Instructional Strategies
Instructional strategies are techniques teachers use to help students learn.
Instructional strategies can:
- Engage students in learning
- Motivate students and help them focus attention
- Organize information for understanding and remembering
- Monitor and assess learning
- Provide students information about their learning
There is an instructional strategy (or set of strategies) for virtually every goal that we may want to achieve, and strategies cut across concepts such as subject specific pedagogies, lesson models, differentiated instruction, and more.
Examples of instructional strategies include (this is a very limited list):
- Participation strategies that distribute engagement and promote thinking
- Rotating through stations using different types of activities to build towards a learning goal
- Interactive Read Alouds
- Thinking routines
- Task variation
- Guided note taking
- Metacognitive note taking
- Graphic organizers
- Visuals and non-linguistic representations
- Simulations & role plays
- Field trips/guest speakers
- Debates
- Multi-media
- Think alouds and promoting metacognition
- Checking for understanding
- Guided learning with sub-groups of students
- Varied lesson formats (gradual release, constructivist, workshop model, socratic seminar, etc.) - each of which incorporate many more instructional strategies)
- Grouping:
- Cooperative mixed ability grouping (pairs, triads, etc.)
- Grouping by interest
- Grouping by distributed skills/strengths
- Group investigations
- Flexible grouping by ability level (in the target skill area)
- Learning stations
- Tiered instruction & intervention
- Learning contracts, personalized learning plans
- Varied time allotments
- Peer tutoring
- Self-assessment
- Student evaluation of the lessons
- Individual goal setting & evaluation
- Clarifying misconceptions with the whole class
- group discussion
- independent study
- portfolio development
- journals and learning logs
- role-playing
- cognitive organizers
- literature response
- service learning
- issue-based inquiry
- Due nows
- Teaching academic vocabulary and language
- Modeling working with academic vocabulary and language
- Accountable talk
- Conferencing
- Activating prior knowledge
- Direct instruction and lecture
- Questioning
- Homework and practice
- Modeling
- Reciprocal teaching
- Word wall