WPSQ Bank: What It Is & Ways to Use It

 We've all utilized Word Banks to support students, but sometimes those can be linguistically limiting. I love when scaffolds can also serve as STRETCHERS. We typically say that we scaffold up for students at lower proficiency levels, but it's important to note that students of ALL proficiency levels (yes, including monolingual students) are also in need of linguistic stretching! 

One easy way to provide both a scaffold AND a stretcher for students is by expanding on the idea of a word bank, and moving towards a Word-Phrase-Sentence-Question (WPSQ) Bank. Here's a simple template to demonstrate how quick this can be: 

How might you use this template? Here are 5 different ways!

1. Whole Class: Warm Up - Prior to watching a video or doing a mini lesson, or as a review of previous days' learning, ask students to take a moment to think about what they'd fill into this template on their own. Then ask them to partner up and share information to build on to their banks. Share a few ideas whole-class by projecting a digital bank on the screen, or capturing ideas on a large piece of anchor chart paper.

2. Whole Class: Co-Constructed Listening Guide - prior to watching a video, doing a mini lesson, or engaging in small group activity - have students collectively contribute to a WPSQ bank on the board. "What words might we hear in this video? What questions might be answered in this video? What questions might we have about this video?"  Have students capture these ideas on their own template at their seats. This can now serve as a listening guide. Newcomer students might just "check off" when they hear certain words and phrases. Students at higher proficiencies can annotate this listening guide by including notes, doodles, and other ideas.

3. Whole Class: Review of Content - after watching a video, observing a lesson, or engaging in other learning experiences, come together and have students reflect on the language utilized in the learning. This can serve as an individual exit ticket or these can be small group captures. 

4. Whole Class: One Teaches & One Captures - to maximize the presence of two adults in the room, while one teacher is teaching, have the other adult capture the learning via a WPSQ bank. This might be shared with the whole class as the teacher does this "live" in front of the students during the learning. This may also be captured on a small mini poster for small groups or individual students.

5. Individual or Small Group Scaffold - This may be a scaffold constructed in advance by a teacher prior to the learning taking place. While the teacher designs this tool to prepare students for learning, they may enhance the WPSQ bank by leveraging heritage language/cognates, images from The Noun Project or Flat Icon, or embed teacher-created GIFs where it makes sense.