Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Dianna Townsend
Dianna Townsend talks to us about providing meaningful encounters with words by focusing our instruction in language-rich classroom environments. She provides some concrete teaching strategies, backed by decades of research in vocabulary instruction and learning. Dr. Townsend is known for her work centering on the language development of adolescents, with specific attention to vocabulary. Her most recent book is Words Worth Using: Supporting Adolescents’ Power with Academic Vocabulary, published by Teachers College Press in 2022. In it, she offers practical support for adolescents’ vocabulary development, to learn words by using them in ways that are meaningful to their identity, language background, and interests. At the University of Nevada Reno, Dr. Dianna Townsend is the Program Coordinator of the Literacy Studies Program within the College of Education and Human Development.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Dianna's book - https://www.tcpress.com/words-worth-using-9780807767627
- Dr. Maneka Deanna Brooks' website - https://brooksphd.com/
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2024, Nov. 14). A conversation with Dianna Townsend (Season 5, No. 4) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/64F8-D0E5-AA9C-742F-3005-9
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Education research has a problem the work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or an expert educator about what they have learned from years of research and experiences. In this episode, dr Diana Townsend talks to us about providing meaningful encounters with words by focusing our instruction in language-rich classroom environments. Dr Townsend is known for her work centering on the language development of adolescents, with specific attention to vocabulary. Her work has been published in Reading Research Quarterly, the Elementary School Journal, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, reading and Writing, an interdisciplinary journal, and Topics and Language Disorders, as well as other journals and books. Her most recent book is Words Worth Using Supporting Adolescence Power with Academic Vocabulary, published by Teachers College Press in 2022. In it, she offers practical support for adolescents' vocabulary development to learn words by using them in ways that are meaningful to their identity, language, background and interests. At University of Nevada, reno, dr Diana Townsend is the program coordinator of the Literacy Studies Program within the College of Education and Human Development.
Speaker 1:For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me. Your host Lindsay Persaud for Classroom Caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Diana, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here.
Speaker 1:So, from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Speaker 2:I would love to. When I get asked a question like this, I just immediately go to work that I do with students in the K-12 space. So I've been a researcher here at UNR for 17, 18 years now but a lot of my research brings me back to K-12 classrooms and that's where I just learned the most, working with students. So about 12 years ago I was working in a middle school for an entire year and working with students and teachers, primarily supporting teachers. But one of the things we did as part of that project was we ran focus groups with students. These were middle school students, primarily multilingual learners, and the work we were doing with teachers was focused on supporting their academic vocabulary development and trying different things in the classroom within content areas, across content areas that would support multilingual learners, development of academic word knowledge. And we ran these focus groups of students and we showed them videos of lessons that they participated in and we asked them to stop the video anytime they wanted to share something about what their experiences was like during those lessons. And the students had to stop the lessons at such interesting places and they would tell us things like that was really confusing. I didn't understand what was happening there or that word was too hard for me or I didn't really know what I was supposed to do there and for the teachers and for me to listen to the students reflect on their own experiences in the lessons related to these specific important concepts we were trying to help them learn was so powerful, and it was. I had done work along these lines before, but that one, that particular year, really stands out to me. I don't know that there's anything more important than listening to students tell us what is and isn't working for them, what is and is not clear for them, when they feel empowered to play with a concept, to build deep knowledge of a concept, to use their knowledge of that concept in writing or discussion, versus when they just needed more support than they were getting.
Speaker 2:And then, similarly, just a few years ago, I was on sabbatical and I was teaching high school full time, again as part of my sabbatical, and I was testing a reading comprehension intervention that I had developed. Sabbatical, and I was testing a reading comprehension intervention that I had developed and we focused on words as tools for supporting reading comprehension, specifically connectives, those really interesting connective words you know, often known as transition words or signal words. And so we were supporting high school multilingual learners. They were designated as long-term English learners and they were playing with all these words and we set up enough instructional routines where they were in control of which connectives go where and why in specific sentences, and connectives tell us really important things about how ideas are related to each other in a sentence.
