S12 E5: From Vocabulary to Visuals: Bridging Science Education Gaps for Diverse Learners

In this episode of Practical Access, Dr. Michael Kennedy, professor at the University of Virginia and co-editor of the Journal of Special Education Technology, shares his expertise in high-leverage practices (HLPs). Known as an expert in the field, Dr. Kennedy provides insights into explicit instruction as a crucial approach for supporting students with disabilities in science education. He discusses the importance of using clear language, concrete examples, and repetition to make complex scientific concepts, such as meiosis and photosynthesis, more accessible. 

The conversation explores effective ways to balance explicit vocabulary instruction with engaging, hands-on learning. Michael emphasizes using “anchor images,” relatable examples, and student-friendly language to help learners connect personally with the material. He also highlights the role of cognitive load in teaching and how reducing it can benefit both teachers and students, making science more inclusive. Tune in for practical tips on integrating explicit instruction in science classrooms and supporting all students in building lasting, meaningful knowledge.

We love to hear from our listeners! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We look forward to receiving your questions on our Twitter (@Accesspractical) or Instagram (@Practical_Access).

Michael Kennedy’s Bio: https://education.virginia.edu/about/directory/michael-j-kennedy

Vocab Support: https://www.vocabsupport.com/the-caps-team.html

Transcript

Lisa Dieker  00:07

Welcome to Practical Access. I'm Lisa Dieker.

Rebecca Hines  00:10 

And I'm Rebecca Hines, and Lisa is so excited about today's guest because he's the HLP wizard and much, much more. Lisa, who do we have? 

Lisa Dieker  00:23

Well, we have both a friend and a colleague here, Michael Kennedy, who's a professor at the University of Virginia, and he's the co-editor of the Journal of Special Education Technology. So welcome Michael. We're so excited to have you.

Michael Kennedy  00:35

Lisa, Rebecca, thank you so much. Good to see you both. Looking forward to our chat.

Lisa Dieker  00:40

Yeah, so, so since you are the writer of the HLPs, no one of the one, out. Yeah, one of many, many, many in special education, we have a project where we're really trying to help people in math and science think deeply about how to do a better job in working with kids with disabilities. So, I'm asking kind of a, maybe a question you've never been asked before, which HLP, do you think is the most important to start with, if I'm a novice teacher working with kids in science and they have disabilities, that I really should think about as I start my journey as a new teacher in science and special education?

Michael Kennedy  01:18 

Yeah, well, I'll never not say explicit instruction that perhaps the most predictable of all the answers, and I'll tell you why. It's because we think about explicit instruction as being one thing, and it's not. It's lots of things you know, using clear cues, using clear language, going out of your way to provide rich examples, modeling, providing guided practice, providing independent practice and the use of explicit instruction and its components are going to help students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and all students receive information about very complex terms in science a lot of times the words that we teach kids meiosis, it means nothing. You know, it has a very technical we wouldn't be here without it, but it has a very technical definition. All of the words that you would use and find to define it need definitions themselves. And so, a master of explicit instruction would go out of their way to be really specific about that nuance. And think through, oh, I can't just give the jargon. I can't talk about the prophase and the anaphase and the sister chromatids. I need to think about, no, this is cell division. This is how cells reproduce, and how we're all here without getting too graphic about it. So, there's my thoughts about that.

Rebecca Hines  02:57

So, I will ask you, then, Michael, what did we do then? So, when we're trying to explain meiosis in a way that it becomes situated knowledge for the learner, not just a vocabulary word to understand. Can you expand on that a little more? I'm sure you've been in classrooms where everyone else hangs on to it, but you've got a few kids who are really struggling. How are we going to help those students have even another layer?

Michael Kennedy  03:26

Yeah, I think the most important thing Rebecca is personal connections. We're not great at this. We in special ed are generally pretty great at this, because we're always thinking about, how can I relate this.

Rebecca Hines  03:40

Right.

