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Teachers use various methods to meet the needs of all students, including those who struggle.

Some methods include slowing down or speeding up the pace of the work for individual students within a classroom.

Other methods include using props such as charts and pictures to show students what they are expected to learn.

Teachers know that students walk into their classrooms with a wide range of abilities. But teachers try to find ways to meet the needs of all students, including those with learning and thinking differences. Here are five common teaching methods.

1. Differentiated instruction

With this approach, teachers change and switch around what students need to learn, how they'll learn it, and how to get the material across to them. When a student struggles in one area, the teacher creates a plan that includes extra practice, step-by-step directions, and special homework. Find out more about differentiated instruction.

This is a method that breaks learning into chunks. The chunks follow a logical order and move toward a clear goal. Teachers form a bridge between what students already know and what they cannot do on their own. These bridges are referred to as "scaffolds." They can include charts, pictures, and cue cards.

Teachers often use this method by presenting a model of high-quality work before asking students to work on their own. Just as they're used when constructing buildings, scaffolds are removed when they're no longer needed.

Using this method, a teacher draws a picture to map out thoughts and ideas. Graphic organization can help younger students with activities like identifying the characters in a story they've read. This can also help them plan and organize a story they'll write. Older students can "map out" history, like the events leading up to World War II, or compare and contrast people or topics.

Students use special phrases to help them remember information. Here's an example: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally is often used to remember the order of operations in math: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiply, Divide, Add and S ubtract.

This strategy can also help with learning vocabulary. For example, a child can learn the scientific name for the common frog, Ranidae, by using rain as the keyword along with a picture of a frog sitting in the rain.

5. Multisensory instruction

This method links what students see, what they hear, how they move, and what they feel. When students learn using all of their senses, they remember the material better. Math teachers might use base ten blocks and two-sided counters so that students learn through touch. Drawing might help students learn new vocabulary by capturing the meaning of a word and sketching it.

Each child learns differently. Teachers will use many creative methods to teach your child - and the other students - so they all learn.

Mapping out ideas using pictures and charts is especially effective with struggling students.

Strategies that involve memorizing phrases help students remember concepts longer.

When students use all their senses, they remember the material better.

About the Author

About the Author

Ginny Osewalt is a dually certified elementary and special education teacher with more than 15 years of experience in general education, inclusion, resource room, and self-contained settings.

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5 common techniques for helping struggling students

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Teachers use various methods to meet the needs of all students, including those who struggle. Some methods include slowing down or speeding up the pace of the work for individual students within a classroom. Other methods include using props such as charts and pictures to show students what they are expected to learn.

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How Teachers Can Help All Students Succeed

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Spread the loveTeachers play an essential role in the academic success of all the children they teach. However, it is critical that they play an even more dominant role in helping children who are facing academic failure and/or performing below their academic potential.

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Student success should be a teacher's number one priority. For some students, success will be getting a good grade. For others, it might mean increased involvement in class. You can help all of your students attain their full potential, regardless of the way they measure success. Following are eight strategies that you can employ to help students succeed.

Set High Expectations

Cultivate an academic environment in your classroom by setting high, but not impossible, expectations for your students. Push students to achieve higher standards and they will eventually get there-and along the way, offer lots of praise. Some may take more time than others, but all students want to be told, "You're smart and you're doing a good job." Give high school students college material to read and tell them, "This story/book/math concept is taught in first-year colleges around the country." Once the students tackle and master the material, tell them, "Good job students-I knew you could do it."

Establish a Classroom Routine

One of the key ways to help young children behave at home is to create an effective and consistent schedule for them to follow. Without this type of structure, young children often end up misbehaving. Secondary school students are no different. While classroom procedures often take a bit of time and effort to implement at the beginning of the school year, once established, they create a structure that will allow you to focus on teaching rather than handling disruptive issues.

Classroom management should also become a part of the daily routine. If rules have been made clear from day one, rules and consequences are posted throughout the classroom, and you consistently tackle any and all problems as they arise, students will fall in line and your classroom will run like a well-oiled machine.

Practice the 'Daily Fives'

Do the same opening activity during the first five minutes of class and the same closing activity the last five minutes so that students know, "OK, it's time to start class, or, "It's time to get ready to leave." It could be something as simple as having students get out their classroom materials and sit at their desks ready to begin at the start of class and putting away their materials, sitting down and waiting for the bell to ring at the end of class.

