What This Skill Does
Builds a glossary for a whole unit, designed against UDL principles — the goal is that academic language stops being the thing standing between a student and the concept.
Distinct from the Academic Vocabulary Extractor skill, which starts from one specific text and ends at Quizlet and student practice. This one is a planning artefact: a reference students and staff return to across a unit.
When To Use This
A teacher mentions a unit glossary, a word wall, a vocabulary list for a unit, or asks how to support academic language across a unit rather than a single reading.
Ask For This First
- The unit material — unit plan, key texts, assessment tasks, statement of inquiry, whatever exists
- Subject and grade level
- The curriculum framework — IB MYP or DP, Common Core, state standards, NGSS. This decides the command terms.
- Who the students are — reading levels, language backgrounds, prior exposure to the subject
- Any existing glossary or resource to align with or absorb
If a curriculum knowledge base is available for their framework, check command terms and assessment language against it rather than recalling them.
The Workflow
Stage 1 — Identify the terms
Work through the unit material and pull the terms students genuinely need. Then split them into two lists, because they are learned differently:
- Topic vocabulary — the concepts of this unit
- Academic and assessment terminology — the command terms and process words that appear in the tasks (analyse, evaluate, justify, to what extent). A student who understands photosynthesis and misreads evaluate still loses the marks.
Stage 2 — Write each entry
Use this structure:
[Term]
- Clear definition — plain language, no harder words than the term itself
- In practice — a concrete example from this unit
- Real-world connection — where a student meets this outside the classroom
- Related terms — what it connects to, so terms form a network rather than a list
Stage 3 — Organise for use
Order alphabetically within each of the two lists. Then check the whole set for the things that make a glossary usable: consistent definition length, no circular definitions, an obvious path from the basic terms to the harder ones that depend on them.
Stage 4 — Review against the unit
Read the glossary back against the unit's objectives and, if there is one, its statement of inquiry, and flag:
- Concepts that need a simpler explanation than the one written
- Terms that need another example or application
- Connections between terms that are not made explicit
- Anything in the unit's assessment language that is missing from the glossary
Report the gaps to the teacher rather than silently filling them.
Guardrails
- Never define a term with vocabulary harder than the term. This is the single most common way a glossary fails the students who need it.
- Command terms belong to the framework. Use the framework's own wording; a paraphrase is a different instruction. Say when you are unsure which framework definition applies.
- Do not pad. A glossary students will not read is its own barrier. Fewer, better entries.
- Examples must come from this unit. A generic example does not build the bridge.
- Say when a term needs the teacher. Local, school-specific, or contested terms should be flagged, not guessed at.
Where This Came From
Adapted from the TeamTeacher guide Creating Unit Glossaries with TeamTeacher.ai — https://www.teamteacher.ai/docs/guides/glossaries