In the article “Principle of Instruction”, Barak Rosenshine talks about 10 research based strategies that are essential for effective teaching. I found all of them helpful, and they are for all disciplines and all age groups. Many of those strategies in the article are broken down based on the research in cognitive science, research on master teachers, and research on cognitive supports. Even though some of the strategies are common sense, it makes the strategy even more trustworthy since it was researched and found to be helpful.
As we are one semester away from student-teaching, it’s decisive that we learn more and more about the different research based strategies. Some of those might be familiar to many of us, but adding more resources won’t hurt anybody. Those strategies are the ones that help us the teachers how to best deliver the material to students and be aware of creating a safe learning environment, as well as providing us with a variety of ways of how to engage and connect with students.
Below is a list of 17 principles that emerged from the research discussed in the main article. It overlaps with, and offers slightly more detail than, the 10 principles used to organize the article.
• Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.
• Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step.
• Limit the amount of material students receive at one time.
• Give clear and detailed instructions and explanations.
• Ask a large number of questions and check for understanding.
• Provide a high level of active practice for all students.
• Guide students as they begin to practice.
• Think aloud and model steps.
• Provide models of worked-out problems.
• Ask students to explain what they have learned.
• Check the responses of all students.
• Provide systematic feedback and corrections.
• Use more time to provide explanations.
• Provide many examples.
• Reteach material when necessary.
• Prepare students for independent practice.
• Monitor students when they begin independent practice.
All of those strategies are great, but some of them might not work with all students. I wondered how many of those strategies will work in our classrooms or inclusion classrooms.
We will discuss more about those strategies on Monday.
I believe it is possible to utilize all strategies with all ranges of student including our students with IEP’s. In fact, I can see how the suggestions work perfectly with IEP students and prompt us not only to diversify our lessons but to also allow us to self-assess our pedagogic strategies. This inevitable leads to providing ample time for creating positive rapport with our students and better our teaching techniques.
ReplyDeleteLooking over these points, I also think these strategies would be really useful to keep in mind when teaching in an inclusive setting. The short review allows all students (IEP or not) to recap what has happened and to anticipate what is about to come. It never hurts to give clear and detailed instruction, to limit confusion, and for students to know exactly what you want. I think what would be really helpful in an inclusive classroom is to write your objectives on the board for students to reference, and even bulleted points of instruction. Providing many examples and allowing students to practice is giving them the opportunities to learn and figure out problems on their own pace. All these points given I think really guide all students of varying needs.
ReplyDeleteHey Lorena,
ReplyDeleteI think that the list of 17 principles that you have here is a great set of strategies for use in the classroom. The more classroom observations that I complete, the more I am beginning to realize how difficult actually teaching in an inclusive classroom will be. The students in my school come from a VERY diverse education background, and they bring that with them into the classroom, which can make instruction difficult. I found out one of the students in one of the classes I am observing is homeless. Others have emotional/behavioral disorders. Others don't have a regular means of eating, and school lunch is the only guaranteed meal of the day. Some students only read at a 5th grade level. It makes teaching difficult, and there are so many things you need to keep in mind. It can work, but it takes a lot of planning, and patience. I hope I have both! I look forward to this discussion on Tuesday!
Hi Lorena,
ReplyDeleteI also agree that these 17 principles are a great set of strategies to use in an inclusive setting, but like we all already know, teaching only gets more difficult! My mentor teacher this semester is only teaching Grammar and writing. It sounds pretty easy, right? Well, the problem here is that most of these students do not even know the basics of English. Some of them do and so they get frustrated doing work that they already know. The teacher tries to get everyone on board, but it is very difficult when you have a group of students who are at various levels. I guess there can be a million strategies out there, but it all really depends on us whether or not we plan to differentiate for our students.
Lorena, I think that all students could benefit from the strategies you listed, and they would all be very helpful even in an inclusive classroom. I think all of these strategies pay very close attention to student success in the classroom that they seem appropriate to be included in an inclusive classroom where some students might need more assitance than others. Students who need accommodations and extra help learning will find these helpful, such as being given many examples and models, being given feedback, only receiving small amounts of new information at a time and mastering it before moving on, etc.
ReplyDeleteI think all of these strategies would work well in an inclusion classroom. In one class I am observing, about half of the students have IEPs. I have realized that the last strategy you listed is important to the success of that class. Monitoring students when they begin independent practice may be hard to do successfully if there is only one teacher in the classroom. On Mondays, there are five adults in the class I am observing (the teacher, a special education teacher, two City Year members, and me). The influx of adults on these days provide a lot of support for the students and teacher. We are able to give each student some individual attention. This allows us to see exactly what each student is understanding and where he may need more help. After, we report back to the teacher and she is able to tailor her next lesson accordingly.