Michael Kennedy  03:40

Because a lot of times we don't know. I work in science. I don't know anything about science. I don't know what my I know a little bit. I know enough to be appropriately conversational about it, but I don't know the half the words that my team, we create these materials all the time, that we're giving to teachers to use and kids to use, and families to use. I have no idea what these words are, what they mean. They might as well be in a different language. And so, the use of vivid images that can this is what it looks like, you know, just showing a cell pulling apart and creating two that means something like, I oh, you know, you could just sort of see it. And then here's the personal thing, Photosynthesis. It's the thing you know, like, do you like that air you're breathing right now? That's this, you know, the result of this process. So, personal connections, images, and then at first exposure, using language that students are prepared to understand. You know you don't have. You can just say it's cell division. It's this. It's the plants using the sun's energy to make make its food, which a byproduct of which keeps you alive. I know we can't hide from the technical full definition a lot of times, because, you know that's that's they need to know, the more technical they need to talk about the ATP and the, you know, all of that. But if they don't have anything on which to attach that, that's why I say the student friendly language, the use of examples, the use of images and then repetition. We're hor we're horrendous in teaching. We think you got the measles inoculation when you were a baby. I didn't get measles. Okay, we're good. Now, it's not like that with teaching. I said it once. You must have heard it, therefore you learned it. Let's move on. I'm not saying it again. You didn't learn it. That's on you. You know, we just can't do that. We really have to be strategic about being, giving kids information over and over again in ways that they can they can grapple with.

Lisa Dieker  06:02

So, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't take you on in a positive challenge. And for the listeners that don't know us, we're very good friends. So, I know I can do this, and I 100% believe in explicit instruction, and especially for kids who struggle with language and vocabulary. But help me understand that balance, because I know you respect that balance too, of student discourse, which is the core value in the 5E learning cycle model in science, where does this explicit instruction of vocabulary and that need for kids to have those personal connections? Because I always say, you know, in social studies, of vocabulary is not as hard, because it's about humanity in most cases. Whereas I've never been a plant and been through Photosynthesis. So, there's always that struggle, as you said, to personalize it. Which I which I loved what you said there. So how do we balance that? That I want kids to be at a group course, but I struggle with language, and yet I need to be taught the language. How do I do both at the same time and not go (scream)?

Michael Kennedy  07:01

Yeah, well, thanks for mentioning history for one, because remember the word revolution means something quite different in history and economics, but over in science, it's kind of talking about something else. So, we set kids up, yeah, in a lot, you know, just our wonderful English language, it's full of words like that that are confusing students, especially our multilingual learners. But no, you're absolutely right. And this is, this is an appropriate challenge. And every time I write a manuscript and submit it to a science-ed journal, you know this is coming, or if you submit a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation, and it's the right question, because, as I said a minute ago, we can't hide from the rigor of this, we can't hide. We shouldn't, and we shouldn't hide from the disciplinary norms, as you alluded to. We want kids to act and function as scientists in order to appropriately engage the content, but students aren't in the position to do it until they have this base understanding, and then they've got a puncher's chance. So, what we like to do in our science work is we'll front load the explicit instruction, because the science teachers don't really want to spend that much time on vocab anyway. It's not really in their training through teacher ed. It's nothing they're interested in. But if we can give them these materials that are premade, which is what we do in our lab, and we're using AI to do it now, which is cutting our production time in not even in half, it's it's amazing with what's possible already, and it's getting better all the time. So, if we can make evidence, evidence based practices, using the principles of explicit instruction, using these images, using repetition, and built in questions, all the things that we know are very effective for kids with disabilities, put those in the hands of the general ed teacher to use, or actually, that's a special-ed teacher could do that. That's one of the ways we're helping to get co teaching to happen, because a lot of times in the secondary setting, the SPED teacher doesn't know what to do, because I don't know the stuff, but they can learn the vocab. So either whichever one do that, and then we are building in simulations. We're building in demonstrations that do what you're talking about, because science is supposed to be touched and smelled and grappled with in interesting ways, and we want that. That's exactly what we want. We just don't want to throw kids into the pot and say, try to figure this out for kids that have intellectual disability or autism or some other disability that's cognitively facing that isn't going to allow it. They might like it. They might enjoy it, but throw me a question about it afterwards. I might as well not have been there. So that's why we I it's almost like a flipped approach, but I wouldn't trust that the kids would pick it up, not in class.

Rebecca Hines  10:06

You know, when. When you look at information processing in general, and everybody sits and consumes in the classroom that that short-term, you know, event, but if there's not rehearsal, as you said, it's never stored. So, I'm gonna be the up. I'll be the intermediary between Lisa's original point, you know, and that idea that the word needs to be said many times by many people in the classroom, and sometimes, for me, it's been in a co-teach setting, and I might be the special educator, and I might say, You know what? Let me, I'll own vocab in here. I'll bring it up, I'll use the word. I'll count how many times we use that word, until we get to a really comfortable spot where the kids start remembering the word better. And I think that's kind of, you know what you're getting at there. So, Michael, I know you've done work in all in all different areas. So not, not just, not just the the vocab piece, what do you think for for young teachers or new teachers, what do you see them struggle with the most when supporting kids with any kind of difference in in science? 

