Teaching Strategies

Pair-share, group share: this is the strategy I most commonly use in my classroom. If you were to walk into my classroom at a random point in the day, this is most likely what you will see my students doing - pair sharing and then being called back after a minute or two for large group discussion. It's my favorite way to get students to feel comfortable talking within a set boundary in the classroom so that they have more practice expressing themselves cohesively and concisely. 

Close reading: every English Language Arts teacher will employ this in their classroom at one point or another during the school year, if not at multiple points. Helping students learn how to grasp the big picture of a text at a glance in order to dive deeper into the meanings behind the text is key and vital to a successful English classroom.

Project-Based Learning: as mentioned in another post (or was it in one of my course discussions? I can't keep track of these anymore), I am a huge believer in Project-Based Learning or PBL. PBL really helps students do what Stern, Ferraro, and Mohnkern mention in their book, Tools for Teaching Conceptual Thinking, Secondary, a strategy called "uncover", which is when students uncover what they need to know through inquiry rather than the teacher "covering" the content students need to know in order to master the skill or Common Core State Standard. This allows the teacher to do a little less lesson planning and has the students do most of the heavy mind lifting, which also makes it so students retain information better because they are the ones "uncovering" and discovering something new for themselves with an end-goal in mind. Project-Based Learning gives learning a much deeper meaning and level of engagement both for students and teachers. Most of the projects in my classroom ended with a presentation in front of the class so I could see students demonstrate their mastery of verbally expressing a thesis/claim and how well they use the evidence they chose to support their claim. 

Prompt and Constructive Feedback: any English teacher will tell you this is the hardest part of teaching, but the most important. Especially as an AP Literature teacher, the goal is usually to get all your AP students' in-class essays graded with constructive remarks and feedback back to them within a week or two max so they can look at the feedback and improve their writing skills in time to succeed on the AP test. This proved extremely difficult for me with my AP students writing an in-class essay every month alongside my ERWC students writing about two essays a quarter. One AP teacher told me her strategy of simply writing out all the "correct" evidence for every "correct" argument on the board and only giving students a score on the essay, then having the students take notes from the board and go over what the teacher wrote. Though this is a great strategy for prompt and constructive feedback for an AP teacher, I personally feel it takes away from students' ability to think outside the box in their arguments and from the great expanse that is literary interpretation. This is why this strategy leads to...

Peer-editing: I used peer editing so. much. in my first year of teaching. My favorite way to have students peer edit is actually to have them first read their own essays out loud to a partner, then have the partner verbally provide feedback based on the arguments, choice of diction, and sentence structure they hear. Having students read their own essays out loud helps them hear their own awkward word choices or awkward sentence structures. Then, after students read out loud, they switch their physical papers to actually check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation issues. This also makes students really think through their rough drafts before bringing them to class. Plus, after they have done this pretty thorough job of self- and peer-editing in class, the final drafts often turn out much easier to grade and the teacher can actually just comment on the peer's edits rather than need to make brand new comments. Plus, while students are doing this in class (usually takes a whole class period), the teacher has time to plan the next lesson, grade other work, or think about what follow-up is needed based on what the teacher hears the students reading and discussing. Obviously, students need to have a good grasp on what makes a strong, well-written essay before being successful peer-editors, which is why I used this strategy more with my AP students than with my ERWC students. When this strategy was employed with my ERWC students, I made sure to choose students' partners and pair a stronger writer with a weaker writer so the weaker writer could learn from the stronger writer and the stronger writer would only improve their own writing by helping to improve the weaker writer's writing. 

Socratic Seminars and Fishbowls: another strategy/strategies I overused in my first year of teaching. Again, because I strongly believe in UDL and want to assess students in their abilities to formulate claims and support their claims using substantial evidence and relevance not only via written assessment but also verbal assessment, Socratics and Fishbowls were not only a fantastic way for students to express their learning and understanding of texts verbally, but also a great way for students to really learn from one another (a much more efficient way of getting students to learn rather than listening to a teacher lecture for 45 minutes). And for those students who didn't feel comfortable verbally sharing in front of a class, there was always the option to write a 3-page essay based on the Socratic/Fishbowl prompts. 

