Want to stop wasting time on vocabulary busy work that doesn’t stick? This episode reveals research-backed vocabulary instruction strategies that transform how students learn academic terms. Using John Hattie’s surface-deep-transfer framework from Visible Learning, I’ll show you exactly how to teach vocabulary effectively. Vocabulary instruction that’s not busy work. We’ll go from SEE-IT cards to Socratic seminars, with one example (mercantilism) carried all the way through.
Remember when you assigned “define the word and use it in a sentence” and watched students mindlessly copy definitions they’d forget by next week? You’re not alone. And the research confirms what we’ve suspected all along: this traditional approach is, quite literally, “pedagogically useless.”
But here’s the good news: there’s a better way to teach vocabulary that respects your students’ intelligence, saves you time, and actually builds lasting understanding.
In this episode of If Teachers Ruled the World, I’m walking you through a research-backed approach to vocabulary instruction using John Hattie’s three stages of learning: surface, deep, and transfer. And I’m using one word, mercantilism, as our example all the way through so you can see exactly what this can look like in your classroom.
Vocabulary Instruction Strategies That Move Beyond Definitions
The problem with traditional vocabulary instruction isn’t that students are lazy. It’s that we’re asking them to do something that doesn’t actually help them learn. Research from Reading Rockets shows that “vocabulary knowledge is knowledge; the knowledge of a word not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world.”
So what works instead? Here are the key strategies I cover in the episode:
Surface Level (Building Foundation):
- Give students definitions upfront instead of having them copy
- Use 5-minute Quizlet previews to identify “struggle words”
- Try SEE-IT cards (State, Elaborate, Exemplify, Illustrate) from Visible Learning for Social Studies
- Practice with Quiz-Quiz-Trade to get students moving and actively retrieving
- Teach appositive sentence structures from The Writing Revolution
Deep Level (Understanding Relationships):
- Have students create cause-and-effect charts showing how concepts connect
- Use subordinating conjunction sentences to force critical thinking
- Incorporate close reading with primary sources (like Simón Bolívar’s Letter from Jamaica)
- Facilitate discussions that compare and contrast implementation
Transfer Level (Applying to New Contexts):
- Run Socratic seminars analyzing modern issues through historical vocabulary
- Challenge students to apply 18th-century concepts like mercantilism to contemporary trade policy
- Assess whether students can use historical frameworks to analyze current event
Teaching Vocabulary Effectively: The Reality Check
Here’s what I want you to hear: if you spend three weeks on a unit and your students only master surface-level vocabulary, that’s not failure. That’s meeting students where they are.
Ideally, you’d spend one week on surface learning, one week on deep learning, and one week on transfer that culminates in a project, Socratic seminar, or essay. But we teach real students in real classrooms with real constraints.
Some students struggle at surface level and getting them confident there is real progress. Some struggle moving from surface to deep. Advanced students often struggle from deep to transfer. With scaffolding, they can all get there. But it takes time.
Ready to transform your vocabulary instruction? Listen to the full episode for detailed examples, step-by-step implementation guides, and the research behind why these strategies work.
Key Takeaway: Traditional vocabulary instruction, defining words and using them in sentences, is pedagogically useless, but you can transform student learning by implementing research-backed vocabulary instruction strategies that move students from surface-level understanding through deep learning to transfer.
Key Moments:
1:15 – Introduction to vocabulary instruction that’s not busy work: moving beyond the traditional “define and use in a sentence” approach that students recognize as pedagogically useless
4:38 – John Hattie visible learning vocabulary framework: understanding the three critical stages of surface, deep, and transfer learning that transform teaching vocabulary effectively
7:45 – Practical vocabulary instruction strategies for the surface level: using Quizlet, struggle words, and memory tricks instead of copying definitions
11:30 – Vocabulary activities for high school using SEE-IT cards and modified Frayer models: creating meaningful engagement through state, elaborate, exemplify, and illustrate
14:24 – Active vocabulary instruction that works: implementing Quiz-Quiz-Trade, card sorts, and appositive sentences from The Writing Revolution
20:01 – Deep learning with vocabulary instruction strategies: using subordinating conjunctions, cause-and-effect organizers, and close reading of historical texts
23:53 – Surface deep transfer learning in action: applying vocabulary instruction through Socratic seminars on modern trade policy and historical mercantilism
26:01 – Realistic implementation of vocabulary instruction that works: meeting students where they are while balancing research-based practices with classroom constraints
Resources and Links
“Some Obstacles to Vocabulary Development” – Colorín Colorado
“Teaching Vocabulary” – Reading Rockets
Sign up for my Free Resource Library and snag the Socratic Seminar Template!