Speaker 2:So for the students to engage in that work where they were deciding and they were debating and they were negotiating, negotiating and they were some pretty heated arguments about is that a, however, or a furthermore, which goes here and why? Just stepping back and letting the students be in charge of word choice and message. Again, it kind of echoed that earlier work I had done in the middle school where we really need to build in a lot of opportunities in teaching, learning and research to let students show us what is and isn't working, and so that's kind of always been intuitive to me. But I've had these couple of experiences where it's just it's just really been hammered home that at my peril should I set up a project and not listen to the students? And I don't think anybody ever says we shouldn't listen to students, but it's easy to run out of time and so it's just kind of always front and center for me. We need to prioritize that.
Speaker 1:I love both of these stories and, in fact, as you were talking about that first methodology of having students watch back something they've had an experience of and pausing it, I think that is so powerful because, you're right, what we anticipate as being the most important things aren't always the most important things to young people, so I love that idea of asking them about what has been most impactful, what's been most confusing for them and, as you were telling those, diana, you used a term that listeners may not be fully familiar with, and that's the idea of a long-term English learner.
Speaker 2:Can you tell us, share with us, what that means? I can, yeah, and full disclosure. I find that label really problematic and not super helpful for students. So the definition of a long-term English learner it can vary, but in general it's a multilingual learner who's been designated as an English learner for longer than five to seven years. So when I my students when I was teaching high school were multilingual learners about 80% of them were born in the US and had all of their language of instruction had been English, but they were still designated as English learners after multiple years of receiving English language development services. So their label had switched from EL or English learner, to LTEL or long-term English learner, and there's a lot of baggage in that label.
Speaker 2:That again doesn't really help students. But in our field I think it's important when we recognize that we're working with groups of kids who have been designated, which has caused them to be grouped in certain ways, and so I think it's important for us to recognize how kids are being labeled. But I'll tell you what those students were anything but monolithic in their language and their knowledge and their engagement and their interest and their readiness for different topics, and so that label can have very much a deficit model with it, but the students I worked with stand in direct contrast to any of the kind of the assumptions that someone might make about that label. Long term English learner.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate that and I don't know if I've never heard it before, so I don't know if that's a label that's not used in the state that I'm working in, or maybe because I my school experience is largely in elementary. Maybe we just never had anyone who who had that label. Maybe we just never had anyone who had that label. But I can certainly agree with you that it may not be the most helpful thing in the world for kids because, right, what does that actually mean and what kind of light does that portray those students in? Yeah, very interesting and certainly something I will do a little bit more reading about, because, yeah, I can imagine that just wouldn't be super helpful for a teacher to have, you know, a student come with a label like that, and certainly not helpful for the child.
Speaker 2:No, no, and the teachers I've worked with consistently have kind of just ignored assumptions and some of the deficit orientations of models, and so this just seems to be like a function of the system we work in and how do we schedule kids and how do we get kids in the right classes, and but yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of kind of negative side effects of that. And to learn more about this, I highly recommend the work of Manica Brooks. She has a great book that tackles the issues with long term English learners. Her work has influenced mine quite a lot but she's a good person to learn from on this topic learners.
Speaker 1:Her work has influenced mine quite a lot, but she's a good person to learn from on this topic. Great, great, we'll locate that book and we can also link that in your show notes as well. Great, oh yeah, thank you so much, and I appreciate the reference to a work that could help us to really understand what that term means and what the potential implications of it might be. And maybe that's something that you know. Whenever I was a young teacher, like, let's say, 20 years ago, I didn't necessarily understand the impact of how kids are labeled within the confines of school and what that exactly means to how they're viewed or, like you said, how they're grouped, how they sort of move through school and cohorts, and also certainly how that would limit things like their language development in really odd ways, because I think that the intention is to support language development but it doesn't actually play out that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so true. In my book I highlight the work I did in this high school. My recent book, words Worth Using, I highlight the work I did in this high school, and every chapter starts with a vignette tells stories about students who again, kind of are in direct contrast to these labels that often have deficit orientations.
Speaker 1:So, Diana, what do you? What do you want listeners to know about your work?
Speaker 2:So my work has largely been focused on word level knowledge and what it means to know a word and different kinds of words that students encounter in school and out of school. And vocabulary knowledge is critical. It just predicts so much. It predicts reading comprehension, it predicts academic achievement in most content areas. It actually predicts all sorts of life outcomes. That might be because vocabulary knowledge is a proxy or a substitute for knowledge in general or for reading comprehension in some ways. But word knowledge, the words we know, that knowledge really comprises a whole set of building blocks that we need to make sense of the world and the texts we encounter in it. So vocabulary knowledge is critical.
