learning by heart to regurgitate in the exam, but for enjoying in their own right. 

I encourage students to take a page in their planners to do this when reading for pleasure and we have a quotation wall in my classroom that any of them can add to. When we ran out of space, they started sticking scrap paper quotations around it too. I love the little images they’ve started to draw as well. 

For each of our key stage 3 themes, which are repeated twice over the three years, we’ve also displayed a key quotation that students discuss at the beginning and ends of the unit, applying them to the texts of study. 

I’d love to know how else English teachers and those in other subjects have created word-rich classrooms for their students to interact with, so please get in touch.