Grab The Complete Unit Planning System – digital course with tons of templates to plan in a snap and give your students consistency
Books Referenced:
- Visible Learning by John Hattie
- Visible Learning for Social Studies by John Hattie, Julie Stern, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey
- The Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler
Prefer Reading? I’ve Got You…
Show Transcript
I want to start by saying this episode is going to be a little bit long for a solo episode, but I think it’s really important. I’m going to walk you through some important vocabulary research and talk about what it looks like, or what it can look like in the real world, in our classrooms. And then I’m going to bring in caveats, because any practicing teacher understands that we cannot carry out research exactly as it is presented to us in the literature. And so this is meant to be a very practical, very informative episode about vocabulary instruction. If you can stick with me today, I think you’re going to find it very useful. Let’s get started.
There’s one complaint I hear from students all the time. As a matter of fact, I just heard it yesterday. And here it is. Why do we have to define words and then use them in a sentence? This is just busy work. Now, kids love to say that about just about everything. But about this, they’re right. They’re absolutely right. Students understand that looking up a word, copying down the definition, and using it in a sentence doesn’t actually help them learn. And honestly, the research backs them up on this. In fact, researchers who examined the errors students made when writing sentences based on dictionary definitions, they concluded that this activity is, and I’m quoting here, “pedagogically useless.” Let me give you an example. From the research. A student was given the definition of redress. As in set right repair remedy. Here’s the sentence they wrote: The redress for getting well when you’re sick is to stay in bed. See the problem? The student kind of got it, but not really. They had a surface level understanding that completely missed how the word actually works. So why do we keep having students do this? Is it because it’s easy to grade? Because we hope it will magically make the word stick? Because it’s what was done to us when we were students? Here’s the thing vocabulary instruction absolutely matters. Stephen Stahl, a vocabulary researcher, puts it this way vocabulary knowledge is knowledge. The knowledge of a word not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world. But if this traditional approach that we’ve all used for so many years are at least many of us have, doesn’t work, then what should we do instead? Today, I’m walking you through a complete approach to vocabulary instruction that actually works, an approach grounded in research that moves students from surface level learning to deep understanding, and then finally to transfer. And I’m going to use one word, mercantilism, as our example all the way through. So you can see exactly what this looks like in practice. All right. Let’s get started.
Before we start talking about strategies, we need to talk about John Hattie’s three stages of learning. And I hope I’m saying his name right. John Hattie, I think I am I hope I am. Uh, I’ve only seen it in print. I’ve never actually heard it spoken. These strategies are from his book Visible Learning. This is a framework that completely changed how I think about vocabulary instruction. Hattie identifies three stages. Surface level learning. This is where students build foundational knowledge. Deep learning. This is where students understand relationships and connections. And finally transfer. This is where students apply understanding to new contexts. And here’s the critical insight. Teachers often mix these levels up. We don’t give students enough time at the surface level before trying to push them to deeper work. There’s an example in Visible Learning for Social Studies by Hattie, Stern, Fisher, and Frey that illustrates this perfectly. A teacher does an entire unit on immigration, spends weeks on it, creates all these activities, and has great discussions. Then later in the year, students are reading something else and the word that’s confusing the most. Can you guess? It’s immigration. The word from the entire unit they had previously studied because they never actually mastered it at the surface level. They discussed it. They dove deep into immigration issues, but they didn’t have a surface level understanding of the vocabulary word.
