End a class, just before your closure (or ticket out the door activity) while students are engaged in something that needs to be completed. Instruct students to begin their work as soon as class begins the next day and not to wait for you to start class. As students enter the room the next day, ask them to get right to work. You can always call for attention after a few minutes and make announcements or give instructions as needed.
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Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-21-12
During an activity or while students are working on a project, ask them three questions:
- What are you doing?
- Why are you doing it?
- What will be your next steps?
It should be the goal of a teacher to reach a point where students can respond correctly to each of these three questions. This is how to prepare students to be independent learners.
Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-20-12
Administrators: do you agree, as most of us do, that people copy what we do much more than listen to what we say? If this is true, then your actions have a much greater impact on your teaching staff than anything you speak to them about.
Ask yourself one question: “Does the way you conduct your staff meetings model the way you expect your teachers to run their classrooms? Do you put across information at a staff meeting the way you expect your teachers to put it across to students?
Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-19-12
Do you want students to learn to empathize and simultaneously learn something about the subject you teach? Distribute a short poem (or song lyrics) about a person or event in your subject area that discusses something that would bring great joy, sorrow or some other emotion to the people being discussed. Ask your students to write how they would feel, or how they think someone else would feel, in that situation. Share and discuss.
Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-18-12
Celebration is an important aspect of student learning and stress relief for employees. Teachers, how often do you ask your students to share successes, large and small in the work they accomplish? How often do you compliment the class and actually celebrate a class-wide success? Administrators, take five minutes at staff meetings to have one or two teachers hare something positive that happened in their classroom!
Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-17-12
No matter what subject you teach, focus students on a specific event, person or place you want them to study. Ask them to come to class with a list of song titles that reflect this person, place, or thing. Use this as the catalyst for a dialogue.
Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-16-12
For English or social studies: play the song or print the lyrics to We’ll Meet Again. Tell students it was recorded during the second world war. Challenge them to do research, or give them a hand-out or textbook and cite appropriate pages which describe the environment in England. Ask students to interpret the song in that context. You could also use The White Cliffs of Dover.
Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-15-12
Sit silently and stare, one day, as students enter the classroom. Don’t say a word until all is quiet, which may take a few minutes. Then ask students if there is a way, without yelling, scolding, penalizing or threatening, to achieve silence at the time scheduled for the start of class.
Volume 13, Issue 6 – How Does a Teacher Differentiate Instruction?
In the next three articles I intend to outline specific strategies for differentiating instruction. These will be practical strategies for classroom teachers in any discipline, at any grade level.
PART ONE:
The two most important thoughts for a teacher to keep in mind when differentiating instruction are “Options” and “Flexibility”. Let’s start with the concept of “Flexibility”.
In traditional classrooms teachers not only focus on what they want students to learn, but also on how they want children to learn. I suggest we need to be more flexible with regard to how we allow students to learn while making our learning objectives (whether gleaned from the nation, state, district or our own standards) non negotiable. Here are two examples:
A teacher walked into her classroom, wrote on the board the standards she wanted the students to learn and stated: “Usually I would determine what you need to learn as well as how you will learn it. But I am more concerned with what you learn than how you learn it – as long as you learn it. So instead of me deciding how you will learn what I wrote on the board, I am asking you to suggest ways you would like to learn. As long as I am comfortable that what you propose will help you learn, I will approve it.”
This can be time consuming and difficult if you have not done it before, and even for the teacher with experience differentiating instruction, I am not suggesting this is something you should do frequently. But if you try this once or twice a year, it will help you, and your students, focus on what is important in a lesson – what they learn as opposed to how they learn it.
While I am not proud of it, I admit that I got through elementary and secondary school reading only one book from cover to cover – The Jackie Robinson Story. If an English teacher wanted to motivate me to learn about conflict, character, setting and plot, why not let me study these concepts in relation to my childhood hero’s autobiography? Now, admittedly, if the learning objective had to do with Shakespearean plays, I would have
to read a play by Shakespeare; but why not assign me to write an essay comparing the secondary characters in The Jackie Robinson Story with the secondary characters in Hamlet?
For social studies teachers, think of the aspects of the civil rights movement that could be accessed through Jackie Robinson. Think of how you could move me from my hero into studying the civil war, African American inventors, the women’s rights movement or any other time in our history.
For math or science teachers, I would sooner have tried to figure out how long it would take a base runner to go from first to third than to be asked to figure out how long it would take a train to go from London to Paris, two cities with which I had little unfamiliarity. And I could more easily have been challenged to discuss appropriate ball field surfaces or the composition of a rock climbing wall than to study rock formations in places that had no
relevance for me.
Not every child is a baseball or even a sports fan. But that is the point. I am not suggesting that everyone in my classes should have had these same Jackie Robinson related assignments. I am suggesting that teachers can allow students to work on different assignments that each have the same learning objectives. In fact, when you do this it opens the door to comparing and sharing student work because we learn best about a concept when we see examples in different contexts. If our challenge is to write a creative, inspiring opening paragraph, we learn a lot more when we share opening paragraphs about totally different people or topics than if we each have written about the same thing.
Giving students OPTIONS in terms of how they learn what you want them to learn is another major strategy to differentiate instruction. When I give a major assignment I look at the eight multiple intelligences defined by Howard Gardner. I try to make sure that each student has an opportunity to select an assignment that will allow the student to draw on his/her strongest “Intelligence”.
There are at least two types of options a teacher can offer:
- Offer choices of content. As an example, allow me to use The Jackie Robinson Story if doing so will not compromise the purpose of the lesson.
- Allow students to work in their strongest Multiple Intelligence. For example, at times it may be appropriate to let them choose whether to learn and demonstrate what they are learning with an essay, a graphic, by writing lyrics to a song that reflect their response to the teacher’s question, by building a diorama or by creating a game that requires an understanding of what is being taught.
More on strategies for differentiating instruction in the next article in a few days.
Teaching Strategy of the Day 2-4-12
Anything that can be spoken can also be recorded as words to a poem or lyrics to a song. Children enjoy being able to engage with music of their generation. Take advantage of this to motivate students to learn in subjects like math, science, English and social studies. Occasionally, ask a question and require students, individually, in pairs or in groups of three, to give their response by writing it in the form of a poem or as lyrics to a tune they are allowed to select. Then allow them to sing their responses.