Speaker 2:At the same time, the idea of vocabulary for the sake of vocabulary is something we frankly don't have time for in schools. So learning words just for the sake of learning new words, or because vocabulary is something I kind of, you know, need to get my vocabulary in for the week that we can move away from Providing students with intentional opportunities to learn words that really matter, for what they're learning is how we need to be oriented toward vocabulary instruction. When I think about working with, for example, my pre-teachers, I say to them what do you want kids walking out the door being able to do today that they couldn't do when they walked in, right so, just what you know? What's a strong learning objective? And then I say what words do kids need to know to meet that objective? That's, that's what should be driving our vocabulary work.
Speaker 2:Not here's my list of 20 words. I did my vocabulary. But what words do students need to be able to use to meet the worthwhile learning objectives we're putting in place for them? So that's kind of the big takeaway from a lot of my work.
Speaker 1:Well, one thing that it really made me think of this idea of how we should approach teaching vocabulary in classrooms. It reminds me a bit of how we should teach spelling as well. We don't teach words for the sake of teaching words. We teach them in a context that has meaning and that is interconnected, and I think that when it comes to planning for classroom instruction, when it comes to looking at trajectories of learning, I find those kinds of concepts so helpful in knowing what's most important and how do we actually spend the time the very limited time that we have with students. Vocabulary is so important, but it must be connected to ideas and things that we're learning and not approached in this sort of isolated kind of here's the word list for this week. I'm hoping that you might offer us a few strategies or tips or things that you've learned over the years as to how we can really make that kind of vocabulary learning most impactful or most relevant for our students.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think once we know what we hope students are going to walk away with from a lesson and we've identified a few central concepts that are really critical for that particular objective, then we get to do the fun work of playing with words and we get to think about word meanings. We get to think about word meanings, we get to think about word parts and we get to think about using words in ways that are relevant to our students' lives, that they get to connect words to their own lives and that they get to connect the words to that kind of the bigger picture of whatever they're studying. And so that boils down to some pretty key principles of vocabulary instruction that are kind of decades of research have borne this out. So multiple opportunities to practice using words, personalized word meanings, multiple opportunities to learn about how words play out in different contexts, explicit instruction so student-friendly definitions, lots of visuals, lots of examples and non-examples all of that kind of builds this deep word knowledge of central concepts. That should be kind of guiding how we think about vocabulary instruction. And then another piece is word consciousness. We can also say metalinguistic awareness, which I talk a lot about in my recent book. But this word consciousness or this awareness of how words work and this curiosity about words and paying attention to things like roots and affixes that show up in multiple words and wondering does it mean the same thing here? Is it means over there? Fostering that word consciousness can really support independent word learning. We can't, as teachers, teach kids every word they need to know or they're going to learn in school. If we try, it's a fool's errand. We cannot do that. So we want to balance our instruction between this language-rich environment that fosters a lot of word consciousness and curiosity and attention to words, and then, at the same time, within that language-rich environment, we've picked our central concepts that students need for the task at hand, and when we do both, we're giving students opportunities to learn a lot of words incidentally, not toward mastery, but just learn a little bit more about a lot of different words. But we're also very clear on what we want. We're helping them develop ownership of what concepts we want to help them develop ownership of. Now. What does that look like? You know what types of instruction or routines help kids develop ownership of what concepts we want to help them develop ownership of. Now. What does that look like? What types of instructional routines help kids develop ownership. Well again, I kind of come back to this less is more space all the time. We don't need 50 or 100 vocabulary games or routines. Those are fine, they're fun, but we don't really need them. We need some high utility routines that we can integrate in all the other things we're doing A concept map, also called a semantic map.
Speaker 2:I've also called it a metalinguistic map. A lot of folks would be very familiar with this. We've got the word in the middle, we've got some bubbles around the side and each of those bubbles has a different type of or different dimension of meaning for that particular word, right. So we could have the student-friendly definition. We could have a technical definition. Another bubble might have the morphology, the roots and affixes. Another bubble for our multilingual learners might have cognates or translations. We might have a bubble where students get to sketch something that's meaningful for them in relation to that word. We might have a bubble where students are making a connection between that word and what they're currently studying.
Speaker 2:Some words are great for synonyms and antonyms Not all words, like photosynthesis, for example, does not have really a synonym or an antonym.