So let me break down what each stage means using mercantilism as our example word. So at surface level you want to ask yourself can students define mercantilism? Can they identify it when they see it? Can they recognize examples versus non-examples. This is about building that foundational understanding. Then at the deep level you need to ask yourself do students understand how mercantilism functioned as a system? Can they trace cause and effect? Can they see relationships between mercantilism and other historical concepts? This is about understanding how things connect. Then there’s transfer level and you want to ask yourself there, can students apply their understanding of mercantilism to analyze modern trade policy? Can they use this historical concept as a lens for understanding something completely different? This is about taking knowledge and using it in brand new contexts. Most traditional vocabulary instruction, the define and use in a sentence approach, tries to do all three stages at once, or worse. It skips surface level entirely and asks students to use words they don’t actually understand yet. We’re going to talk about how to do this differently today.
All right. Let’s start with the surface level. This is where we’re building foundational understanding. And the first thing I want you to do is going to feel radical to some of us. Stop having students copy definitions. Just stop. Give them the definitions at the beginning of the unit. I have templates in my complete unit planning course, where I literally just copy and paste vocab words and definitions into a PDF. Students get these in their unit binders on day one. I’ll link to that unit planning course in the show notes. So my question is why are we still having kids copy definitions in the age of Google and AI? That’s not learning. That’s handwriting practice. And students know it. So here’s what I do instead. And of course, there’s many things you can do, but I’m just walking you through my process today. I load the vocabulary list into Quizlet. It auto generates the set for me, and we start the unit with five minutes of Quizlet. I’m a huge fan of Quizlet Learn, but I let students pick whatever mode they want, flashcards matching whatever works for them. After those five minutes, I have students write down their struggle words. The words where even after seeing the definition, they still don’t get. Words that at a cursory glance, they were struggling with. Then I asked them to think of one way they might remember that word. Is there something they can associate with it? A mnemonic or a memory trick? Something that gives the word meaning in their mind. And then we discuss what they came up with as a class. Students share their memory tricks. When someone comes up with a really good one, everyone benefits. From there we might do a couple of rounds of Quizlet live, usually as individuals first, not as teams. This is a low stakes, gamified pretesting method. I can view the stats and see which words they’re missing most. Then we can go over those. This gives students an overview of where they’re starting, and it gives me data about what we need to focus on.
Now we need to deepen that surface level understanding. I’m going to give you two options. You can use one, or you can use both of them depending on what works for your students. Or you can come up with your own. The first one is a modified frayer model that I have, and this is modified just really to save paper. It’s a vocab chart. It’s laid out on a table and sometimes I’ll give it to students to fill out. Sometimes I’ll fill it out myself and use it as an anchor chart in the classroom. So the word is in one column, and then students put the definition for the word in their own words. That’s key. And it’s actually harder than it sounds. I share exemplars with the other students when one student nails it, and that’s important too, because they need to see examples of what that looks like. Then they do use the word in a sentence, but we move on to that step after we’ve really talked about the definition and introduced it with Quizlet and discuss the words like I was talking about, then they find a synonym. Sometimes I have them find an antonym too, and then they draw an illustration that represents that word to them. And I want you to remember for the definition that the key here is in their own words, if a student can take a complicated definition and get it down to something really short and clear, that they understand, that is a skill of translating definitions into your own language and that surface level processing matters.
Option two is SEE-IT cards. And this comes from visible learning for social studies. I really, really love this the structure. It’s similar to the Frayer model, but with a little more scaffolding, and students are actually using index cards. So on the front of the card they write the word. So for our example the word is mercantilism. On the back students complete four sections. The acronym for it is SEE-IT. The S is state. State the idea clearly in your own words. For mercantilism, a student might write an economic system where colonies exist to make the mother country rich. That’s not a perfect definition, but that is meaningful to the student, and it gets at the heart of the idea. E is elaborate. So for this they would add some nuance and some detail. For example, the governments control trade. Colonies can only trade with the mother country. The goal is to accumulate gold and silver. The second e is exemplify. Give examples and give non-examples. This is kind of like our Frayer model synonym and antonym. Some examples might be the British Navigation Acts, Spanish treasure fleets, French colonial trade restrictions. Some non-examples might be free trade. Laissez faire economics. Modern global markets. The I is illustrate. Draw it. A student might draw ships carrying goods from colonies to Europe, or maybe gold coins flowing into a treasury. I really like this structure because it builds in the elaboration piece, and it forces students to really think about what the word is not, which actually deepens their understanding.