Universal Design for Learning (UDL): I suppose UDL should get a mention here, haha. I think I assume every teacher is implementing UDL in their classroom already, which is why I simply throw out phrases like "multiple means of assessment", "multiple modalities of engagement," etc. when I talk with other teachers like they already know what I'm talking about, but I need to remember that UDL is a fairly recent phenomenon in the teaching world. I simply came into teaching at a time when it is really being highlighted in credentialing programs and when meeting the needs of every student is truly the focus of most teacher professional development. A lot of my teacher friends who have been teaching for 10+ years and don't have time to attend PDs look at me with confused faces when I mention how I challenge myself to implement UDL in every lesson and every unit assessment I create, and I have to explain that it just means I make sure to allow my students to engage, be assessed, and express themselves in multiple modalities. 

Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman): this was one of our school's three initiatives after a WASC visit three years ago, and I came to our school in a WASC year so there were heavy discussions of this about a month before WASC came. Luckily, I grew up having gone to full-on conferences on emotional intelligence and its importance for personal development and understanding oneself, so I was already applying the teaching of emotional intelligence through literary texts and ERWC's social justice-related units (i.e. Racial Profiling, Value of Life, etc.) in my classroom before I knew this was one of our school's three big initiatives. EI/EQ is something I heavily promote in my classroom because I sincerely believe in that last level of Bloom's taxonomy for a student to truly live a fulfilling life - self-actuation. Self-actuation cannot happen without some level of emotional intelligence. But emotional intelligence also recognizes how others are feeling (not just yourself), and of course, I recognize when some of my students cannot reach any level of EI because they are still struggling to help their parents put food on the table and make the next month's rent. 

Strengths/Assets-Based Thinking: I love Strengths Finder 2.0 (Tom Rath). The entire first section focuses on this idea that when we try too hard to fix and overcome our weaknesses, we actually lose a huge part of ourselves by forgetting to focus on our strengths, because our strengths are what truly make us, us. The statistics from the book regarding a person's level of engagement when their weaknesses are pointed out vs. when their strengths are utilized (20% engagement vs. 99% engagement) are astounding. Applied to the classroom, this means that you will have 20% of your students responding to you in class or through their work if you focus on getting rid of their shortcomings or helping them improve their weaknesses, vs. 99% of your students engaging with you and the content in the classroom when you focus on helping them use their strengths to succeed academically. My classroom really is proof of this, because I focused so much on students' inabilities to apply proper grammar to their writing at the beginning of the year and lost about 70% of my students' attention most of the time, but when I really learned my students interests and their strengths, I honed in on those and actually got about 90% of my classes to really engage and connect with both the material and me, and I am quite proud to say that I ended the year on probably the best note a first-year teacher could ask for - my students all loved me. 

Growth Mindset: similar to strengths/assets-based thinking, Growth Mindset focuses on what students can become rather than where they fail. Growth Mindset teaches us (not just students, but everyone) that failures are experiences to celebrate, because they are what make us both human and show us where we have space to become more of who we are meant to be. We grow through recognizing and overcoming challenges and failures. 

Mindfulness: I practice this with my students every day. Since I came at the end of September, it was difficult to get seniors to really buy into daily mindfulness practices, but by the end of the year, even my most prideful student at least admitted he understood mindfulness and what it meant for me, and the other 90% of the class was invested in mindfulness because it was 2 minutes at the beginning of each class where they could stop, focus on themselves and their needs, and regain alertness for the rest of the period. 2 minutes at the beginning of class always feels like a long time, but in a lot of my students' reflections on the class throughout the year (and also based on the notes/cards/yearbook signings they wrote me), they wrote about how they loved mindfulness practices in the classroom because it really re-centered them for the period and sometimes even the rest of the day.