● give students opportunities to practice in an environment where they feel safe to ask questions, persevere and take risks, with the support of the teacher and their peers.
● allow students sufficient time to develop their skills or concepts to support their growth to greater independence.
● provide students repeated authentic opportunities to practice to develop their mastery.
● support vocabulary development, deepen comprehension, and enrich understanding of a concept.
● share background knowledge and brainstorm before beginning an activity or inquiry
● research, develop ideas, and provide and receive feedback
● produce evidence of learning or present findings from their inquiries.
● Embed collaborative elements in learning experiences so that students can practice skills, strategies, or concepts
● Identify clear expectations around what effective collaboration looks and sounds like
● Communicating clear expectations of what effective collaboration looks like
● Conferring with individual students as they practice
● Observing students’ progress to plan for further mini-lessons
● Responding to questions and delivering additional instruction as needed
● Giving small group instruction with students who need further instruction
● Practising the skills, strategies, or concepts that were the focus of the explicit instruction with their peers
● Discussing their progress with other students in pairs or small groups
● Asking questions when they encounter challenges
● Prepare further learning experiences if students need more practice
● Consider how collaboration was used to support skills, strategies, or concepts
● Identify communication strategies that might need support in advance of further collaboration
According to the research,
Students experience increased achievement from:
● reading and discussion during class to practice their reading comprehension skills with self-selected and teacher-curated texts. Classrooms that are more discussion-oriented and language-rich create environments that produce higher literacy growth
● relationships during reading because friends want to share their experience and their ideas.
● practice in choosing a strategy to fit a particular purpose and context, and also in explaining why they made the choices they did by conferring with the teacher or collaborating with peers
● flexible groupings that frequently change as their needs change
● culturally responsive learning experiences developed for students with similar learning targets, based on collected evidence, observations, and conversations
● collaborative reading and team-based learning strategies as they are effective in improving reading comprehension and writing. Writers must learn to work effectively with one another to create writing, provide feedback, and complete a final draft, often with the use of collaborative technologies for a wide range of audiences and purposes
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