Now here’s what’s critical. Don’t just check these cards for a grade and move on. Use them. Have students bring these cards to class every single day. You can use a class set of these to play Quiz-Quiz-Trade. This is a Kagan structure that gets students up and moving. Every student starts with one card. You can play music or set a five minute timer, and students walk around the room and they find a partner, so they’ll just stop. They’ll face a student, and student A shows their word. Student B has to state it, or maybe later in the unit, elaborate or exemplify. If they can’t, student A shows them the back quickly. Then student B shows their word. Student A responds. They trade cards and find a new partner. By the end of five minutes, students have practiced every single word. They’re up. They’re out of their seats. They’re moving around. They’re getting the blood flowing to their brains. This is active retrieval practice disguised as a game.
Then there’s card sorts. You can give students a sorting mat, just paper divided into columns, and have them categorize the words. Start simple. For history, I might start with people events, concepts because my students will absolutely match a person’s name to an event definition in the pre-test, and this helps them see the difference. Then I get more complex. Maybe they sort by time period, or by cause versus effect, or by political versus economic versus social. Eventually students create their own categories and justify why they group the words together. You can do this multiple times throughout the unit with the same cards. Each time students are processing the relationships between concepts more deeply. Oh, and by the way, with the Kagan structure, I did say something about having a class set of those cards. Here’s a good option for creating that. You can divide your class into groups and each group gets a different set of words. You can divide your vocab list up into sets, and they create SEE-IT cards together for their little set. Then you combine each group set into one class set. Now you can do big sorts as a full group. You could even do this in the hallway on a big piece of butcher paper or on a wall, and have students stick the cards to it and take them off or on the floor and have students put the cards down in the categories. It becomes this physical, collaborative activity, and it’s one you can do as a whole class.
One more surface level strategy I absolutely love comes from the Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman in Nancy Wexler. It’s teaching sentence structures while reinforcing vocabulary. My favorite one to start with with students is the appositive sentence. An appositive sentence follows this structure. Noun. Comma. Definition. Comma. Significance. Period. And for this I think I’m going to use a different word besides mercantilism. Just because this is popping up to the forefront of my mind because we just did it in world history. So if we’re going to talk about absolute rulers and compare Tsar Peter the Great to Louis the fourteenth, I might open class with those two names and have the kids write an appositive sentence for each as a bell ringer. For example, Louis the fourteenth comma, an absolute ruler of France, comma built the Palace of Versailles period. Or Louis the fourteenth. Comma, the sun King of France, comma is the quintessential absolute ruler of the seventeenth century period. There are so many ways students can answer this, because they’re naming it. They’re defining it in their own words, and they’re stating a significance. Plus, they’re learning a sentence structure that’s descriptive and pretty sophisticated. You can also do this as an exit ticket at the end of class. After you’ve done a lesson comparing Louis the fourteenth to Tsar Peter the Great, you can have them write an appositive sentence about each, or you can take it further. And this actually gets a little into the deep learning portion and have them use subordinating conjunctions. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about these later. But here’s just an example with this. Because the nobility of France was so powerful, and so you would give them that little, that little phrase because the nobility of France was so powerful, or that, I guess, dependent clause. And then they would add the comma and they would add to it. Louis the fourteenth lessened their power by making them live at the Palace of Versailles with him, so he could keep an eye on them. And then they could do one for Tsar Peter the Great that talks about the beard tax and westernization, and forcing the nobility to dress in a certain way. See you’re giving students sentence starters that encourage comparison and complex thinking while they’re using vocabulary. That is a win win, I think.
