Instructional Strategies
Strategies I have used successfully in my classes include peer teaching, project-based learning, jig-sawing, and group work, along with authentic assessment, teaching across disciplines, and differentiated instruction. As I look back, I see the pattern that shows these strategies as a part of a larger picture that defines my teaching, and my classroom climate.
Elena and LaTiffany explain how their story fragment fits into the Freytag pyramid. They wrote original material to complete the missing plot elements. (If you’ve taught the informative essay, you’ll understand the prohibited YOU sign above the whiteboard.)
Double-click on the image, not on the PLAY arrow, to make this work
I stumbled into
peer teaching, born of frustration and desperation one day, and have used it successfully since. It fits into the
constructivist and discovery theory arm of my philosophy of learning as students are more involved in self-discovery and take more responsibility for their own learning. I use a lot of visual aids in my teaching, and having students present their
collaborative work to the class incorporates both peer teaching and successful group work.
Some of the best advice I got from another teacher was that students would only listen to the first 200 words I say each day. Or some number -- but you get the point. The less I talk, the more they’ll listen when I do. Peer teaching gives my students a break from hearing my voice. I often incorporate that concept as I transition from my direct instruction to a peer-lead activity. “You’re as tired of hearing me as I am of talking, so let’s get busy on ... .”
A recent peer teaching lesson was on the five elements of plot development. I gave small groups of students different story fragments and had them create a Freytag’s pyramid that incorporated the story fragment, adding the missing plot elements before or after the fragment they were given. They had to decide as a group which part of the plot their fragment would be. Then they drew a pyramid diagram for their expanded stories on overheads, explained them to the class, and acted out one scene from the story . The reinforcement of doing the hands-on activity, listening to others’ stories, and manipulating the various plot elements to find the best solution gave students a variety of entry points to the concept.
In addition to peer teaching and group work, I've developed a good
system for project based units. Poor organizational skills combined with frequently chaotic, irregular home environments often leave
students unable to work effectively at home. As a solution to students' continually forgetting their binders, along with the work needed to complete a class-based project, I devised
reading packets that stay in class and contain all the work on a given unit. Each student has his or her own folder, decorated during the first unit, that they keep for the whole term. As we begin a new unit,
Student reading packets in their class-block bins. Students learn time management by using the packets to manage long-term assignments.
I put the various assignment sheets in the folder (also solving the absent missing handout problem).
Beginning with a short, two-day unit, students become accustomed to managing the folders, procedures for distribution and storage, and time management. As I work up to two-week units, students learn to manage their time by getting their folders during down time after a quiz, or whenever they finish a given task. They regularly check the daily agenda to see whether they'll be using the folders that day.
My most successful story packet unit is the Everest project, which also included
differentiated instruction and
authentic assessment. In this unit, students read one of the two accounts of the 1953
summit of Everest by Edmund Hillary and his guide Tenzing Norgay. (The excerpts are on two different reading levels.) After completing their individual work, students are paired with someone who read the opposite piece, and work together to compare and
The Everest bulletin board showing plot diagrams that incorporate author’s perspective conveyed by connotative language. This unit successfully uses authentic assessment and differentiated instruction.
contrast the two authors' perspective. The literary focus is on plot, author's perspective, and connotation. I make the unit
interdisciplinary by including mini-lessons about Buddhism, Tibetan culture, geology, and the history of colonial cultural dominance. They create travel itineraries, use trigonometry to compute Everest's elevation, and read primary source documents.
This is an especially satisfying strategy for me because it originated to solve a specific problem (lost work on multi-day projects) and has evolved into a staple of my planning and the students’ experience of my classroom. I’ve also been able to share this strategy with other teachers who have incorporated it successfully. I realized that most of the literature units I used this year involved learning about another country. Next year, I’ll use a passport theme for the packets, possibly using something like a passport stamp or destination sticker for unit completion.
As a side benefit, the reading packets make grading the unit much easier. I pull the contents of the packet, staple the unit rubric to the front and return the entire pack to the students for feedback.
I recently finished my first
jig-saw unit, and will definitely use this strategy again. We read Tolstoy's short story How Much Land Does a Man Need? which is broken into nine distinct chapters. (See? Russia! Passport stamp! ) I had each of nine groups read a chapter, predict a likely outcome based on characterization and plot, create a story board illustration of their chapter, and present a summary of the chapter to the class. On presentation day, we displayed the story boards, and got to hear the story in its entirety.
Jasmaine explains how she arrives at the answer on a sample state test question. Group work requires careful placement, and good classroom management, but students benefit from the experience of peer teaching and cooperative learning.
The class was more actively involved in the story than I'd seen them before: asking clarifying questions and taking notes (from an oral presentation; a first), and assessing their predictions. The average score on the unit quiz for the story was 87 percent, showing that students were successful in summarizing, predicting, and understanding the themes, characterization, and plot development.
Lesson Plans
Planning is something that comes fairly naturally to me, and served me well in my publications management career. I'm able to multitask easily, which has saved the day more than once as a teacher.
At first, I thought my ability to think on my feet, improvise, and manage my class would carry me along.
I discovered soon, of course, that planning was more than just being ready to teach tomorrow morning. As I gained more confidence in my teaching, I began planning longer units that encompassed multiple competencies.
One of the hardest aspects of teaching English is that it's really four classes in one, none building sequentially upon the other as math, history, or science do.
I've included three plans here that were part of a larger poetry unit that included figurative language (extending a metaphor based on Indian Summer), parts of speech (inferring parts of speech from context using the nonsense words in Jabberwocky), and diction (informal diction of folk poem, John Henry's Hammer). In addition, these lessons incorporate historical information on the industrial revolution, word origins, the labor movement, and a variety of cultural heritages. The assessments involve hands-on creative projects as well as traditional comprehension assessment. There is enrichment, and adaptations for inclusion students.
I've continued to refine the concept of teaching all competencies from within a particular piece of literature, using a variety of short stories, poems, and nonfiction writing. In general, I have students read a selection, and then write within that structure and purpose using the concepts emphasized in that particular unit. More detail about this is in the teaching strategies section.
