The 5 Best Methods & Specific Tips on HOW to Incorporate Each in Your Own Classroom
What are teaching strategies?
First off, it’s important to know exactly what teaching strategies are and how they can assist you in the classroom. Basically, these are methods teachers use to deliver information and lessons to their students. They are most often identified with three main basic areas of learning; visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. However, it can be hard to know what strategies to use and exactly when to use them. It can seem, at times, like we almost have too much information coming at us about the best designed lesson plan. And it can easily leave us teachers feeling overwhelmed and a little lost. We all want to be innovative and try new things, but how can we know what is the best use of our time and effort?
Here’s what research says:
John Hattie, who has researched the levels of achievement in K-12 children for over 15 years and is the author of Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, has some insight for us. His findings helped link student outcomes to a few highly effective teaching practices. His findings along with those of other researchers have helped to link positive student outcomes with highly effective teaching strategies. So, which teaching strategies has research supported as the best? Here are the top ones that were found.
1.) Clear Lesson Goals - Making sure that you are clear and concise with what you want your students to learn in a lesson is imperative. In fact, in Hattie’s research, he found that the student results were 32% greater with clear lesson goals than if they were held to generally high expectations (source).
TRY IT: Post the objectives for each day on a specified space on your whiteboard following these guidelines. 2.) Checking for Understanding - Kathleen Cotton’s research in Classroom Questions - School Improvement Research Series suggested that even though teachers spend a lot of time asking questions, they don’t always use their questions to check for understanding. However, it is incredibly important to do so before moving on to the next part of a lesson. TRY IT: Check out this fantastic article on How to Check for Understanding, for some great ideas. 3.) Give Students Plenty of Practice - This tactic can be a little tricky since we always seem to be under some kind of time constraint in our classrooms. However, practice really does make perfect. Make the most of practice by ensuring your students are practicing the right things. Split up topics among students and have them demonstrate their knowledge to the classroom in a show and tell/question and answer session in class. TRY IT: Use games that do not waste time. I call these “no fluff.” The creative & unique game options available for purchase here offer a bit of fun without taking away any lesson time. They incorporate the same number of problems as a worksheet, but in a fun way (the perfect blend of fun and rigor!) 4.) Provide Feedback - It’s hard for students to know where they are without proper feedback. According to John Hattie’s research, “any teachers who seriously want to boost their children’s results should start by giving them dollops and dollops of feedback” (source). TRY IT:
5.) Nurture Metacognition - Basically this is thinking about thinking and it is very beneficial to our students. It helps them make connections when reading and verbalizing problem solving. This tactic involves more than just strategies. It involves thinking about your options, your choices, and the results. This actually helps the student decide on the strategies they can use instead of being told which one to use. Then they can analyze their choices and decide if they are on the right path of cognition. TRY IT:
Having these 5 teaching strategies in place is exactly what our students need to succeed. By giving clear lesson goals, checking for understanding, letting them practice, providing feedback, and nurturing metacognition in our students, we can give them strong support in their learning.
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8/1/2017 3 Comments Teaching Math with CREATIVITY!The Neuroscience Behind the Creative Brain
More than 1,000 brains went under analysis at the University of Utah and they found no evidence to support this. The results showed that all of the participants were using their entire brain equally (source), concluding that our left brain-right brain ideas are mostly just a myth. This shows that creative brains aren’t just housed in the right side of our cranium. There’s so much more that happens to us when our brains are ignited with creativity.
If you read this blog frequently, you already know that using both hemispheres together is the way to go, inside and outside of the classroom. Crossing the corpus callosum engages the full brain to increase focus, memory, creativity, problem solving skills, and more. (see these posts for more on that):
What is a creative brain?
Genius is often most associated with having this type of brain. But does that mean that only creative brains can be genius and good at all things? What exactly does it mean to have these types of neuroconnections? Early psychologist and researcher, Frank X. Barron decided to try and tackle these questions in a historical study at the University of California - Berkeley campus. Here were some of his findings: ● IQ alone could not explain the creative spark ● Creativity uses a host of intellectual, emotional, motivational and moral characteristics ● A preference for complexity and ambiguity ● An unusually high tolerance for disorder and disarray ● Ability to extract order from chaos ● Willingness to take risks Barron realized that creative brains had a mixed bag of traits, he concluded, “both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person” (source). So, what is the neuroscience behind this creative brain? There are many facets to creativity and that’s why it is a process that utilizes your entire brain. Another psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, spent more than 3 decades studying it. He concluded “If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’” Different neural networks are activated when different tasks are being completed. However, a more creative brain accesses each one a little differently.
The Large Scale Neural Networks:
Executive Attention Network Since it's recruited when the brain requires attention that is highly focused, this network is most likely active when concentrating on complex problem solving, listening to a challenging lecture, or heavy reasoning (most math classes!) Imagination Network This network is involved in using personal past experiences to create mental simulations, thinking about the future and general imagination of possible scenarios that occur in daily life. Also, it is used in social cognition when we’re trying to assess what someone else is thinking. Salience Network We need to constantly monitor the external events of our lives with our steady internal stream of consciousness. Depending on what information is the most salient to solving the task at hand, this network takes the reigns.
The way these networks interact can help us understand creative cognition. They will activate and deactivate according to the needs of the task. So, if you’re trying to create a painting it might be best to let your mind wander a bit. This means deactivating your Executive Network and letting your Imagination Network take center stage. Then once you have your ideas, you’ll need to access your focus to take these ideas and bring them to to reality. And the Salience Network helps us do exactly that.
This effect is similar to the effect that coloring, doodling, and sketching while learning a new math concept can offer. Strategies like doodle notes and other visual note-taking methods help student brains to shift between these networks. We can activate neurons from each category to increase the brain’s effectiveness and give student creativity a boost.
This was actually reflected in recent research on jazz musicians and their ability to create such wondrous improvisational music. It’s what neuroscientists like to call a flow state.
Of course this is just a tip to the iceberg of understanding the depth of our creative cognitive abilities. It’s still good to know that our creativity has better roots than just one side of our brain. It takes both sides of brain, working together in networks to have creative thought.
These thoughts can not only help us create literature and art, but it can also be used to come up with creative solutions to problems.
And sometimes, those same creative minds lead us to the most fundamental discoveries in geometry, physics, and more. This is why we should not hesitate to teach math creatively! Allow students to tap into the different levels of thinking. Check out these resources that cross the two hemispheres of the brain and incorporate these neural networks to maximize creativity, learning, and retention (click the images for links):
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