Okay, so your students have spent time at the surface level. They can define mercantilism. They can identify it. They can give examples. They can give non-examples. Now we move into deep learning. This is where we shift from what is mercantilism to how does mercantilism work and how does it connect to other concepts? At the deep level, I want students creating their own graphic organizers, not filling in ones I’ve made, creating them. For mercantilism, a cause and effect chart would work really well. Students could trace the flow. For example, mercantilism, and then an arrow that leads to state control of trade and an arrow that leads to colonies must trade only with the mother country. And an arrow that leads to competition among European powers for the colonies. And an arrow that leads to resentment builds in colonies, and an arrow that leads to eventually revolution. Students are showing that they understand not just what mercantilism is, but how it functions as a system and what it leads to.
Okay, so I said I was going to bring up subordinating conjunction sentences again. At the deep level, we’re using subordinating conjunctions to force students to think about relationships. So I might give the students this clause because mercantilist policies restricted colonial trade, and then have them finish the sentence. And they might say American colonists grew increasingly resentful of British control. Or I might give them a different one. Although Spain enforced strict mercantilist policies and they might finish it with colonists found ways to engage in illegal trade. I might even give them a blank and then a comma, and I might write this part. It impoverished colonial economies. Well, then they could open the sentence with something like while mercantilism enriched European powers. So the sentence would be while mercantilism enriched European powers, it impoverished colonial economies. These sentences require students to understand causation and comparison. They set students up to write thesis statements with nuance, with counterclaim and claim. And I love that. They can’t just plug in the definition. And that’s key for this. They have to actually understand how the concept works.
I’m also a fan of close reading at this stage, so this is where we see vocabulary in authentic historical texts. For mercantilism, I might use excerpts from the Navigation Acts to show the policy in action, but here’s one I really love as a world history teacher. Simon Bolivar’s Letter from Jamaica, written in 1815. Now, my students have traditionally had an issue with reading this document. They have a tendency to read this letter at the surface level, and I’m going to quote from this letter so that you can see what I’m talking about. So Bolivar writes, we are still in a position lower than slavery, and therefore it is more difficult for us to rise to the enjoyment of freedom. States are slaves because of either the nature or the misuse of their constitutions. A people is they’re enslaved. Oh, I cannot read today. A people is therefore enslaved when the government, by its nature or its vices, infringes on and usurps the rights of the citizen or subject. Oh, that was hard. So a lot of times my students will read that and they’ll say to me, oh, so they’re slaves to the Spanish. Do you see that mistake? Bolivar’s not talking about literal slavery. He’s describing economic and political oppression through mercantilist policies. He goes on to detail how Spain controlled what they could produce, who they could trade with, what they had to grow. All the restrictive practices of mercantilism. This is deep reading. Students have to use their understanding of mercantilism to interpret what Bolivar’s actually saying. So then we want to bring class discussion into this and comparison. At the deep level, class discussions become more analytical. Instead of what is mercantilism? We’re asking how did British mercantilism differ from Spanish mercantilism? What were similarities and differences in implementation? Why did these differences matter? Students are using vocabulary to make sophisticated arguments about relationships between concepts.
All right. Here’s where it gets really interesting and sometimes a little intimidating. This is the transfer level. Now transfer is when students can take their understanding of mercantilism and apply it to something completely new. Here’s what I like to do. I like to assign readings about current trade policy, maybe articles about tariffs, trade wars, protectionism, then have a Socratic seminar. The question how do modern protectionist policies compare to historical mercantilism? What’s similar, what’s different? What can history teach us about these approaches? Students have to use their understanding of an eighteenth century economic system to analyze twenty first century policy. That’s transfer. I’ve got a free Socratic seminar template in my resource library at leahcleary.com. It works so well for this. It’s got assessment built right in with rubrics and everything. You can sign up for my free resource library. I will link in the show notes where you can do that. And here’s what I’m looking for with that Socratic seminar on those readings. Are students making genuine connections? Do they understand the concepts well enough to see parallels? Can they use historical vocabulary to discuss contemporary issues? That’s one. But here’s some other transfer possibilities. You could have students analyze China’s Belt and Road Initiative through a mercantilist lens. You could have students evaluate America First trade policy using a mercantilist framework. You could have students compare economic nationalism today to seventeenth to eighteenth century mercantilism. Oh, that would be really interesting. You could have students apply their understanding to a completely different time period. What about in world history Roman economic policy? The key here is that they’re not just recalling information. They’re using historical concepts as tools for analysis in brand new contexts.
