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Research-Based Instructional Strategies
Columbus City Schools teachers and administrators have a rich menu of strategies for improving student performance, along with support for successful implementation.
Participants in the district’s Performance Advancement System need to provide documentation of how the strategies are used with students.
Check out their source, Classroom Instruction that Works >
Nine Strategies that Work
1. Identifying Similarities and Differences
Definition: Recognizing characteristics, categories, patterns, and relationships among things or ideas
Components: Presenting explicit guidance, requiring students independently to identify and develop graphic or symbolic forms for the purpose of
- Comparing
- Classifying
- Creating metaphors
- Creating analogies
2. Summarizing and Note-Taking
Definition: Distilling information into a synthesized form
Components:
Using rules to determine which information to delete, substitute, or keep
Providing a series of questions for students to answer in a specific framework
- Narrative
- Topic-restriction-illustration
- Definition
- Argumentation
- Problem/solution
- Conversation
Providing a framework for students to engage in reciprocal teaching through
- Summarizing
- Questioning
- Clarifying
- Predicting
Structuring student note-taking by providing
- Teacher-prepared notes
- Variety of formats including the informal outline or webbing
- Combination format of informal outline, webbing, and summary statement
3. Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
Definition: Emphasizing that effort is the cause of achievement
Components:
- Explicitly teaching about effort and exemplifying the connection between effort and achievement
- Having students track their effort and achievement using a rubric
- Personalizing recognition of accomplishment of a performance goal or standard
- Pausing, prompting, and praising for improved performance on a demanding task
- Offering students concrete symbols of recognition for accomplishing specific performance goals
4. Homework and Practice
Definition: Opportunities to deepen understanding and skills relative to content that has been initially presented
Components:
- Establishing a homework policy to communicate purpose, amount, consequences for not completing, and acceptable parental involvement
- Designing assignments that clearly articulate the purpose and outcome
- Varying the approaches to providing feedback
- Charting accuracy and speed to facilitate skill development
- Designing practice assignments that focus on specific elements of a complex skill or process
- Planning time for students to increase their conceptual understanding of skills or processes
5. Nonlinguistic Representations
Definition: using mental pictures or physical sensations to store knowledge
Components:
Creating graphic organizers that correspond to the following patterns:
- Descriptive
- Process/Cause-Effect
- Episode
- Generalization/Principle
- Concept
Making physical models
Generating mental pictures
Drawing pictures and pictographs
Engaging in kinesthetic activity
6. Cooperative Learning
Definition: Grouping strategies that promote positive interdependence, face-to-face promotive interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing
Components:
- Using a variety of criteria for grouping students
- Using informal, formal, and long-term base groups
- Managing group size by continually monitoring and modifying size, where needed
- Combining cooperative learning with other classroom structures to vary amount of student interaction
7. Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
Definition: A metacognitive system of thinking in which a direction for learning is established and students receive specific, corrective, and timely information about how well they are learning
Components: Applying knowledge to develop a conjecture and test it
Using a variety of structured tasks to guide students through generating and testing hypotheses
- Systems analysis
- Problem-solving
- Historical investigation
- Invention
- Experimental inquiry
- Decision-making
Ensuring students can explain their hypotheses and conclusions
- Templates
- Sentence stems
- Audiotapes
- Rubrics
- Parent/community presentations
8. Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
Definition: Activating prior knowledge and providing ideational scaffolding
Components:
Using explicit cues
Developing questions that elicit inferences
Asking analytic questions
Using a variety of advance organizers
- Expository
- Narrative
- Skimming
- Graphic
Yes, there is a #9
True to their words about giving staff the chance to do action research, Columbus offers an “Other” option. Here, the researchers are given space to identify, define, and list the components of their original work with students.
