9 Instructional Strategies that Work in the Classroom

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge

9 High-Yield Essentials
Summarizing & Notetaking
Reinforcing Effort &
Providing Recognition
Homework & Practice
(3 – 12)
Nonlinguistic Representations
Cooperative Learning
Setting Objectives &
Providing Feedback
Cues, Questions & Advance
Organizers
Identifying Similarities &
Differences
Generating & Testing
Hypothesis

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Setting Objectives &
Providing Feedback

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework & Practice
(3 – 12)
Organizers

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Hypothesis

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Setting Objectives
Set learning objectives that are specific but
not restrictive.
Communicate the learning objectives to students and
parents.
 Connect the learning objectives to
previous and future learning.
 Engage students in setting personal
learning objectives
12%

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Setting Objectives

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Setting Objectives
Procedural Knowledge
Factual Knowledge
Understanding

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Provide Feedback 28%
 addresses what is correct and elaborates on
what students need to do next.
 appropriately in time to meet students’ needs.
 criterion referenced.
 Engage students in the feedback process.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Provide Feedback

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
2 strategies that are related to motivation
Self-efficacy
Control beliefs
Intrinsic motivation
Task value
29%

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Reinforcing Effort
Teachers establish a positive environment for learning
by intentionally scaffolding classroom experiences that
allow students to be faced with challenges.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Reinforcing Effort
3 Recommendations:
 Teach students about the relationship between effort
and achievement.
 Provide students with explicit guidance about exactly
what it means to expend effort.
 Ask students to keep track of their effort and
achievement.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Reinforcing Effort
Mr. Marwan: “Students,
you have a large test
tomorrow. I want you to
know that everything on
the study guide will be
found somewhere on the
test. You must work hard
today in your learning
teams and study very hard
tonight at home. I know
you each want to succeed,
so let’s get to work.”
Mr. Hussein “Students, you
have a large test tomorrow. You
have demonstrated a
willingness to stay with the
various tasks I have given you
as you prepared for the test.
Today I need you to work hard
in your learning teams.
Let’s do a quick review. I will
use Inspiration® software to
capture your ideas about what it
means to work hard with your
team members.”

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Reinforcing Effort
Charting effort and achievement will reveal
patterns and help students recognize the
connections between the two.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Reinforcing Effort

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Providing recognition is the process of
acknowledging students’
attainment
of specific goals.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Recognition and praise direct impact on
self-efficacy (beliefs about one’s
competency),
effort,
persistence, and
motivation—than on learning.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
3 Recommendations:
Promote a mastery-goal orientation.
Provide praise that is specific and
aligned with expected performance
and behaviors.
Use concrete symbols of recognition.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
 Read the following hypothetical examples of providing
recognition in the classroom.
 Evaluate each example in terms of the guidelines for
praise from “Guidelines for Praise” handout.
 For each example, consider whether the recognition the
teacher provides is likely to be effective or ineffective.
 Assign specific criteria to each sample and explain your
thinking.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Example #1. Majd is unable to use a table of
characteristics to make connections among
chemical elements. Mr. Salem suggests that he
focus on one characteristic and look for
connections. When he returns later, Majd explains
how he figured out a way to group the elements
according to boiling point. Mr. Salem
congratulates him on finding a valid connection.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Example #2. Mr. Salem circulates as students
are working in small groups.
He pauses at Station 1 and comments, “Nice
work on your calculations.”
At Station 2, he says, “Nice work on your graphs.”
At Station 3, he says,
“Nice work on your calculations.”

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Example #3. Mr. Salem calls a student in his
chemistry class to his desk and says the
following:
“You really did a good job working through all of
the steps and checking your answers for this
problem. I know you’ve had difficulties with
multistep calculations before and sometimes
settled for getting any answer down on paper,
even if it wasn’t correct. Your determination with
this task really showed.”

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Example #4. Mr. Salem looks up from his desk
and calls out, “Good job, Jackson. Keep it up.”

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Teachers can use various concrete, symbolic tokens
of recognition such as stickers, coupons, awards,
treats, or other types of prizes.
Such rewards are better used with routine tasks or
ones that require rote learning (e.g., multiplication
facts) rather than with those that require creativity or
discovery (Brophy, 2004).