If you are consistent with your daily fives, it will become second nature to your students. Establishing routines like this will also help when you need to get a substitute. Students don't like to deviate from the established norms and will become advocates in your classroom to make sure things run smoothly.

Continually Grow in Your Profession

New ideas and research that can enhance your day-to-day teaching become available yearly. Keeping up with the latest information through online forums, workshops and professional journals can make you a better teacher. This will lead to increased student interest and greater success. In addition, teaching the same lessons each school year can become monotonous over time. This can result in uninspired teaching. Students will definitely pick up on this and become bored and distracted. Including new ideas and teaching methods can make a huge difference.

Help Students Climb Bloom's Taxonomy Pyramid

Bloom's taxonomy provides teachers with a great tool that they can use to measure the complexity of homework assignments and exams. Moving students up Bloom's taxonomy pyramid and requiring them to apply, analyze, evaluate and synthesize information will result in an increased use of critical thinking skills and a greater chance for authentic learning.

Bloom's Taxonomy can also help you move students from a basic understanding of concepts to asking more complex questions like: "What happens if?" Students need to learn how to go beyond the basic facts: who, what, where and when and question the world around them. They should be able to explain their answers as to why they feel a certain way about a concept, posit changes they would make and explain why. Climbing the Bloom's Taxonomy ladder can help students do just that.

Vary Your Instruction

When you vary teaching methods, you provide students with a greater opportunity to learn. Every student has different strengths and weaknesses. Instead of just focusing on one method that only appeals to a single learning style, varying your teaching techniques allows you to cater your lessons to different learning styles. Students will be more successful if they are not bored.

For example, instead of lecturing for an entire 90-minute class, do 30 minutes of lecture, 30 minutes of work-involving as much music, videos and kinesthetic movement as possible-and then 30 minutes of discussion. Students like it when you change things up and they're not doing the exact same thing every class period.

Show That You Care About Every Student

This might seem obvious, but every year, do a gut check concerning the students in your class. Are there any students you have written off? Are there students who are difficult to reach or who just don't seem to care? Students can sense your feelings about them, so be very careful with your own beliefs.

Regardless of your personal feelings, it is important that you work with each of your students to ensure their success. Be excited with them. Act like you want to be at work and you're happy to be there and see them. Find out what their hobbies are, take an interest in their personal lives and try to incorporate some of that into your lessons.

Be Transparent and Ready to Help

How to succeed in your class should be easy for all students to understand. Provide students with a syllabus at the beginning of the year that explains your grading policies. If you assign a complicated or subjective assignment such as an essay or a research paper, give students a copy of your rubric beforehand. If students participate in science labs, ensure that they understand exactly how you will be grading their participation and their work.

For example, if you just toss a C- on an essay but you haven't edited it or explained why the student got that grade, your student has no buy-in and will likely put little effort into the next assignment. Make students check their grades frequently, or provide them with printouts so they're constantly aware of where they stand in your class. If they've fallen behind, meet with them and create a plan to usher them toward success.

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8 Teaching Practices That Can Help Students Succeed

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Helping students grow and succeed is the goal of every teacher. This article looks at 8 things that you can do to foster student success.

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Students working in small groups often learn more and demonstrate better retention than students taught in other instructional formats. When instructors incorporate group assignments and activities into their courses, they must make thoughtful decisions regarding how to organize the group, how to facilitate it, and how to evaluate the completed work.

Instructor Evaluations

Create a rubric to set evaluation standards and share with students to communicate expectations.

Assess the performance of the group and its individual members.

Give regular feedback so group members can gauge their progress both as a group and individually.

Decide what criteria to base final evaluations upon. For example, you might weigh the finished product, teamwork, and individual contributions differently.

Consider adjusting grades based on peer evaluations.

Peer Evaluations

Consider providing a rubric to foster consistent peer evaluations of participation, quality, and quantity of work.

This may reveal participation issues that the instructor might not otherwise know about.

Students who know that their peers will evaluate them may contribute more to the group and have a greater stake in the project.

Completing evaluations early in the project allows groups to assess how they can improve.

General Strategies for Evaluation

Ensure that groups know how each member is doing by integrating assessment throughout the project.
Groups need to know who may be struggling to complete assignments, and members need to know they cannot sit back and let others do all the work. You can assess individual student progress by giving spot quizzes and evaluate group progress by setting up meetings with each group to review the project status.

