Teaching Strategies
Teaching strategies are what make lessons classroom-ready. Most teachers use teaching strategies and aren’t even aware they’re using them. These strategies not only create effective lessons but allow connections between the students as well as between the teacher and students and the students and the material. Strategies allow students to interact with the materials, their classmates, and the world around them. These 12 strategies were selected based on how well they lend themselves to interactions between students, teachers, and all the materials involved. The 12 strategies I highlight in this unit are:
Anonymous questioning is a strategy that allows students to anonymously submit questions and concerns to be addressed in class. Equity in schools, especially for students who don’t have the materials they need to succeed, can be a tough subject and students don’t always want their peers to know about their personal concerns. Anonymous questioning not only lets students get their concerns across but has the potential to show students that they’re not isolated in their concerns..
Check In/Check Out is a teaching strategy that allows teachers to figuratively take students' emotional temperatures when they arrive and when they leave the classroom. This can be done in a variety of ways, through entrance and exit tickets, warmups and wrap ups, or even verbal or eye contact as students enter and exit the classroom. Gauging where the students are both before and after class is important not only with this course material, but with high school students in general.
Conferencing is exactly what it sounds like, both allowing students to conference with one another, and the teacher to conference with individual students or student groups. In person conferencing allows ideas to flow more openly than having written comments and allows the teacher and the students to better understand the concepts being discussed and assess the level of understanding. Conferencing is a great form of assessment that is low pressure for the student and allows the teacher to get a clear picture of what the students understand and what still needs to be ascertained. With this unit, conferencing is key as students will be working with some heavy topics and may need some guidance to handle those topics at an age-appropriate level.
Cooperative learning has students working together in pre-planned groups to investigate materials as a team. This allows students to learn from one another and use each other’s strengths to craft the writing and arguments they want to make and not put all the work on one team member.
Differentiation is one of the most important strategies used in the classroom, allowing all students to succeed to their maximum potential. Differentiation is designing lessons, work, and assessments for students to address their individual needs. Having multiple options for how students can organize themselves or complete work allows students to create work that can show what they know without being confined by restrictions that might impede their ability to get across the knowledge and information they’ve gained during the lessons. The assignments and assessments in this unit are open-ended, allowing students to take them in any number of directions and still be successful.
Formative assessment is using markers along the way to assess student learning, not just using the final product at the end of the unit. It often includes using student notes, student-teacher conferences, graphic organizers (see below,) and student observation to give student feedback (or grades in some cases) on the work they’re doing and insight into how they might proceed. Final products are still important with formative assessment styles, but the process is deemed the more worthy and weightier focus for the unit.
Flipped classroom - a strategy in which students view the material ahead of time, and come to class ready to discuss. This allows for more discussion and analysis to happen in the classroom, while making sure students have the prior knowledge to follow along. Having students watch a short video clip and answer a question or two before coming to class can allow for more time having the deeper discourse over the material rather than watching the video and checking for comprehension as a use of time in the classroom.
Free recall - this strategy is a nice way of saying a brain dump. Students are given a set amount of time to write down anything and everything they can think of about the topic they’re about to dive into. This allows the students to see how much they already know, and allows the teacher to see what might need some extra focus.
Graphic Organizers are often at the heart of my instruction, giving students a concrete place to pull their thoughts and ideas together before beginning an assignment. For students who have trouble focusing their ideas, graphic organizers are one of the best things they can do to get everything down on paper before embarking on a large project. Even for students who are skilled at organization, graphic organizers allow all group members, and the teacher, to see what students are thinking and where their assignments are headed so specific conversations can be had to address any potential concerns before any work is completed on the project.
Inquiry-based learning is when students research, conference, and create to solve problems that they have posed. This strategy brings high-level thinking and real-world problem solving into the classroom, and the students are looking into high interest ideas that they themselves have posed as questions.
Jigsaw is a cooperative learning technique where students are divided into groups and each group given a different part of the research to be done, and then the groups teach each other and put all the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. This allows students to become experts in one small bit of material and have ownership over it to teach it to others.
Journals are important for students to track their own thinking and opinions as the unit progresses. Students will have guiding questions to write about, but are free to take those prompts any way they want. Journals are not assessed, but monitored for completion.
Thinking Hats is an exercise in parallel thinking, made popular by Edward DeBono in his book Six Thinking Hats. This strategy has students look at a text or image using different “hats” such as information hat, creativity hat, curiosity hat, feelings hat, critical hat, etc.15 This allows students to try to focus their thoughts in a new way and challenges their brains to respond to only one prompt at a time.
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