The Strategic Teacher

Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson

Harvey F. Silver, Richard W. Strong

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416616979
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Are you looking for high-impact, research-based strategies to transform your students into high-achieving and inspired learners? In The Strategic Teacher, you'll find a repertoire of strategies designed and proven to meet today's high standards and reach diverse learners. Twenty reliable, flexible strategies (along with dozens of variations) are organized into these groups of instruction:

*mastery style to emphasize the development of student memory;
*understanding style to expand students' capacities to reason and explain;
*self-expressive style to stimulate and nourish students' imaginations and creativity;
*interpersonal style to help students find meaning in the relationships they forge as partners and team members, united in the act of learning; and
*four-style strategies that integrate all four styles.

To guide teachers in delivering content to students, the authors started with the best research-based teaching and learning strategies and created a tool called the Strategic Dashboard. The dashboard provides information about each teaching strategy in a concise, visual profile; it is also designed to document how you incorporate current, highly respected research into your instructional plans.

For each strategy, you'll find the following information:

*a brief introduction to the strategy;
*an example of a teacher using the strategy in the classroom;
*the research base supporting the strategy and how the strategy benefits students;
*how to implement the strategy using a list of clear steps;
*guidance through the planning process, providing steps, examples, and suggestions for designing superior lessons; and
*additional tools, strategies, and resources for adapting and expanding the use of each strategy.

The authors have combined their years of research and practice to deliver reliable, high-impact, flexible teaching and learning strategies grounded in current, highly regarded research to teachers at all levels of experience.

Note: This product listing is for the reflowable (ePub) version of the book.

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Part One

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Introduction

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Welcome to Strategic Teaching

The What, the Why, and the How

The word strategy comes from two ancient Greek roots: Stratos, meaning "multitude" or "that which is spread out," and again, meaning "to lead" or, we might say, "to bring together." Thus, at its heart, the word strategy celebrates the difference between teaching and nearly all other professions: Most professionals see their clients one at a time, but teachers' clients come to them as groups of diverse individuals brought together by birth date, scheduling demands, and, occasionally, interest. The goal of teaching is to weave together a conversation that unites these disparate individuals around a common core of learning. Strategies are the different types or styles of plans teachers use to achieve this goal.

Although teachers have always used strategies (think of Socrates's dialogue, Jesus's parables, the medieval birth of the lecture), until recently most teachers had only a handful of generic techniques at their disposal: discussion, demonstration, lecture, practice, and test. Over the the last 50 years, however, teachers and researchers have created, revised, tweaked, and recast these five basic elements into hundreds of new forms.

In The Strategic Teacher we have collected 20 of the most reliable and flexible of these strategies (along with dozens of variations) and organized them into four distinct styles of instruction: a Mastery style that emphasizes the development of student memory; an Understanding style that seeks to expand students' capacities to reason and explain; a Self-Expressive style that stimulates and nourishes students' imaginations and creativity; and an Interpersonal style that helps students find meaning in the relationships they forge as partners and team members, united in the act of learning. The goal of The Strategic Teacher is therefore simple indeed: to provide teachers with a repertoire of strategies they can use to meet today's high standards and reach the different learners in their classrooms.

We have designed this book to be read, but also to be used. To this end, we address these questions:

• What does strategic teaching look like?
• How are teaching strategies the same but different?
• Why does every classroom teacher need a repertoire of teaching strategies?
• How do we select the right strategy for a particular teaching and learning situation?
• How can we get the most out of our use of teaching strategies?

What Does Strategic Teaching Look Like?

Let's begin by peering into four different, but equally thoughtful classrooms. Gabrielle, Martin, Stephen, and Rimi don't work harder than their colleagues do. Rather, they work more strategically. Strategies help them and their students by providing a plan that addresses three questions:

1. What kind of structure will help my students achieve our purpose?
2. What role will I play in achieving this purpose?
3. What role will my students play in achieving this purpose?

