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Filtering by Category: Instructional Strategies
WWMD?
What Would Marzano Do?
Robert Marzano's research from Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement listed nine strategies that yielded high results. They are:
If you are interested in knowing how successful each are, check out his book or visit this PDF adaptation. Warning: without the book you might not realize that there is also a matter of HOW well the strategies are implemented.
Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris wrote a book on a project titled, "Who's Doing the Work." Something I know you say to yourself often. But what if you did less and the students did more?
Limiting "Teacher Talk," Increasing Student Work author Tori Filler shares the meat of this project in her Achieve the Core article. She explained the after only a month and a half of working on the project, 90% of the teachers reported that their students were more engaged and that they were, in fact, talking much less than previously. Here's some tips that the participants found most effective.
Elicit 100% participation
Example strategy: Think, Write, Pair, Share based on a MEATY question
Beef up discussions
Example strategy: Reduce ping pong between one student and you. Include others teaching them how to listen first, then agree, contrast, add on, and so forth.
Read, read differently, then read differently
Example strategies: Increase reading time by providing support strategically, use partner reads, echo read, re-read, annotate, cite evidence.
Build Independence
Sample Strategies: Explicitly teach students to engage, facilitate student-led discussions, read and re-read more, and self-assessment (and how to adjust one's self).
If you visit the article, you can find the entire list of strategies.
Challenge: Do a small scale research project in your own classroom by implementing one of the strategies for two weeks. You might be surprised what you learn.
Resource attributed to Michele Rutin, Peer Evalutor and Education Aficionado.
Do your students raise their hands excitedly to give responses?
Do your students work together or collaborate often?
If you answered yes to either one, you might be rewarding extroverts and forgetting about your introverts.
Susan Cain founded the Quiet Revolution and immediately went to work on changing classrooms. In a 2012 TED Talk she stated that educators "unconsciously reward extroverts who dive headfirst into discussions, sometimes without much forethought." Her work shows us how to measure engagement versus participation.
Here's some tips to support your introverts:
1) End hand raising practices.
2) Evaluate body language and "facial feedback"
3) End traditional Think-Pair-Share, go for Think-WRITE-Pair-Share
4) Learn how your students learn
5) Look for culture differences. In some cultures listening is prized more than speaking.
6) Engage one-on-one
7) Help students explore their preferences
Ready to learn more?
Read Teaching Introverted Students: How a "Quiet Revolution" is Changing Classroom Practice by Brenda Iasevoli.
Watch Susan Cain's TED Talk.
Visit the Quiet Revolution website which also includes tips for parents of introverts.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
I forgot!
The research is in. Our brains are hardwired to forget. Which may explain why the kitchen trash never seems to go out!
It's frightening to study the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve (below), but we can ALL identify! Fortunately, research also tells us what we can do in our classes to fight these odds. Scroll down for some quick tips.
Source: stuffforeducators
Why Students Forget---and What You Can do About It by Youki Terada shares with us 5 researched strategies to make the learning "stick."
Student Conversations "not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016)."
Practice and practice aligned activities to give "multiple opportunities to review learned material."
Frequent formative and fun assessments reduce anxiety as students become accustomed to showing what they know.
Mixing it up. Grouping similar problems together to have the students practice over and over in just one way decreases thinking. Mix up problems/strategies to increase thoughtful learning.
Images (or non-linguistic representations) help students recall information by attaching context to a visual cue.
Read the full article here.
The chances that you have, or will have, monolingual students in your class are pretty high. If you do have monolingual students, you know the value of modeling. Monolingual students benefit from:
Modeling a process — how to do something.
Modeling a product or performance —an exemplar that shows the end result of the completed task.
A good model is:
Explicitly constructed—it uses intentionally, concrete examples and/or visual images.
Free of distractions—there isn’t any extraneous information or verbiage.
Labeled with precise academic vocabulary for each step or part.