Creating the
Environment for
Learning

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Cooperative Learning 27%
is one of the most
misunderstood instructional practices

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Drs. David Johnson and Roger Johnson
(1999) use the following five elements to define
cooperative learning:
• positive interdependence
• face-to-face promotive interaction
• individual and group accountability
• interpersonal and small-group skills
• group processing

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
2 elements
 positive interdependence
 individual and group accountability

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
 positive interdependence
 ensure that each individual’s workload
is reasonably equal to the workload of his or her
team members
 clearly defining roles and responsibilities during
the cooperative learning activity.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
 individual and group accountability
 each team member’s need to receive feedback
on how his or her personal efforts contribute
toward achievement of the overall goal.
use formative and summative assessments and
determine students’ contributions to the group
goal.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
3 Recommendations
 Include elements of both positive interdependence
and individual accountability.
 Keep group size small.
 Use cooperative learning consistently and
systematically.

Creating the
Environment for
Learning
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Organizers
22%

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Cues and Questions
Cues are explicit reminders or hints about what
students are about to experience. They help
students activate what they already know about a
topic and let them know what they should expect.
In the classroom, teachers who know their content
often fail to understand that students need explicit
cueing as an aid to learning.

Classroom One. Mr. Ammar is always in a hurry to
get students started with the learning. After he briefly
describes the objective, he immediately
begins his lesson. As he passes out papers, he says,
“Okay, I have a short piece for you to read before we
break into your learning team groups. Please take a
few minutes and read the information on the paper.”
Students get right to work and read.
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Cues and Questions

The process often involves drilling and extracting. The work
can be expensive and time consuming. Silver and gold are
two minerals recovered from the operation by skilled
operators who perform the necessary tasks. As with any
procedure that involves instruments and machinery, there is
some level of risk. In fact, some have died during the
extraction process. Other dilemmas that can arise are due
to poor resurfacing. If the surface area is not returned to its
original contour after the drilling and extracting process,
erosion of surrounding materials can and often does
occur.
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Cues and Questions

When students finish, he asks them to discuss the following
question:
How does the process you read about relate to what we
were discussing yesterday?
Confusion erupts as students attempt to answer the
question.
Ali says, “I was at the dentist yesterday, and I know this is
about having cavities filled. How can learning about cavities
tie in to what we talked about yesterday?”
“It’s about mining, not the dentist,” says Aser.
“No, it’s not,” replies Faisal.
“Let’s ask Mr. Ammar,” offers Omar.
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Cues and Questions

Classroom Two. As he plans his lesson about mining, Mr.
Anas keeps in mind that his students might have only very
limited background knowledge relevant to his unit on
nonrenewable resources.
Mr. Anas begins by asking students to follow along as he
reads aloud the lesson objectives that discuss the effect of
primary economic activities in a geographic context. He
then asks students what they know about the terms
nonrenewable and strip mining.
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Cues and Questions

Mr. Anas has his students discuss what they want to learn
with their study partners. As he passes out the short
reading assignment, he cues students into the learning by
explaining that they should read the paragraph with a focus
on being able to share three important points about mining
with their partners. He also asks them to think about how
the reading connects to the previous day’s discussion of
precious metals.
Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Cues and Questions

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Cues and Questions
4 Recommendations
 Focus on what is important.
 Use explicit cues.
 Ask inferential questions.
 Ask analytic questions.
Mr. Mazen’s
Workshop on
High Level
Questions

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Advance Organizers
4 Recommendations
 Use expository advance organizers
 Use narrative advance organizers.
 Use skimming as an advance organizer.
 Use graphic advance organizers

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Advance Organizers
 Use expository advance organizers
e.g. a teacher is designing a lesson about health and
nutrition. As an expository advance organizer, he
provides the key vocabulary words that students will
encounter, the trend data on childhood obesity, and
sample menus from the school cafeteria. He asks
students to review the data and menus prior to
beginning instruction.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Advance Organizers
 Use skimming as an advance organizer.
Teachers should model skimming though think aloud
protocols
Tools such as an SQ3R protocol
(Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Reflect) or anticipation
guide) increase the probability of positively influencing
student achievement. Teachers

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Advance Organizers

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
27%
5 recommendations
 Use graphic organizers.
 Make physical models or manipulatives.
 Generate mental pictures.
 Create pictures, illustrations, and pictographs.
 Engage in kinesthetic activities.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Use graphic organizers.
Descriptive Graphic Organizer

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Time-Sequence Graphic Organizer

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Process/Cause-effect Graphic Organizer

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Episode Graphic Organizer

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Generalization
/Principle
Graphic
Organizer

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Concept
Graphic
Organizer

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Make physical models or manipulatives.
Concrete depictions of the knowledge students are
learning.
If you ask students to create physical models, make
certain that the activity will extend students’
understanding of the knowledge.
What purpose does building a Berlin Wall out of sugar
cubes serve? How does building a papier-mâché
volcano help students understand the formation of
magma? The construction of the physical model
should be closely tied to the content students are
learning.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Make physical models or manipulatives.
For example, if students are comparing the
circulatory and respiratory systems by creating a
model that shows the interrelationships that exist
between the two systems, then their teacher should
not accept a model that merely identifies the major
components of each system.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Generate mental pictures.
The most important out of the 5 strategies of
nonlinguistic representations since all
strategies result in creating a mental image .

