The Nine Essential Instructional Strategies

I found the Nine Essential Instructional Strategies handout a useful review of the types of ways we should be varying our classroom activities.  It also helped me to understand why many of my administrators have been pushing toward having everyone state the objectives of each lesson on the board at all times.  One of the instructional strategies that I know I could incorporate more is providing "advance organizers" and "nonlinguistic representations."  To be honest, working with my peers in this class and exchanging ideas has helped me to increase these things already.

For instance, in my current A Tale of Two Cities unit, Alicia's wonderful suggestion of creating a character storyboard inspired me to do the same.  I have created a poster of well-known actors and actresses, which then stands for various characters.  Every time we meet someone new, I add another face to the poster, and I am hoping this will help the students to understand character relationships in a different way.  I think this strategy is especially useful during ATTC because of the mixture of characters from both England and France; it is essential, yet sometimes challenging, to keep these nationality distinctions straight. 

Also, I have been including more "advance organizers" by giving my literature students a hand out of "Double Entry Journals" to use while they take notes during individual reading assignments.  This structure has helped many students to stay more organized, which then helps them to improve upon their thoughts and substance of notes.  I am eager to incorporate this into each of my units of study from here on out, while the students can refer back to the same handout which gives them a "key" for how to organize this type of graphic notes organizer.

During Session Nine in class, Pam shared with Angela and I how she uses a tri-venn diagram to cover some of her key civil rights figures.  This addressed "identifying similarities and differences," which is something I also use as my writing students complete their compare and contrast essays.  Pam mentioned how part of the lesson extends into a second day, which gave her an opportunity for homework, practice, and reinforcement of what was being learned through the venn diagram.  The students were then able to generate and test hypotheses, by watching a movie which complimented the leadership styles the students had covered through the civil rights figures.  I have also become aware of how to help my students test hypotheses, by including this as a component in the double entry journals and using this type of language during class discussions. 

Something we talked about as a group was how to reinforce effort and provide recognition.   We realized that every time we tell a student that they asked a good question, or shared an interesting perspective, we are providing recognition.  However, I know that I personally need to work at being more consistent with reinforcing effort.  The main struggle that I have is how to turn over multiple essays in a short amount of time.  While I work at figuring this out, I am making sure that I can provide shorter assignments, which the students get back quickly in between the larger ones.