In this way, strategies work like a kind of open-ended script that helps both teachers and students move thoughtfully toward their goal. To see how, let's focus on Gabrielle D'Abo's Mystery lesson on dinosaur extinction (from Figure A).

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Figure A. Four Classrooms

Making Memories

On the upcoming final, students in Martin Finn's 11th grade civics class will be responsible for knowing and explaining 12 different principles of constitutional government. To help the class prepare, pairs of students are delivering brief lectures on each principle. Here's the twist: Each student lecture includes an opening discussion, a visual organizer, and a set of review questions that engage different forms of thinking. Students learned this format from Martin. They call it New American Lecture.

The More We Are Together

Rimi Meyer's 6th graders are studying biography as a writing genre. Today, the students are arranged in their regular Friday Community Circle groups. Today's topic: Life Challenges: Where Do They Come From and How Do We Overcome Them? Each group monitors and runs its own discussion as students explore the topic in their own lives and in the lives of the biographies they are reading together. A visitor to the classroom comments to Rimi, "I just can't believe how well these kids listen and how well they empathize with these historical figures and one another."

A Mystery Explained

Gabrielle D'Abo's 4th graders are entering the third day of a three-week unit on extinction. For today's lesson, Gabrielle has designed a Mystery lesson. Working in groups of four, students examine and assemble a set of clues related to the extinction of dinosaurs. Each group's goal is to build chains of evidence that explain why the dinosaurs disappeared.

Mathematical Connections

Looking back over last week's work on polynomials, Stephen Mulhall can see that his decision to use the Inductive Learning strategy has paid off. He began by asking students to create at least five different ways of categorizing polynomial expressions. The class then discussed the labels they gave each group, explained their reasons for grouping them the way they did, and worked to form generalizations about how each group might need to be treated mathematically. As they progressed through the unit, students revised both their categories and their generalizations. Now, with the unit nearly over, Stephen can see how much more flexibility and insight his class has when it comes to applying what they have learned in problem-solving situations.

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Like any good lesson, Gabrielle's began with a clear purpose. Gabrielle wanted students to practice and develop their abilities to reason and weigh evidence while using the concepts they were learning during her unit on extinction. The Mystery strategy supplied Gabrielle with a structure that helped her formulate her mystery, develop a set of guiding questions, and design 20 clues related to dinosaur extinction. The Mystery strategy also made the teacher's role clear to Gabrielle: She posed the mystery to students, explained what students were to do during the lesson, listened in on and coached student groups as they were assembling clues, and served as devil's advocate to help students shore up gaps in their emerging explanations. Students' roles were made obvious as well—they became detectives charged with studying clues; weighing evidence; and forming, testing, and revising their explanations of how and why a planet's worth of large and exotic beasts vanished from Earth.

Now, take a second look at the other teachers' strategic lessons shown in Figure A. Can you get a sense of the structure, teacher's role, and students' role from these descriptions?

How Are Teaching Strategies the Same but Different?

Words like "structure" and "role" make us think not merely in terms of plans but beyond that as a kind of drama. In this way, we can see teaching strategies as a new kind of script—a script designed to accommodate improvisation, student engagement, and response. All teaching strategies are similar in their universal commitment to structure, engagement, purpose, and response. What makes teaching strategies different is their style: differences in purposes, structures, roles, and means of motivating and engaging learners. We group our strategies into four broad instructional styles, plus one group of strategies that integrates all four styles. The styles and their strategies are listed and described in Figure B.

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Figure B. Style Strategies

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Take another look at the four classrooms described in Figure A. Can you see how each teacher's strategy lessons represent the Mastery, Understanding, Self-Expressive, and Interpersonal styles respectively?

Why Does Every Classroom Need a Repertoire of Teaching Strategies?