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Generate mental pictures
picture what is being read during and after
reading.
create these pictures in their minds using prior
knowledge, emotions and all 5 senses.
engages with text or problem in ways that make it
personal and memorable to them alone.
adapt mental images in response to the shared
images of others.
adapt and revise images when new information is
given.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Directions:
•Listen as I read the following paragraph.
•Write about what you see as you hear the story.
•Use illustrations, words, phrases, or sentences —
or combine them all!
•Draw and write as YOU see it in your mind. There
are no right or wrong answers. Just fill up the paper
as you visualize the story.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
I stood on the top of a grassy rise watching a young girl
and her dog. The dog had been swimming in a muddy
pond, and upon seeing the girl ran at full speed to greet
her. He placed his muddy paws on her shoulders and
vigorously licked her face. The girl laughed with glee and
stroked the dog’s fur.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
I imagined how the fur must smell from the water in the
muddy pond and realized that the girl must now smell
the same. I could almost feel how gritty her hands had
become from petting the dog. My thoughts traveled to
the fact that her face must be sticky from the “dog
kisses.” The two ran off together. I continued to hear her
laugh and the dog bark even after they were well out of
sight. I smiled as I walked back home.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
How about this?
F = (M1M2)G /r²
This equation states that force (F) is equal to the product
of the masses of two objects (M1 and M2) times a
constant (G) divided by the square of the distance
between them (r2).

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
34%

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
facilitates learning by
 providing opportunities for students to
capture, organize, and reflect on important
facts, concepts,Ideas
 distilling information

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
Where in our school curriculum is a grade level
identified as being responsible for teaching
students to summarize and take notes?

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
Summarizing involves at least two highly related
elements: fi lling in missing parts and translating
information into a synthesized form.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
Two card players stare at each other across a table.
Both appear tense, although the man smoking a
cigar seems to have a slight smile on his face. He
lays down his cards in a fanning motion that displays
one card at a time. When each new card is shown,
his opponent in the silk shirt seems to sink lower and
lower into his chair. When the cigar-smoking
antagonist finally shows all of his cards, the silk-
shirted man gets up and leaves the table without
showing his cards and without saying a word.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
Two men had a large bet on a single hand of poker. As
soon as the cards were dealt, one of the men knew he
had won the hand. After he showed his hand, his
opponent silently got up and left, knowing he had lost.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
3 Suggestions
 Teach students the rule-based summarizing strategy.
 Use summary frames.
 Engage students in reciprocal teaching.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
Common patterns and their accompanying
summary frames include
• narrative frame
• topic-restriction-illustration frame
• definition frame
• argumentation frame
• problem–solution frame
• conversation frame

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Summarizing
topic-restriction-illustration frame

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Notetaking
Note taking, like summarizing, requires students to
 identify essential information.
 synthesize material, prioritize pieces of data,
 restate some information, and organize concepts,
topics, and details.
can help them
 memorize information and
 conceptualize new ideas.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Notetaking
Students often struggle with this strategy because note-
taking strategies are not intuitive.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Notetaking
 intentionally take time to teach note taking to students.
 teach a variety of note-taking strategies
 Bulleted lists may work for one student, whereas a web
or concept map might help another.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Notetaking
3 Recommendation
 Give them teacher-prepared Notes
 Teach students a variety of note-taking formats.
 Provide opportunities for students to revise their
notes and use them for review.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Notetaking

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework & Practice
(3 – 12)
28%

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework
(3 – 12)
“Sometimes, when teachers explain something,
it’s not enough. I have to do it by myself at home.”
—Wael, age 15
“All homework is busywork and a waste of time.
For me, it’s more beneficial to talk to friends,
relax, and explore personal interests like lasers.”
—Abdulrahman, age 16

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework
(3 – 12)
Summary of Research
• The amount of homework assigned should
increase as students get older.
• Parental involvement should be kept to a
minimum.
• The purpose of homework should be
identified and articulated.
• If homework is assigned, there should be
feedback.