Speaker 2:So we can think about a concept map being adaptable and using different dimensions of word knowledge for different words, depending on what we're having students do. Now, one key thing about a great tool like concept maps is we wouldn't have students create 40 of them, you know, for like a 40 word vocabulary packet. That would start to feel like busy work. It'd be not very meaningful. So we've pared down a short set of words that are critical for kids to really learn and then we use concept maps for them. And they go back to the concept map. Oh, there's that word, photosynthesis. Again, we practiced that last week. Let's pull out our concept map. What else can we add to our concept map that we just learned today about that? And so it becomes a kind of a document that documents their growing, deepening, developing word knowledge. So it's a living document for them. So that's one great high utility routine that, once we've selected our central concepts, we can help students really develop deep knowledge of them.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that, because I think that you know, we know that teachers get a lot of information and they get a lot of directives from a lot of different spaces. And so I think, whenever we can provide these sort of high utility kinds of concepts and I love the idea of using a concept map or a semantic map in kind of tailored ways I even envisioned, you know, your concept map could include, you know, four of these eight to 10 options, right, and then giving kids a way to sort of tailor that and make it their own based on the mode that they learn best in. And then, of course, you could create, like a classroom semantic map based on all those different options. So you gave me a lot of really concrete ideas about how we could use what I feel like is a very familiar concept, a very familiar idea about how to teach vocabulary in a really fresh and relevant and tailored sort of way. So I appreciate that, diana, great. So what else would you like listeners to know about your work?
Speaker 2:I think that one of the things I learn over and over again as a researcher is the existing research is a great place to start and it guides a lot of what I do when I'm either teaching students or starting a new study in schools. But the research only gets us so far. There's no perfect study out there that gives us anything that's one size fits all. Now, those earlier principles of vocabulary instruction I mentioned. There's a lot of research to support those. We can't really go wrong when we're abiding by those principles, but how they play out in any given class with any given group of students is going to vary pretty, pretty widely.
Speaker 2:So I think it's important for all of us to think about let's start with the research and then let's let the kids tell us where to go next. And that doesn't mean I kind of throw the research out if something isn't working with students, but I think, okay, the research worked in this setting with these students. It's not working here with mine. What do I need to do differently? What other research do I need to bring in? How do I need to go back to that research and recognize that it's not the perfect fit for either my objectives or my setting?
Speaker 1:What it made me think about is how research is being, in many instances and in many settings, really heavy-handedly given to teachers, where they're forced to sort of follow it to the letter when it may not apply to their individual learners and to me, that's actually a really important point, because I think that that's one way that the story, the message in education has gotten really twisted is that narrow interpretation of what research is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just my two cents.
Speaker 1:The context of the research matters and the context of how it initially came into publication, as well as the context in which it's translated.
Speaker 1:Because, again, I think that so often in education we think we have the thing that's going to fix everything and then it is sort of forced upon teachers in ways that aren't always productive. And I think that the encouragement to go back to the research to say, well, what did it actually say, or what was the context in which the study was conducted, I think that's very helpful, especially if you are up against a concept that is, in air quotes, supposed to work and you're not seeing evidence of that in your own area, right? So I think that there's something really important in what you've told us about how we become savvy consumers of research yeah, it reminds me of the story you started with. Is that we've got to find out what are the kids telling us, what are our students telling us, what is our own experience telling us and how does that inform particular angles that we play up from research or how we go back to other potential research sources in order to become better informed and to better implement the big ideas that other people have found through research.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right now I'm teaching middle school almost every day as part of a current project and I'm designing lessons and implementing them and I am abiding by everything the research says should work. And it's just so much messier than that, and I think we really need to use the research, attend to the research and leave a lot of room for growth in what else needs to happen besides what the research says, and also acknowledge that every statistically significant research study won't apply to every single situation out there, and so we need to be open about incorporating other research or re-examining our own practices to see did I really align them to the research or not? And so it's just a great intellectual journey anytime we're thinking about research-based or research-informed instruction, and I think staying open and reading the research carefully and then staying open and curious is a good pathway forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I totally agree. Another thing that that made me think of is the fact that whenever we are writing up research, there are a lot of ideas that don't make the cut. And there's, you know, right, there's this I think of. You know, the thinking process, the research process is often iterative, it is messy, it is complex, and then what we see in a publication is in a linear writing format, and so a lot of the messiness is necessarily trimmed away just because of the mode of communication.
