Instructional Strategies

Think-Pair-Share: Students engage in independent and collaborative thinking to explain complex concepts, come up with examples, and take risks. Students practice expressing themselves in both written and oral language, giving each other feedback on their ideas, and refining their understanding given that feedback.

Table Diagrams : Students use tables to analyze the features of a particular topic. They are able to classify objects within that topic at a more granular level and explore the logical structure of the content.

Identify the Big Idea: Students are often asked to summarize what they have learned in a particular lesson or unit. This comes in the form of reading a paragraph and selecting from a list of "big ideas" that identifies that of the paragraph. Also, students are given open ended prompts to encourage in depth, abstract thinking.

Strategy-based Instruction: Teacher explains a cognitive strategy or procedure, models the strategy, provides guided practice and feedback as students internalize the strategy.

Coaching: Teacher makes criterion-referenced observations about performance and makes immediate, specific feedback.

Hands-on experimentation: Teacher provides the structure to perform experiments to help students understand content and thinking strategies with practical experience.

Independent Study: Teacher encourages individuals or small groups of students to explore self-selected areas of study.

Socratic Questioning: Teacher poses a carefully constructed sequence of questions to help students improve their logical reasoning and critical thinking skills.

Inquiry-based Instruction: Teacher poses a task, problem, or intriguing situation, which students will explore across small changes in the data set, and generate insights about the problem and/or solutions.