Chapter 6: Rationale to Practice (Part two)

There is so much information in this chapter with different strategies and ways to implements supported curriculum and instruction.

Strategies for Demanding and Supported Curriculum and Instruction

Use Tiered Approaches:

Many instructional approaches can be tiered for example: writing tasks, homework, learning centers, computer tasks, product assignments, learning contracts, and labs to name a few.

Incorporate Complex Instruction:

Challenging tasks relating to individual tasks that are necessary for increasingly independent work.

Use a Variety of Rubrics to Guide Quality:

The use of rubrics help teachers to teach about the various elements and how students can continue personal development in them, and to modify the rubrics as students develop in proficiencies over time.

Provide Learning Contracts at Appropriate Times:

Learning contracts allow teachers to focus students on work necessary for their own development and growth at a particular time. 

Aim High:

It is highly likely that students achieve much more when we present them with tasks that we genuinely believe to be beyond them, and then set out to ensure their success on those tasks.

Take a "No Excuses" Stance:

Accepting no excuses for work that is undone, incomplete or inferior can be tricky, but enabling students to succumb to excuses empowers the problem that already diminishes their vision of a possible future.

Become Computer Savvy:

Appropriately monitored, the internet provides endless resources that can link with students interests, experiences and primary languages. It enables students to build knowledge and skills in an array of subjects as long as the teacher assesses students needs and matches task and program to those varying needs.

Help Students Realize Success Is the Result of Effort:

The most successful students understand that their success results from their own effort.

Use the New American Lecture Format:

When the lecture is the most appropriate instructional strategy, be sure 1) that the lecture is well organized to clearly present key knowledge, understanding and skill 2) to provide students with a blank graphic organizer that follows the flow of the lecture 3) to guide students in completion of the organizer as the lecture progresses and 4) to stop often during the lecture to ask students to review ideas, make predictions about what will come next and make links with past knowledge or their lives.

Designate a "Keeper of the Book"

Helps students to listen for important ideas, and it is a great help to the teacher in dealing with absentees and a range of students who need support in grasping the flow of the class.

Try ThinkDots

An instructional strategy that can be of high interest to students as they work toward competence in knowledge, ideas, and skills. 

Directly Teach Strategies for Working Successfully with Text

-Surveying a chapter to determine its structure 

-Predicting what will be in a chapter based on the survey

-Asking questions as they read, based on their thinking and the structure of the chapter

-Locating hard and important words

-Finding main ideas

-Finding details that flesh out main ideas

-Linking ideas in the text to personal experience and prior knowledge 

-Summarizing important ideas

-Determining the structure of meaning or flow of ideas in the text material

-Monitoring ones attention, thinking, and understanding while reading

-Making adjustments in reading in response to self-monitoring

Use Think Alouds

 This strategy asks students to verbalize their thinking as they encounter and grapple with problems. Teachers can use think alouds as an assessment tool.