Classroom Instruction That Works
Helping Students Develop Understanding
Create an Environment for Learning
To ensure student understanding in the classroom, teachers must do three things first: set objectives and provide feedback, reinforce effort and provide recognition, and use cooperative learning. Once these strategies are met and implemented, students will begin to develop better understanding in the classroom.
What Comes Next?
Once the environment is set in the classroom, students can then begin to develop understanding and extend and apply their knowledge. The webinar, Classroom Instruction that Works: Helping Students Develop Understanding, provides great detail on how to approach such methods. Although it is not mentioned, many of these strategies are also used by a leading educational researcher in the United States by the name of Robert Marzano. Several strategies that I use in my classroom on a regular basis are questions, nonlinguistic representation, and summarizing and note taking. The webinar is very lengthy, but also very informational in helping teachers develop the most effective ways to help their students.
Resources
SWBAT
This is a short video of a teacher explaining and demonstrating a strategy called “SWBAT” to set the learning goal/objective for the day or for the lesson.
Numbered Heads Together
This website provides a great strategy to implement cooperative learning. Numbered Heads Together is a strategy that is used to ensure that every student is being held accountable for learning the given material. This strategy also promotes individual learning, not just group learning. This site also gives teachers a breakdown of how to implement this strategy in the classroom.
Robert Marzano
Robert Marzano’s Summarizing & Note taking Strategies – This site provides more detail and explanations of summarizing and note taking strategies. Other resources are also provided for download to help students (and teachers) better understand how to summarize effectively as well as best practices in note taking skills.
Shannon Moore
Professional Development Assignment