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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5 Comments
sam
8/18/2017 04:17:29 pm
I would love to see some of your objectives. It makes sense to post the objectives, but how does one do this without interfering with the discovery of a math lesson? A well designed lesson will include some tool building that has the objective in mind, but not reveal what the students are expected to discover and draw conclusions. Was this strategy intended for the Social Studies and Language classrooms?
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8/18/2017 07:52:44 pm
Hi Sam,
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Natasha
9/4/2017 09:20:03 am
Thanks for providing another great quick read, reinforcing what I am doing well so far and reminding me of areas where I can improve! I am not a Maths teacher and sometimes struggle to see how some of the activities you suggest could translate into the English classroom. Any suggestions? I came across your website when I was trying to help my own child review Maths concepts in a fun way and have been trying ever since to incorporate some of your strategies.
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9/6/2017 09:09:05 pm
Hi Natasha,
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4/13/2022 08:54:56 pm
What a nice insights and guide that every parents should follow through for their kids learning needs.
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