The Effective Instructional Strategies Series

Provides an introduction to nine categories of instructional strategies and planning for the use of these high yield strategies. It also provides strategies focused on identifying what students will learn and additional strategies to determine how well they have learn the content. The included modules are:

• High Yield Overview
  Offers an overview of the nine categories of instructional strategies and the context of incorporating these with curriculum design and classroom management. This module emphasizes the research base of the nine categories of strategies and the use of these in groups, not individually, to scaffold improved achievement.

• Planning for the High Yield Strategies
  Focuses on the intentional, consistent, and systematic planning necessary to incorporate the strategies effectively with ongoing teaching and learning. This module emphasizes a four-question planning structure to determine effective ways to incorporate the strategies.

• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
  Focuses attention on strategies that define what students will learn and monitor how well they are learning it. This module emphasizes both teachers and students monitoring progress toward clearly defined objectives.

• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
  Promotes making the relationship between effort and achievement clear. This module emphasizes the importance of addressing students’ attitudes and beliefs in order to underscore the critical importance of effort.

Examines the categories of instructional strategies that focus on the ways in which students learn and how they can best synthesize and analyze academic content. The online modules include:

• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
  Provides strategies teachers can use to help students activate their prior knowledge, connect prior knowledge with new knowledge, and organize information. This module emphasizes using these strategies to assess student knowledge as well as for advancing student knowledge.

• Nonlinguistic Representations
  Explores ways students can represent knowledge in nonlinguistic ways through pictures, graphics, mental images, physical models, and kinesthetic activities.

• Summarizing and Note-Taking
  Promotes strategies to help students think analytically and to deeply engage with academic content, promoting greater comprehension. This module emphasizes distilling and synthesizing complex information through summarizing and note-taking.

• Cooperative Learning
  Focuses on cooperative learning as a strategy for enhancing student understanding of content and fostering decision-making and conflict-resolution skills. This module emphasizes the five key elements of effective collaborative learning.

Focuses on strategies that build comprehension by requiring students to practice and apply their skills. The online modules include:

• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
  Promotes requiring students to apply their knowledge and use higher-level thinking skills by asking questions about what they know, finding ways to test those questions, and explaining their conclusions. This module emphasizes promoting both inductive and deductive reasoning to improve student learning.

• Homework and Practice
  Focuses on homework and practice as two instructional strategies that provide students with opportunities to deepen their understanding of content, practice new skills, and extend learning beyond the school day. This module emphasizes using these strategies to deepen content understanding and skill proficiency.

• Identifying Similarities and Differences
  Focuses on comparing, classifying, and creating or recognizing metaphors and analogies as instructional strategies that teachers and students can use to identify similarities and differences between items. This module emphasize accessing and connecting prior knowledge to new learning to explore content deeply.

Focuses on three specific strategies shown to improve student achievement – explicit, direct teaching; differentiating to address student learning needs; and scaffolding to support and enhance student learning. The online modules include:

• Direct Instruction
  Provides information about the underlying research and the five phases of the direct instruction model. This module emphasizes the processes and impact of direct instruction on student learning.

• Differentiating Instruction
  Provides a foundation for differentiating instruction, as understood through the Universal Design for Learning principles. This module emphasizes the planning necessary to differentiate instruction. 

• Scaffolding in Action
  Focuses on building knowledge about scaffolding and using scaffolding effectively in classrooms. This module emphasizes assessing student needs, planning for scaffolding, and integrating scaffolding with the ongoing teaching. 

Promotes the teaching strategies proven to enhance and deepen student learning. The online modules include:

• Foundations of Effective Teaching
  Explores teaching strategies that underlie establishing and maintaining well-managed classrooms and consistently producing gains in student achievement. This module emphasizes both effective instructional strategies and group management practices.

• Instructional Decision Making
  Promotes a systematic process for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting student data to group students for instruction and to make decisions about the implications of their identified learning strengths and needs. This module emphasizes the development of an action plan to identify concrete steps teachers can take to ensure the academic achievement of students in each of the identified instructional groups. 

• Understanding Student Need
  Promotes an ongoing, systematic process to assess, interpret, and address student learning needs made evident through multiple sources of formal and informal data in a balanced literacy approach. This module emphasizes identifying focus students representative of the learning groups and informing instruction through their learning needs.