Teaching Strategies
Anchor Chart
An anchor chart is a visual representation of a concept, process, or other content. These charts are hung up around the classroom and referred to regularly throughout unit lessons.
Math and Science Journals
Journals are personal notebooks (usually composition or spiral bound). The journals are set up like a non-fiction textbook with a table of contents, page numbers, and an index. Pages of the journal are used for scientific drawings, observations, tables and charts, or academic writing.
Cornell Note-Taking
The Cornell Note28 taking is a common note taking strategy that can be used in any lecture, video, discussion, or reading. Students take notes on the right side of the page and write questions on the left side, highlighting content vocabulary and underlining any important information. Students then write a summary of the notes by succinctly answering the questions from the left side. This type of note taking strategy allows for students to interact with their notes on multiple occasions. During the first go around, the students take notes. Next, students highlight important concepts and write questions on the left margin. Finally, a summary is written about the content of the notes. This strategy helps students to store the information given into their long-term memory through the multiple reviewing of the notes. Pages in the scientific journal can be set up for Cornell Note-Taking.
Examination of Primary Sources
Students look closely at primary sources: first-hand accounts, written journals, photographs, etc. in order to get information.
Structured Student Talk: Whip Around
A Whip Around is one structured student talk activity aimed to achieve equity of voice in a class discussion. Students are presented with a question, usually one that everyone has a response to, and students take turns sharing their response to the question.
Tape Diagrams/Bar Diagrams
Tape diagrams, also known as horizontal bar diagrams, are used to model equivalent ratios using fractional-sized rectangles. This teaching strategy has been used successfully in Japan and Singapore for many years bridging the pictorial or concrete representation of quantitative data and abstract representation with a tape diagram.29
Ratio Tables
Ratio tables are used to list equivalent ratios in ascending order with the smallest unit at the top under the heading of items being compared.
Double Number Lines
A double number line is a set of two parallel lines representing two quantities in a ratio being compared. Starting with zero, students choose an appropriate scale for each number line depending on the numbers in the ratio being compared. This works similarly to a ratio table but students are also able to expand the number line to see quantities in between equivalent, whole number, ratios.
Silent Line-Up
In the silent line-up30 activity, students work together to silently place themselves in order according to criteria given to them by their teacher. This is typically done by birthday, but it could also be done to create any sort of agree/disagree spectrum and be used as a tool to create partners or groups by folding the line in half or counting off to create larger groups.
Sentence Frames
Sentence frames are used in order to develop fluency in academic speaking and writing. These frames can be categorized by their language function (cause and effect, sequencing, claim and evidence, explain and describe, or proposition and support).31 These sentence frames include academic content vocabulary (or brick words) and the words that go along with the academic content vocabulary needed for sense making and fluidity (mortar words).
Experiential Learning
Cooking is a way to bridge the concepts or ratios, the Common Core Mathematical Practice of attending to precision, science content, and high student engagement. Culturally relevant connections can be made with students’ home cultures in a hands-on way.
Socratic Seminar/Paideia Seminar
Students discuss which recipe makes a “just right” pancake in a Socratic Seminar. For this, students’ desks need to be arranged so they are facing each other and use their Cornell Notes for this discussion. Follow the protocols detailed in Chowning’s research study, “Socratic Seminars in Science Class”.32
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