Tier 1 Interventions
Strategies for Full Groups of Students
Below, you will find a list of strategies that could be used in the classroom. Feel free to click on the headings to learn more or see examples of the strategy in action!
Students are faced with a series of statements, and have to chose Strongly Agree, Agree, Strongly Disagree, and Disagree. Each of these options should be labeled as a corner in the classroom. Students walk to a corner to show their opinion about the question, and talk with others who are in their area. Then, students can share out to the rest of the group to gain perspective and discuss differing ideas.
Students are presented with a question or a task. First, they think about the task or question individually, then they pair up with another student or two to talk about what they thought about, and then they are prepared to share their thoughts with the class.
There are four specific components of Complex Instruction.
1) Roles: Students are assigned or chose roles such as Facilitator, Recorder/Reporter, Resource Manager, and Understanding Coordinator. The idea is that everyone has something important to do, and the task cannot be accomplished without everyone being involed.
2) Multidimensional class: Multiple ways of getting to the task or answering the question, or even asking the question- valuing different ways of being successful and applying them. For example, students could: Ask good questions, rephrase problems, explain problems, use logic, justify methods, use manipulatives, and/or help others. Many more students are successful because there are multiple ways to be successful. Helps students also to see why things work, not just focus on getting an answer.
3) Assigning Competence: Taking something a student says and helping students who may feel left out to be more involved
4) Teaching Responsibility: Students work to support and encourage each other. All students need to know the answer to a question, so all students feel responsible for knowing the information, even if they are at different levels of learning.
Literature circles are a useful method of instruction when you have multiple students doing a shared reading, and help to guide them in deeper and richer discussions of the text. There are assigned roles, such as narrator, discussion director, investigator, literary luminary, summarizer, connector, vocabulary enricher, illustrator, questioner, research gatherer, etc. Students can be assessed with questions at the end, teachers listening during the literature circle, or collecting literature circle information post session and having students do a reflection piece on what they talked about and learned that day.
Socratic Seminars, students develop their own thinking and help others understand ideas, issues, and values reflected in a text in a group discussion. Although they may debate issues, the use of this is mainly to help students listen to one another. Examples of questions and ways to dive deeper into discussion can be found here.
When you have multiple things to teach students that tie in together, want students to work in groups, have limited resources, or have multiple formative assessments, learning stations can be a constructive format for learning. In stations, you can include key skills students need to know for the unit you're on, give time for students to isolate and practice to gain mastery, or give some "wild card" time, where students can dive deeper or catch up.
Similar to Learning Stations, Jigsaw requires students to work in groups. Each group will become an "expert" on a specific text or task, and then share that with another group of students. The second group should have one member from each original group, so that everyone in the second group brings what they learned with the first group to them. Since students are responsible for teaching others, they should feel more responsibility in the task, and more accountability to learn it well the first time and teach others. This activity works best when students have to put together a final product of all the group's information.
In a Gallery Walk, students walk around the classroom, where there are different pictures, articles, or other visuals spread around. When they walk around they can be in groups or look individually, and they will explore the different materials, taking guided notes (or not-so-guided notes) or answering questions related to the images. After the allotted time, there should be a debrief where students talk about what they saw, ask questions, and reflect or come to conclusions.
Usually, when students are completing a task or a test or an essay or a project, the audience they are writing or performing to is the teacher. When students start to think of their peers as their audience, the scope shifts, and student work shifts too.