Exit tickets are a quick, easy, and great strategy to check for understanding and plan for next steps. The following are some things to keep in mind when using exit tickets:
Begin with the end in mind. Ensure your questions are precise enough for students to give you the information you need. Write questions that assess understanding, apply the concept, or demonstrate the concept.
Keep it brief. Exit tickets are intended to challenge your students while providing you feedback for planning. They should be able to be completed in under five minutes.
Examine the tickets carefully. Sort tickets into groups based on what you need to know. For example: students that understand the content, students that don’t understand the content, and students that you are unsure about. However you organize the data, make sure that it gives you an overall picture of your classroom.
Sample Exit Tickets (Fisher & Frey, 2004):
Write one thing you learned today.
Discuss how today's lesson could be used in the real world.
I didn't understand…
Write one question you have about today's lesson.
Did you enjoy working in small groups today?
I would like to learn more about…
Please explain more about…
The thing that surprised me the most today was…
I wish…
For more on Exit Tickets, watch this video.
Teachers constantly nurture the relationship between motivation and engagement. Knowing how to design learning experiences using strategies that build learner self-direction and ownership of learning sets great teachers and great lessons apart. There are many tools that can support the facilitation of authentic engagement where students are not just compliant, but can see a connection between the assigned task and the results. The following three are just a few of them:
Padlet - www.padlet.com
Padlet empowers collaboration across distances without much set up. Think of Padlet as an electronic Post-it note wall. The difference is, the Post-it notes can be text, images, and videos. Visit the website for an example of how two teachers in two different classrooms use Padlet to facilitate student-to-student interactions.
Socrative - www.socrative.com
Socrative enables students to use any internet-connected device with a web browser to become a student response system. Socrative empowers the teacher to receive real-time data about what students are thinking and understanding.
PowToon - www.powtoon.com
PowToon is an engaging, easy to use publishing tool. It allows students to tell animated stories quickly and easily without a lot of knowledge about video production.
When considering creating authentic learning experiences for students, think about the following five levels of authenticity:
Level One: Student produced a product that is not relevant to objective.
Level Two: Student produced a product that is relevant to objective only.
Level Three: Student produced a product that has value inside the classroom.
Level Four: Student produced a product that has hypothetical value outside the classroom.
Level Five: Student produced a product that has value outside the classroom.
The higher the level, the more authentic the work.
“Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed – even in part – the other immediately suffers …” – Paulo Freire
In a go-go academic world focused on the “correct” answer, it is easy to overlook the power of reflection. Students of all ages, from pre-schoolders to adults, benefit from the quiet think time coupled with either written or verbal reflection. Such “marinating” allows students to better integrate their learner.
The following Edutopia blog post by Joshua Block explores the importance of reflection in depth.
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/let-it-marinate-reflection-closing-joshua-block
We are including the list of reflective prompts from the post for those who simply wish some quick ideas for prompting reflection:
· Share one thing you learned.
· Share a question for future investigation.
· Respond with a word.
· What worked? What didn’t work?
· What is one part of your work that you are proud of?
· How would you do this differently next time?
Block, Joshua. “Let It Marinate: The Importance of Reflection and Closing." Edutopia. N.p., 20 May 2014. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
Today’s Goal: Find Dazzling Differentiated Texts Easily!
We all know the value of utilizing high-interest, authentic texts that are differentiated by students’ Lexile levels. Unfortunately, time is a teacher’s worst enemy, and our best intentions often are sacrificed to competing interests.
Today’s resource is a ready-made resource for the time vs. differentiated authentic text conundrum.
https://www.commonlit.org/texts
The above link takes you to Common Lit’s home page. In addition to its thoughtful thematic organization with paired texts, teachers can search by both grade level and Lexile ranges. Moreover, Common Lit recently added a “Guided Reading Mode” feature; the introductory video is well worth a few minutes of viewing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igpf3O6JeoE
Users are asked to register, which carries the benefit of regular updates featuring new material.
Happy lit hunting!
In her article, “Using Math Menus,” Burns shares the underlying benefits and specific math menu items to strategically tackle “The Big Three” burning teacher questions (Burns, 2016, p. 40).