ReplyDeleteAll the teaching strategies will be useful in our classrooms. I think it will be hard to utilize all of them at one time in the beginning. We will have to learn how best to over come time restraints. It seems like trying to do all of them in one lesson will be a hard task, but I do believe with practice and time every teacher should be able to. I especially think that it will be important to limit the amount we want our students to understand in any given class period. I have been told to limit that to about 3 core understandings per class period. If we stick to that number I believe it will be easier to use all of these strategies in one class period.
ReplyDeleteHey Lorena,
ReplyDeleteI think one of the special things about being a teacher is that we we are constantly adapting and coming up with different ways to reach our students. As you mention, the strategies brought up by Rosenshine seem easily applicable to any discipline. That being said, it is our job as teachers to figure out how to apply it and see the success of our students through. I have a lecturer right now that goes on and on about the importance of planning checks into your instruction. "All the best teachers I've ever seen flawlessly integrate checks throughout their activities." She knows it's important, now we know it's important, and if that wasn't enough this article gives us reasons as to why. Students who need specialized plans or 504 accommodations need these strategies just as much as their peers, they just might need them in a different way. A handful of these strategies actually lend themselves to help us consider how to go about instructing inclusive courses. The most important thing is that you understand what your students need from you and that they understand what you need from them.
Nice post Lorena,
ReplyDeleteI agree that by using all of these strategies in our classroom it will help our students learn. By giving them multiple examples and limit the amount of information we throw at them at one time and making sure we give a lot of explanation, we can make sure our students really grab the material and can understand what they have to fully.
I think it is a good list to throw into the pile of resources to use when evaluating teaching and coming up with better strategies, I think that the article itself and it's research didn't necessarily give good examples, as a list like this can easily be used as a broken checklist among all the other broken checklists, I would have liked to see more definitive research and better examples of effective implementations of said strategies, I think that in some cases or at least as I was reading it, with the exception of some of the strategies, it seemed that it was removing responsibility from students and their self-efficacy, promoting the use of kid gloves and baby stepping not allowing students to develop their own skill sets for learning. I think the encouragements of things like think-alouds were good tools for showing students how to think about a subject or a problem when approaching it, but beyond that most of it, was like carefully paving the surface and transforming everything into simple procedures for students to develop their rote memorization, for the intent of passing on content, rather than challenging them to grow as learners and think more deeply and interpret their education into something meaningful. with that aside, I think for students with IEP's as mentioned in the comments above or for the sake of testing, or simply when a content heavy unit comes up, these strategies can be very useful, but the places we use them at and the functions we use them for should also be considered,
ReplyDeleteLorena,
ReplyDeleteAll of the teaching strategies you listed above are very important. I have actually spoken to my mentor teacher about how important several of these strategies are in her classroom as both of her English classes are inclusion classes, so she has a very diverse set of learners in her classroom. One strategy that she always stresses in her teaching is modeling, as she feels it is the best way to show the students what is expected of them while also avoiding confusion. In addition to that, she makes it a routine to relay a preview of the lesson at the beginning of the class while including a 'why' statement to explain to the students the significance of what they are about to learn. From observing and working with her classes, I can tell that these teaching strategies really do make a difference, as a great majority of the class is able to understand what is expected of them. She does utilize other teaching strategies to cater to the great variety of learners in her classroom and the effectiveness of all of the strategies combined really show in the progress of the students. Of course there may be students who need more specific accommodations that these strategies may not address, but at least the strategies you have listed above can make for a great start in helping the classroom as a whole a work towards a successful understanding.
Hey Lorena,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post. I find these things really helpful in organizing or coming up with ideas about a unit/lesson plan. And I completely see these strategies in action while doing my hours at Juarez, which is great. Right now she is setting up the structure of her class- a lot of her explaining what to do when and how to do it. But she has to do this because she is preparing her students for independent learning. She gives them a lot of freedom and opportunities to have agency with their learning. They have choices about when to turn a response paper in and what to write about, which articles to respond to, etc. And she also has her expectations clearly laid out, and continually repeats them in class. The students now are struggling, they don't understand what to do with the freedom and flexibility. Someone said today in class: "I didn't know what to write on the response paper, so I didn't do one this week." This is to be expected, she says. The first quarter is bumpy, but eventually, by the end of the year, her students are essentially running their own class, driving their own learning, and holding their own full-class discussions.
It is because of researched strategies, such as these, that she is able to do this. She presented her curriculum of IB Freshman English and backed it up with research and was basically given free rein to craft the course. It is very rewarding to see it all play out successfully.
