⚙️Strategies🔎

Instructional Strategies

Activities, techniques, approaches, and methods that teachers use to promote student learning and achievement

Learning Strategies

Conscious, flexible plans learners use to make sense of what they’re reading and learning, which reside in the learner’s head
English Learners who regularly and appropriately use learning strategies:
- - Understand spoken and written language more effectively
  - Learn new information more easily
  - Retain and use English better

How should we teach strategies?

Each strategy should:

1. Have a name you and your students use

2. Have clearly defined steps the students discuss

3. Be modeled EXPLICITLY

4. Be practiced regularly so it becomes automatic

5. Be practiced in different contexts and with different content so that it becomes transferable

Students should be provided with ample opportunities to practice and use learning strategies

Scaffolding

Teacher should provide students with scaffolding techniques (ex: think-alouds) to support student understanding
Combining a variety of learning strategies into a single classroom activity not only enhances efficiency in their use and application but also helps to make the content more understandable.
Verbal sentence frames examples:
- - Beginner: I like the _________________ because ___________________.
  - Low Intermediate: I like the story of the _________________ more because ________________.
  - High Intermediate: In my opinion, the story of the __________________ is best because _________________
  - Advanced: Of the two stories, I prefer ____________________. This story is the best one because_______________.
Questioning, Prompting, Encouraging, Elaborating, and Extending Examples:
- - Tell us what you learned.
  - How did you figure that?
  - What did you discover?
  - What would you like to discuss with us?
  - What did you find most compelling/interesting?
  - Can you restate that?
  - Tell me a little more
  - Expand on that...
  - What do you mean?
  - Can you explain it again?
  - I see a lot of thinking going on here.
  - So, you are saying...
When differentiating instruction, teachers may want to provide students with scripts or sentence frames to illustrate what their written work should resemble. These writing scaffolds are gradually phased out as students gain proficiency in their writing skills.
- - Example: _______________ (author) once said, “______________.” This means that _____________________________ (explain the quote). This quote is ____________________ (correct or incorrect) because _______________________. A work of literature that supports this point of view is ____________ (title) by _______________ (author).

Before using any strategy - MODEL, MODEL, MODEL! A student will not understand the benefit of a strategy unless they know its purpose and how they can use it in context.

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