While teaching strategies are not new to most educators, many educators have not been given the training or support needed to develop a repertoire of effective strategies. Research and experience demonstrate that teaching strategies are critical to the overall health of the classroom and to the academic success of our students for at least six distinct reasons:

1. Strategies are tools for designing thoughtful lessons and units. As teachers, lesson and unit design questions exert a profound influence on classroom decision making. It should come as no surprise, then, that educational researchers have spent many years working to develop clear and practical models for lesson and unit design—from Madeline Hunter's (1984) classic lesson design model, to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's approach to Understanding by Design (2005), to Robert Marzano's work in classroom curriculum design (2003). From these models, we can extract five questions that every teacher needs to answer when developing a lesson or unit:

• How will the material be introduced?
• How will new information be presented?
• How will students practice and apply what they are learning?
• How will student learning and progress be assessed?
• How will students reflect on what they learn and their own learning process?

No single strategy can respond effectively to every question. Although New American Lecture is an ideal tool for presenting new information, it is notably weaker when it comes to promoting independent practice or assessing student progress. Only a repertoire of strategies guarantees that each and every element of effective design—introduction, new knowledge, practice, assessment, and reflection—gets its due in the lessons and units we teach.

2. Strategies make the work of differentiating instruction manageable for teachers and motivating for students. Let's begin our investigation into the relationship among strategies, motivation, and differentiation by listening to two students responding to the question: Who was your favorite teacher?

Kenny R.: My favorite teacher had to be Ms. Gibbon. Ms. Gibbon taught U.S. history in a way I'll never forget. She used to teach historical periods and movements as recipes. I still remember my ingredients list: yeast makes dough rise, warm water activates yeast, salt brings out natural flavors, sugar adds sweetness, and so on. So, for particular periods or movements in U.S. history like the Progressive Era and the Civil Rights Movement, we would have to analyze the historical forces at work and use the recipe metaphor to explain the effects and reactions of each of these historical factors as if they were food ingredients. Sometimes, we would even have bake-offs, where we would present our recipes for teachers and other students to judge.

Rosalynne F.: More than anyone else, Ms. Lacey got me ready for college because she was the first teacher who really taught me how to take notes. First of all, Ms. Lacey took the time to show us how she made notes. She'd put these difficult passages from textbooks or articles up on an overhead and she'd just sort of talk her way through them, stopping to summarize, asking questions, and making arrows and margin notes. Then we'd have these group practice and study sessions where we'd have to apply what she had taught us. Ms. Lacey was always there to give group members feedback on how we were doing and suggestions on how we could get better, so we always mastered new note-taking techniques pretty quickly.

Right away, we can see that Kenny and Rosalynne have very different ideas about learning. Kenny is drawn to the novel and imaginative aspects of learning, Rosalynne to practical skills, such as taking effective notes. Kenny favors teaching practices that allow him to explore surprising connections, such as the connection between history and cooking. For Rosalynne, good teaching looks an awful lot like good coaching, with an emphasis on modeling skills, practice sessions, and instant feedback. Finally, Kenny and Rosalynne evaluate their teacher's success in reaching them using different criteria. Ms. Gibbon gets high marks from Kenny because she was able to make history come alive in exciting and unforgettable ways. Rosalynne judges Ms. Lacey's success according to how well she prepared Rosalynne for the rigors of information management at the college level. The differences in how Kenny and Rosalynne approach, process, and relate their classroom experiences are the result of learning styles.

The long and prestigious history of learning styles begins with Carl Jung (1923), who discovered that the way we process and evaluate information develops into specific personality types. Later, Kathleen Briggs and Isabel Myers (1962/1998) expanded on Jung's foundation to create a comprehensive model of cognitive diversity made famous by their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Since then, new generations of educational researchers, including Bernice McCarthy (1982), Carolyn Mamchur (1996), Harvey Silver and J. Robert Hanson (1998), Edward Pajak (2003), and Gayle Gregory (2005) have studied, applied, and elaborated on learning styles and how to use them to improve teaching and learning. In synthesizing this expansi...