Speaker 1:Isn't really a form that allows us to sort of double back on ideas, to create a lot of caveats or parenthetical kinds of notes, much like you can in a conversation or as you would if you were talking about the research you're doing with someone. It doesn't translate the same way into writing, and so I think that that's another important thing for us to keep in mind as we translate research into practice is that reanimating that from. You know, a two-dimensional black and white kind of print is very different than probably how it started and certainly how it ends, and I think that you know. In that, I think there's some grace to be found about how we interpret what we see and how we like. To your point. How are we ensuring that, if we're looking to get the same results that a research study did, do we have the same conditions?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. I really appreciate your point about what's kind of lost in traditional research publications that could be really informative for the field, and I think that's the conversations and collaborations that happen in spaces like this and between researchers and teachers. Those are some of the most generative spaces to push our field forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I totally agree. I think that as a classroom teacher, and certainly as a beginning researcher, I maybe wasn't fully aware of just how messy that work can be and how much of that mess is cleaned up in the final products that we see. So I think that, like I said, it's helpful for early researchers, practitioners, to understand that that's cut away during the writing process. It's sort of ever present in the research process, because anytime you're working with humans, things are going to be a little messy.
Speaker 2:Definitely, and it's one of the most fun parts of it all, but it doesn't see the light of day as often as it should.
Speaker 1:So is there anything else you would like to share about your work, Diana?
Speaker 2:One more thing that's a little more focused that I'd love to just speak quickly to is the importance of morphology, so understanding roots and affixes and how they tell us good information about what words mean and how they help us make connections across words. It's it's one of I think maybe one of the more under leveraged tools out there to support students, especially older readers who may have histories of reading difficulty. Morphology is a great way in to supporting both word level reading as well as knowledge of individual words, and then we've got these nice bridges to comprehension, and so morphology is just a pretty powerful space for all of us to learn in, and to that end, there's great resources out there for all of us to learn more about morphology. I feel like in the last decade I started knowing kind of the expected amount of Greek and Latin roots and that type of thing, and as I've done deeper and deeper dives, you just get more and more curious. Rarely do I hear a word without wondering where'd that come from, and so it's a fun learning curve to be on, and I get the sense sometimes from teachers that I work with that they don't really feel ready to dig into that with their students, that they haven't had the 10 years I've had to explore this stuff and I totally respect that.
Speaker 2:I actually felt that way as a high school English teacher that I didn't know enough.
Speaker 2:I just want to put out there that one of the things I've learned is it's really okay and fun to learn with your students. There's great tools out there when a word comes up or a student has a question about a word, or, as a teacher, I recognize a word part but I'm not really know enough about it to teach it. There's these great resources online where you can just spend a couple minutes with your students looking back at roots, where they came from through history and then make connections to other words, and so that's a great way to integrate vocabulary learning because you're paying attention to these meaningful word parts. Vocabulary learning because you're paying attention to these meaningful word parts, it's a great way to support students reading of multisyllabic and morphologically complex words and it doesn't take a lot of instructional time or planning. So I'd be happy to share more resources on that in the show notes or anywhere that might be helpful. But morphology is a really powerful tool that I think there's enough evidence that's saying, yeah, let's go big with this.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love what you're saying, diana, and absolutely, if you have resources to share, we would be happy to post a list of links there. Because, yeah, morphological instruction I think really is key to maintaining that curiosity about words, particularly as learners get older, but also really to hand that over right, so that we do in fact have young people in schools who become young adults, and then adults who are still curious about words, who are maybe doing the crossword puzzle every week. Or they hear a word or they see a word and they still go, huh, I wonder where that came from, and then they go back to a source in order to learn more about it.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I think you said that's really key here, that I think is hard for a lot of teachers is being okay with not knowing everything about something you're going to teach, and I just really appreciate that sort of permission that I think we have to give ourselves really over and over again to say you can't be an expert in everything. Right, and sometimes the best teaching really happens in the moment. When you and your students encounter a word, you think, huh, I know what it means, but I'm not sure where it came from. I'm not sure how we arrived at this particular form or usage of this word. Let's look that up together, because I think we're also in those moments, modeling for young people how to be a lifelong learner of new words. Yeah, I really love that Great. So, diana, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Speaker 2:When it comes to creating opportunities for students to learn words, I think it's okay to begin with the idea that less is more. We do have limited instructional time and we have a lot of challenges facing students and teachers in classrooms. And when we are really clear on what we want a given lesson or unit of study to do and we know what small number of concepts are central for that goal, we don't have to worry about fitting in time for the long list of words. We just integrate meaningful work with those concepts throughout different learning activities. It's a bit of a misnomer, however, to say less is more, because when you do deep dives into a few concepts, you're supporting word knowledge of lots of related words for those concepts, right?
