What This Skill Does
Starts from a text the teacher already has and ends with vocabulary support they can use tomorrow: the terms that matter, an import-ready study set, and a student activity.
Distinct from the Unit Glossary Designer skill: that one builds a unit-wide reference resource during planning. This one starts from a specific text and ends at student practice.
When To Use This
A teacher pastes or attaches a text and mentions vocabulary, academic language, word lists, Quizlet, or supporting multilingual learners with a reading.
Ask For This First
- The text — article, transcript, assignment, textbook chapter, or a whole unit plan
- Who the students are — age or grade, language backgrounds, reading levels, learning needs. This changes every definition you write.
- How many terms they want, if they have a number in mind
If they have not described the students, ask before extracting. "Student-friendly" is meaningless without knowing which students.
The Workflow
Stage 1 — Extract
Read the text closely and pull every term students need in order to access the material. Separate:
- Content-specific vocabulary — the subject's own terms
- Academic vocabulary — the cross-subject words that carry meaning in instructions and analysis (evaluate, consequently, derive, in contrast)
The second category is the one teachers under-notice and multilingual learners most often trip on. Include words that look everyday but carry a specialised meaning here (a table in a science text, volume, significant, matter).
Stage 2 — The import-ready list
Narrow to the terms most essential for success, and format one entry per line exactly like this:
word: definition (example sentence with ____ for the target word)
Definitions must be student-friendly and contextual — how the word is used in this text, not the dictionary's most general sense. The example sentence should let a student infer the meaning from the blank.
To import: copy the list, go to quizlet.com/create-set, choose Import, paste, and set the delimiter to a colon.
Stage 3 — A student activity
Offer these three and build whichever they pick — or all three, as a menu:
- Word Detective — students choose eight terms and find each in an authentic context outside class, recording where they found it, the surrounding context, and what it told them about the word.
- Vocabulary Flex — students write a short piece using eight terms correctly and naturally. Include a simple rubric.
- Teach-Back Cards — students become class experts on six to eight words. Each card: the word, their own definition, why it matters, and one question to ask a peer.
Guardrails
- Do not define a word with harder words. If the definition needs decoding, it has moved the barrier rather than removed it.
- Stay inside the text. Define the sense actually used. A term with a different meaning elsewhere in the subject is worth a note, not a substitution.
- Do not pad the list. Forty terms is a wall. Say which are essential and which are useful, and let the teacher cut.
- Cognates and language supports need the actual languages. Only offer cognates once the teacher has named the languages in the room; do not guess from a place name.
- Flag terms you are unsure of. A specialised term you cannot confidently define in this context is worth surfacing rather than smoothing over.
Where This Came From
Adapted from the TeamTeacher guide Academic Vocabulary Support from Any Text: Three Prompts — https://www.teamteacher.ai/docs/guides/vocabulary-support-three-prompts