An Analysis of Implementation Strategies in a School-wide Vocabulary Intervention

From an improvement research perspective, this study explores strategies used to implement a school-wide vocabulary intervention into language arts instruction at an urban elementary school. Academic language time, an innovative change in the instructional delivery system, allots time and structure for deliberate teaching of cross-disciplinary academic vocabulary as a routine practice in the language arts block. Implementation included a set of core strategies delivered by a university-school purveyor team. Implementation evidence consisting of survey, observation, and interview data was collected over one school year. Quantitative and qualitative analytic techniques were applied to determine effectiveness of the implementation strategies. Results identify strategy characteristics that supported or impeded the implementation process, the valence of strategy patterns, and areas for improvement. The strategy analysis provides fine-grained descriptive information that informs the specification and description of implementation strategies for purposes of innovation and change.