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework
(3 – 12)
How much homework is the
right amount of homework?
Elementary School (3- 5) 30 - 40 minutes
Middle School 50 - 60 minutes
High School 120 minutes

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework
(3 – 12)
Parental Involvement
• Minimal
• Facilitate the completion of homework
• Research has shown some negative
effects when parents help students

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework
(3 – 12)
The purpose of homework should be identified
and articulated.
Practice
vs
Preparation or Elaboration

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework
(3 – 12)
If homework is assigned, provide
feedback
The reality is that we cannot give high-quality
feedback on all homework.
Use of Homework
Percentile
Gain
Not graded or commented on 11
Graded only 28
Homework with teacher’s
comments as feedback
30

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Homework
(3 – 12)
Recommendations on Homework
• Communicate a Homework policy
• Clearly articulate the purpose and outcome
• Vary approaches to feedback

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Practice

Helping Students
to Develop
Understanding
Practice
3 Recommendations
 Clearly identify and communicate the
purpose of practice activities.
 Design practice sessions that are short,
focused, and distributed over time.
 Provide feedback on practice sessions.

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Hypothesis

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences46%
• Basic to human thought
• Possibly the core to
learning
• Higher-order on Bloom’s
• Level 4: Analysis
• Level 6: Evaluation

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Why is it important?
• Leads to deeper student understanding of
the content.
• Students make connections with old
knowledge to new knowledge.
• The brain works by building connections
and associations constantly.
• The brain remembers more easily things
that are unusual or different.

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
• Definition: Identifying the similarities and
differences. (Note: Traditionally, comparing
refers to identifying similarities; contrasting
refers to identifying differences.)
• How are the objects below the same? How
are they different?
Comparing/ Classifying

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
• When introducing the activity, start very
structured, explicit, and teacher-directed. Use
familiar and simple content.
• Teacher-directed: Teacher selects items to
compare and how to compare.
• Student-directed: Teacher selects items,
students decide how to compare.
• Advanced student-directed: Students select
items to compare and how to compare.

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
 Listening for rhyming sounds, vowel sounds
 Looking at letters, fonts, words carefully
 Book Characters
 Producers, Consumers, Decomposers
 Freshwater & Saltwater
 Tsunamis & Earthquakes
 Solids & Liquids (Gas & Plasma)
 Fiction & Non-fiction Features
 Cultures/Holidays/Traditions
 Numbers/Sets
 Types of Music/Sounds/Art/Movement

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Comparing
/Classifying

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
• Steps for classifying:
• What to classify?
• What things can I group?
• How are the things alike?
• Can I make the groups another way?
• Does everything fit into a group?
• Would it be better to split up any of the groups or
combine any groups?

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Category Category Category Category Category
Items Items Items Items Items

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Creating Metaphors
• Definition: Identifying a pattern in a specific
topic and then finding another topic that
appears to be quite different but has the same
general pattern.
• In other words… two items
that are connected by an abstract (non-literal)
relationship.
• Note: Similes connect two things using the
words like
or as.

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Creating Metaphors
• Teacher-Directed: Teacher provides the first
element and the abstract relationship.
• Student-Directed: Teacher provides first
element and the student identifies the second
element and the relationship.
• The brain is _______________.
• Love is ____________.
• For younger students, starting out with similes
may help them understand the relationship
concept.

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Creating Metaphors
Element 1
Literal
Pattern 1
Abstract
Relationship
Literal
Pattern 2
Element 2

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Creating Metaphors

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Creating Analogies
• Definition: Identifying relationships between
pairs of concepts. In other words, identifying
relationships between relationships.
• Example:
happy:sad::big:sm
all
“Happy is to sad as big is to small.”
Happy and big are opposites of sad

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Creating Analogies
• Teacher-Directed: Analogy is given and the
students explain the relationship. As
understanding increases, eliminate one
element. (Younger students- use pictures
or do the activity orally in a whole-group or
small-group setting.)
• Student-Directed: The teacher presents
the first pair, the students come up with the
second pair.
• Advanced Student-Directed: Give students
the type of relationship. Students come up

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
Types of Analogies
• Similar Concepts:
hungry:ravenous::tired:exhausted
• Dissimilar Concepts: grim:cheerful::hilly:flat
• Class Membership: carrot:potato::brown:red
• Class Name/Class Member:
whale:mammal::snake:reptile
• Part to Whole: spark
plug:engine::variable:function
• Change: caterpillar:butterfly::tadpole:frog
• Function: pilot:airplane::lawn mower:grass
• Quantity/Size:
one minute:one hour::one second: one hour

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Differences
is to
is to
Relationship:________________
___

Helping Students
to Extend and
Apply Knowledge
Hypothesis23%

9 Instructional Strategies that Work in the Classroom

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9 Instructional Strategies that Work in the Classroom