So today I had the pleasure of teaching a class for the whole period. One of which went really well and the students were extremely engaged. However, I would like to say that engagement does not necessarily mean that the students are learning. Certain "common sense" methods are easily passed on when teaching. I can say that I forgot to structure a worksheet in a way that even though my lecture reflected the content it did not reflect the structure needed for certain students.
ReplyDeleteI have to focus on the point of giving clear directions. I believe that giving clear and explicit instructions is important in maintaining the lesson plan. Many times in the class I am observing the teacher failed in delivering the instructions to an activity clearly and lost valuable time. Many of her activities extend into the next day because of this and it interrupts the flow of the lessons. Time management is an important skill that I have yet to master.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of this list consists of things that we as (future) teacher already consider subconsciously. I would like to use this list as a sort of check list when planning a lesson, to ensure I include most of these elements in my lesson plan. Of course some strategies don't work for every student, however once you get to know your students you will know which ones will be more effective!
ReplyDeleteHi Lorena,
ReplyDeleteYou are right to be skeptic about whether all of these strategies will work with all of our students. Even though these are research-based effective strategies, that does not mean that every student learns the exact same way. By adapting our lessons to include multiple of these strategies every topic, we are more likely to have all of ours students attain a deeper understanding than if we had focused on only one of these teaching strategies per topic. I feel the bigger issue is going to be including as many of these strategies per lesson and still having the time management to cover all the content necessary.
Hi Lorena, I enjoyed reading your post. A lot of the strategies the reading listed served as refreshers for me. I had previously read/learned about most if not all of them; however, it's interesting how easy it is to forgot these strategies when trying to create a lesson plan. I know that happens to me a lot. I think one of the most important strategies that can be beneficial to all students (gen ed or not) is reviewing. The other article mentioned how a student who was absent felt lost when he came back to school because the teacher would not take the time to explain to him what had happened the day before. I can relate to this student. When I was a kid, I was absent quite a bit-and I too felt lost upon my return. I think it is important for students to get filled in on what they miss-if not, they run the risk of falling further behind.
ReplyDeleteI agree that most of these are intuitive, but I am humble enough to admit that without that list, I could easily forget some of the things on that very list. I think as a future educator I really have to pay attention to the fact that the students I will be teaching will not be at the same level as I am. Especially because the content I am teaching is content that I have made sure that I have a very strong working knowledge of. I am thinking maybe I can take this list, and post it on my desk so only I can see it as a reminder. Thank you very much for this.
ReplyDeleteHey Lorena,
ReplyDeleteI think most all of those practices would be ideal in any classroom, the one that I would add if I could would be every once in a while asking the students what they feel like they need to work on or go back on and review. Not sure if it would work in a real classroom, but in an ideal one I think it would be great. I think that it would be inclusive as well as effective, because if one student asks to go back and work on something then it is likely that more have the same feeling as well.
Hey Lorena, great post.
ReplyDeleteI especially like the principle "Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step." At Westinghouse this week my mentor teacher Ms. Luna gave me the chance to teach her lesson to 8th period after I co-taught the same lesson for two earlier periods. The lesson plan was designed along the same lines as this principle. I asked the students to analyze a poem and broke the analysis into smaller parts. First, I presented material on rhyme scheme and end rhyme, next I demonstrated how to identify rhyme scheme in a portion of our poem, and last I asked students to identify the scheme in the remaining section of the poem. Finally we reflected on what the rhyme scheme meant to the poem.... before moving on to another literary device with which we repeated these steps. If I had just presented 4 literary devices and then said "Go" to ask students to practice the activity of analysis I don't think the lesson would have been as conducive to learning.
Looking over the provided points I think they are all excellent to use and model in an ideal classroom. I think that is always important to access students background knowledge and learning. I believe considered schema?? I think great ways to draw into that is through bell ringers and journals.
ReplyDeleteScaffolding lessons or units is a great way to introduce new material as well new skills at a rate that doesn't overwhelm students. It allows for them to build at a consistency where they are taking in, applying and retaining the information.
Lastly, one I think that works well is teaching modeling. That allows them to have an active role in their learning experience. I usually break mines down by: I do, you watch, I do, you help, You do, I help, you do, I watch. Steps like these allow them to know expectations, give them examples to refer back to, and allow for questions and concerns. It helps if they even do pair or group work after the teacher models. This calls for them to have to learn/help/work with one another to find understanding.
These are wonderful methods to keeping our students engaged! I believe that some of the most difficult parts of this strategy is its maintenance, meaning the frequency of its use. Since we cannot rely too much on the same method and overuse it in the classroom for it will loose it's effect, we need to learn ways of integrating engaging practice into our curriculum .
ReplyDeleteNice post! Saarah Mohammed