Okay. So let’s talk about timing because I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Leah, this all sounds great, but I have forty seven other things to teach and three weeks to do it. And I, of all people get that. I really, really do. Ideally, if we’re doing a three week unit, we’d spend about a week on surface level, a week on deep learning and a week on transfer that culminates in something like a Socratic seminar, a debate, an essay, a presentation, a podcast, a dbq something students create. That’s ideal, but we live in the real world. And while all of this research is phenomenal, when we apply this research, we have to apply it with our students and the reality of our schedules in mind. And sometimes surface level is all we can do in three weeks. And that’s not a failure. That’s meeting students where they are. I’ve had classes where it’s difficult in three weeks to get students to the deep level, and I’m happy if we can solidly nail the surface. I’m not going to lie about that. I have other classes where I can get students to the transfer level. It just depends on the students. It depends on the year. It depends on a thousand variables, such as scheduling that we don’t control. We have to meet students where they are. We have to make sure they adequately get the surface level before we move on.
And different students struggle at different points in this progression. Some of my students who are struggling readers or English language learners, they might get stuck at the surface level. And you know what? If we can get them confident at surface level, that’s good. That’s real learning. A lot of my students struggle going from surface level to deep thinking about causation, continuity and change comparison. that’s an added layer. But with scaffolding they can do it. You just have to work a little harder to support them. And I’ve noticed that even my more advanced students, my gifted students, my AP and IB students, they’ll struggle from deep to transfer. But again with scaffolding and practice they can get there. The point is this. It’s not about perfection. This is about progress. If by the end of three weeks your students have gotten the surface level and that’s all they’re able to get, that’s not ideal. But it is reality. And sometimes that’s all we can do.
If we can spend a week on the surface, a week on deep and a week that culminates in some kind of transfer activity. That’s when vocabulary instruction actually sticks. That’s when vocabulary instruction is beautiful and it shines because that’s when students can use these words years later. So here’s my challenge to you. Start with one thing. Maybe you just stop having students copy definitions and give them the definitions instead. That is a great place to start. Maybe you try one round of quiz quiz trade with cards students have already made. Maybe you incorporate appositive sentences as bell ringers. You don’t have to overhaul your entire vocabulary instruction tomorrow. Just pick one strategy and try it. Because here’s what I know. When we respect student intelligence, when we focus on meaning making instead of compliance, when we work smarter instead of harder. And I’m not going to lie, that one’s hard for me. Vocabulary instruction stops being busy work and starts being real learning. And the students, they notice. They engage differently when they understand that we’re not wasting their time.
The resources I mentioned today, the Socratic Seminar the Complete Unit Planning course. You can find those on my website, at leahcleary.com, but I’ll also link to them in the show notes. The research I cited is from Visible Learning by John Hattie, Visible Learning for Social Studies by Hattie, Stern, Fisher, and Frey, The Writing Revolution by Hochman and Wexler, and articles from Reading Rockets and Colorin Colorado, which I will also link to in the show notes. Remember adequate is actually strategic. Good enough is good. Students need sustainable teachers more than perfect ones. Let’s do what works at the surface level. Keep reassessing as we go and try to move to deeper levels when we can. But always, always keep reality in mind. Keeping where our students are in mind is important. Keeping time constraints in mind is important. Because that, my friends, is what real teaching looks like. Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you next time.