Michael Kennedy  11:24

Yeah, I wish we did more in our work in teacher ed, I wish we did more in professional development and just talking about the basics of Cognitive Load Theory and helping our remembering ourselves, because I know we know it conceptually, but we don't talk about it, but we don't talk about it with our teachers nearly enough. I have a presentation I give on this, and I the title, it's rhetorical, is, are we talking enough about cognitive load? And the answer is no. And the issue for young teachers, for all teachers, is we're all burdened with being alive. By that, I mean, we're worried about our finances. We're worried about my knee hurts. We're worried about my mom is sick. We're worried about life. Then throw into the mix. Okay, now I've got this ridiculously difficult job to do with 22, 25, 30 students at a time that all have their own unique cognitive needs. I'm teaching content which with with which I may not be fully comfortable. I mean, if I'm a scientist, sure, but if I'm me, I'm making it up. Now I'm reading what I can to stay afloat from moment to moment. And then I'm using these teaching practices with which, if I've never used them before, everything is going to be I have a cognitive load. And so, as I think about how that impacts students, that's it's sort of easy to see the impact on them. As kids get overwhelmed in any given moment, and then they stop paying attention because they're not willing to pay attention to something that's frustrating them. They don't like feeling that way, so they don't they just shut off, and some kids kick the desk over, and other kids put their head in the desk. Either way. For teachers, it's similar. This is one of the reasons why so many teachers leave, is because I hate feeling like a failure every single day. I'm not going to keep doing something, you know? I mean, I know I'm getting paid, and there's benefits here, so people stick it out. But there's lots of ways to do that, make money and get benefits. So, as I think about cognitive load and its impact, it's really paramount, and so managing that for the teacher is really difficult, and that's the core of our work. This is one of the reasons why. Like, if you go to vocabsupport.com, you'll find over 200 slide shows, four science words made. And here you go, because you know you can change if you don't like the definition, change it, you don't like the images, change them. But here you go, and what we find is our newer teachers, or out of area teachers, you might as well be handing them you know the King James, or fill in with your favorite holy book. And our veteran teachers will say, oh, I can see what you're going for here. I've got slides that are like this, but I could, I'll plug this in too, and that's where we learn really interesting things. So, managing cognitive load is well beyond just vocabulary. It's something that we really need to be paying more attention to in our field.

Lisa Dieker  14:29

So, so our last question, and I love that it's cognitive load, and it's going to lead to a weird spot, but I it's one that I would love to get your thoughts on. So, there is some emerging research that shows that smell and taste lay closest to the sensory part of the brain where long term memory is stored. And I love it. We mentioned pictures and movement. I'm curious what you would tell me as kind of your parting thoughts here. If I've got two minutes and and that's all the time I can squeeze in before the kid has to go to a group and do so like, where do I start? There's so many things I could do, but let's take the word photosynthesis. You're right. You know, the word photo means something in one world, photosynthesis means something else, and synthesis means, you know, where do I start? What would be your kind of, your parting thoughts of all right, Lisa, new teacher, do this before you do anything else?

Michael Kennedy  15:20

Yeah, I would. I would track down what we call an anchor image for each that's going to be the main image that you utilize over and over again. If you see tree, you see plants, you're thinking about Photosynthesis. I would think about the language that's going to define it without needing other words that need defined themselves. And I'm going to get an army of examples. So often we just say, yeah, an example of that is some throw away thing, and then let it go. No, we want to teach the examples. We want to explain. This is an example because and then do multiple ones and let kids talk about it, let them come up. Could you think of one? And there's not always that's always possible, like, you know, some things we teach, there isn't anything obvious, and so that we need to do more work in those circumstances. But a lot of times, there are, and science lends itself to this, especially in the physical sciences, there's so much for kids to go and find or touch, or I could find for them if they can't, but just popping on a video, that's not it, you know, just talking about it or giving a lecture on slides, that's not it. So, we really need to be deliberate and thoughtful about this, and it takes a little bit more time, sure, but the payoff is the better engagement, which then breeds better engagement. And when we have a classroom full of struggling kids that are tired of me talking, 180 times of that is going to be a recipe for not much learning and not setting them up or being interested in the next year science and then the career potentially in science. So, stop talking, get get them seeing it, touching it, if they can talking about it. I love that writing about it would be, would be a gift for kids. There you have it.

Lisa Dieker  17:18

All right. Well, thank you. Some great advice and exactly what our listeners need to hear about science vocabulary. So, thank you, Michael. If you have questions for us, please send us a Tweet at Access Practical or post a question on our Facebook page at Practical Access. Thanks again. Michael.

Michael Kennedy  17:35

Good to see you both. Thanks for having me.