What do I do with students who finish their math assignments more quickly?
How can I free up time to work with students who need extra help?
How can I differentiate experiences to support struggling learners while also meeting the needs of students who require additional challenges
Here is one such menu item, entitled “The Game of Pathways.” We have summarized the strategy below, but we invite you to visit Marilyn Burns’ blog for in-depth directions at http://marilynburnsmathblog.com/wordpress/the-game-of-pathways/
Create 4X5 game board grids.
Complete the grid with “numbers that are products of two of the factors below the grid.”
Students play in pairs on the same board.
The goal is for each student to “X off” connected “pathways” of squares from one side of the grid to the other.
Player One chooses two factors and puts an “X” in the square with the product of the two factors.
Player Two changes one of the factors previously used and then puts an “X” on the product of the new two factors.
Players continue to change a factor from their opponent’s previous move.
The first player to finish a pathway wins the game.
Burns, M. (October 2016). Using math menus: giving students a menu of activities to choose from helps differentiate instruction and engage all learners. Educational Leadership, 74 (2), 40.
We have all been there. You have spent hours pouring over your standards, sifting through ideas and resources, to get 15 minutes into a lesson and realize your students aren’t, shall we say, impressed. Crickets are chirping. Or, utter confusion ensues. What do you do?
Even the most seasoned veterans experience a “flop” every now and then. Today, we provide three tips to turn the flop into an opportunity.
Acknowledge it. Tell students you see they are confused or not engaged, and you are going to change gears a bit.
Determine what’s up. Using the think-pair-share strategy or quick write, ask students to articulate what they are finding confusing or difficult.
Some quick open-ended questions are:
Tell me in your own words what you understand about the topic.
What are you finding confusing?
What do you think you need to help you understand?
3. Switch it up. Instead of whole group, teacher-centered instruction that relies heavily on language, have students act out directions or allow them to perform a non-verbal representation of the concept, such as a drawing or play-dough sculpture.
Finally, and most importantly, use the feedback gained from students to reflect on what was the cause of the “flop,” how you put on your Super Teacher cape to save the day, and what you can do to prevent future flops. Then take a deep breath, and know you’re not alone.
The idea of structured, academic dialogue has received great attention in recent years.
This attention is well-deserved; Stanford University professor Dr. Jeff Zweirs provides clear justification for increasing academic dialogue as “the process of learning is actually a social venture, and interactions such as conversations (and specifically academic conversations) [help] students to enhance and broaden their comprehension of a specific topic profoundly and in a meaningful way” (Zweirs, 2014). Yet, Dr. Zweirs’ research found most classroom academic conversations are dominated by teachers, robbing students of the rich opportunity to actively engage in a learning dialogue with their peers. Armed with this knowledge, teachers have made a concerted effort to increase structured student-to-student conversations. As a result, students are now talking to each other much more often than in the past.
“Peanut butter and jelly partners” are probably familiar to most teachers, especially those teaching elementary-aged students. It is an accessible strategy for creating “think-pair-share” partner groups to ensure equal participation and individual accountability. The danger, however, is sometimes these sharing opportunities are merely a recitation of facts or lower-level comprehension.
Without a doubt, structures are a necessary foundation for academic conversations that foster deep and extended learning. We are going to take this base even further this month as we share various resources to deepen teachers’ academic conversation toolkit.
To get us started, here are Dr. Zweirs’ “Think-Pair-Share Tips.”
In Think-Pair-Shares, students should:
Think about the possible responses and how best to say them in connected sentences (They can write them down, too, but shouldn’t read them when talking)
Interact face to face (face each other)
Take turns talking
Listen to remember, connect, and compare to what the partner says.
Give evidence from the book, discussions, or own life.
Ask clarifying questions to know more (Do you mean that…? Why do you think that? Where does it say that? Did you get that from a random website? Tell me more about…)
Zweirs, J. (2014). Academic language literacy: tools & resources. Retrieved from
http://www.jeffzwiers.com/ and http://jeffzwiers.org/tools–resources.html