Speaker 2:So in science, for example, we might be thinking about the word astronomy. When we help students do a deep dive into the word astronomy, we have opportunities to help them connect to things they already know or build new knowledge about things like telescopes, different forms of the word astronomy, like astronomer, we might get into the life cycle of stars and get into nebula and supernovas and those types of words. Think about well-known astronomers that have made important contributions to the field and build deep knowledge of the word astronomy. That, along the way, builds developing knowledge maybe not mastery, but developing knowledge of lots of other words and concepts. That looks really different from a list of here's 20 words on astronomy to learn it's we're going to develop knowledge, deep concept knowledge of astronomy, and you're going to pick up lots of other word knowledge along the way.
Speaker 2:So starting with less is more doesn't mean students are having fewer opportunities to learn a lot of words. It's just much more organized and clear for them. They're building deep knowledge of the concepts that matter most, building kind of incidental or peripheral knowledge of a lot of other terms that they'll be able to recognize down the road. And so it lets us know as teachers, we're doing our job pretty well, even though, no, I didn't teach my students deep knowledge of 40 concepts this week. That was never going to happen anyway and so I've instead given them really meaningful opportunities to build deep word knowledge that gives them traction going forward in these fields or topics we're learning about.
Speaker 1:What an important message, and I think in my mind it helps us cut through some of the noise of what instruction is supposed to look like, and I know even in my instruction now that becomes so important to know what to emphasize and what to focus on, and I love the idea of how we sort of organically bring other words along that are related to a central concept. That becomes a part of the collective conversation in a classroom. That really gives so much weight, I think, to those conversations whenever they are driven by students, kind of back to where this conversation started right, listening to the young people that we're working with and understanding what do they want, what do they see, what are they interested in, what confuses them, what is crystal clear to them and how do we get there. Well, thank you for your contributions to the field of education and thanks so much for spending some time with me today.
Speaker 2:Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Dr Diana Townsend's research centers on the language development of adolescents, with specific attention to vocabulary. She examines both the unique language demands of the disciplines and effective instructional strategies to help students understand and use the language of the disciplines the Elementary School Journal, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, reading and Writing and Interdisciplinary Journal and Topics in Language Disorders, as well as other journals and multiple books. Her most recent book, words Worth Using Supporting Adolescence Power with Academic Vocabulary, was published by Teachers College Press in 2022. Dr Townsend's research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Department of Education. She serves as a principal member of the Education Research Scientific Review Panel with the Institute of Education Sciences. She's also a member of the Reading Standing Committee for the National Assessment of Education Progress. Assessment of Education Progress In Nevada. Dr Townsend is the co-founder and president of the Nevada Adolescent Literacy Network and the lead author of the Nevada State Literacy Plan. Diana is a winner of the University of Nevada Reno's Tibbets Distinguished Teacher Award. She created the Innovative Virtual Reading Clinic in the online Masters of Education program in reading curriculum and instruction to support remote and rural teachers in a graduate-level practicum experience Within the College of Education and Human Development at UNR, dr Townsend is the program coordinator of the Literacy Studies program.
Speaker 1:Check out the show notes for links to resources mentioned in this episode. For the good of all students, classroom Caffeine aims to energize education, research and practice. If this show gives you things to think about, help us spread the word. Talk to your colleagues and educator friends about what you hear. You can support the show by subscribing, liking and reviewing this podcast through your podcast provider. Visit classroomcaffeinecom, where you can subscribe to receive our short monthly newsletter, the Espresso Shot. On our website, you can also learn more about each guest, find transcripts for our episodes, explore topics using our dropdown-down menu of tags, request an episode topic or potential guest, support our research through our listener survey or learn more about the research we're doing on our publications page. Connect with us on social media through Instagram, facebook and Twitter. We would love to hear from you. Special thanks to the Classroom Caffeine team Leah Berger, abaya Valuru, stephanie Branson and Shaba Oshfath. As always, I raise my mug to you, teachers. Thanks for joining me.