Give students an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of their group.
Once or twice during the group task, ask group members to fill out a group and/or peer evaluation to assess team effectiveness. Consider asking "What action has each member taken that was helpful for the group? What action could each member take to make the group more effective?"

Give students an opportunity to evaluate themselves.
Help students reflect on what they have learned and how they have learned it. Consider asking students to complete a short survey that focuses on their individual contributions to the group, how the group interacted together, and what the individual student learned from the project in relation to the rest of the course.

Decide how to grade members of the group.
Explain your grading system to students before they begin their work. The system should encourage teamwork, positive interdependence, and individual accountability. If you are going to consider the group's evaluation of each member's work, it is best to have students evaluate each other independently and confidentially.

Example Group Work Assessment Rubric

Here is an example of a group work assessment rubric. Filling out a rubric for each member of the group can help instructors assess individual contributions to the group and the individual's role as a team player.

This rubric can also be used by group members as a tool to guide a mid-semester or mid-project discussion on how each individual is contributing to the group.

Skills

4 Advanced - exceeds expectations

3 Competent - meets expectations

2 Progressing - does not fully meet expectations

1 Beginning - does not meet expectations

Total Points ______

Notes and Comments:

Resources

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Students working in small groups often learn more and demonstrate better retention than students taught in other instructional formats. When instructors incorporate group assignments and activities into their courses, they must make thoughtful decisions regarding how to organize the group, how to facilitate it, and how to evaluate the completed work.

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Group Work Accountability Worksheets & Teaching Resources | TpT

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Browse group work accountability resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, a marketplace trusted by millions of teachers for original educational resources.

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3 Group Work Strategies That Help Hold All Students Accountable

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From delegating roles to involving students in rubric design, here are group work strategies to help hold all students accountable.

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Socially Distant Classroom Activities: Working Together While Keeping (6 feet) Apart - Art with Jenny K

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As we look for ways to go back to school, in person, safely, amid health concerns are concerns about how the new procedures will affect our sense of classroom community. Sitting 6 feet apart, behind masks, is isolating and makes many children feel alone. Doing this all day, working by themselves, can be stressful.

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Picture it-you design an exciting, collaborative lesson that that you're sure your students are going to love. The best part about it? They get to work together in groups! Everything is going amazingly until:

One group has that slacker who's not doing their fair share.

Another group has that student does all of the work while the others look on.

And in the end, one group's project turns out awful, and the group turns on each other.

While working cooperatively with others is an important life skill, it can definitely be tricky when it involves kids whose abilities (and attitudes) vary wildly. Middle school teacher Sara recently wrote into our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE! with a group work dilemma involving one student who was bulldozing the other members of the group. Not only that, but when she was recently absent the group had no access to the project's materials and no idea how to proceed without her. Here are some words of wisdom our teachers offered to conduct successful group work in the classroom.

Top 📸 credit from Beyond Traditional Math -check out their site for additional tips for group work!

1. Assign roles.

"Assign each student in the group a unique role so that everyone has to work together to make the project a success," said Jaime L. Being solely responsible for a portion of the work gives students ownership over the project's success. The nature of the project will dictate the roles, but some examples are: proofreader, fact-checker, and scribe.

2. Make sure every group member has access.

Technology makes it easy for each group member to have access to all work and collaborate. "I have each member share any and all work on Google drive," advised Sonja L. This helps facilitate the notion of working together and contributing equally.

If your students don't have daily access to technology, make sure they have a system to store hard copies of their group work in the classroom. "When I do group work, I have a work-in-progress folder for each class. That way, they always have the work even if someone is absent." -Karen K.

3. Ask for input.

Becky M. shares, "At the end of a project, I have each student write a reflection. What was easy about the project? What was challenging? What grade would you give each person in your group, and why?" Let students know the contents of their letter will remain confidential but will also factor into their final grade. Listening to your students can help give you insider information about who really worked and who didn't. It can also help you structure your project differently next time, if necessary.

4. And grade accordingly.

Include a participation grade into your rubric and make a point of observing each group's activity during class. When students know that their grade is dependent on their participation, they are more likely to work toward the project's success. "If I see that only one member is doing most of the work, I absolutely adjust grades to incorporate that information," says Sonja L..

5. Speak to outliers privately.

Slackers are easy to redirect, but students who can't help themselves from taking over have their own set of issues that need addressing too. "Sometimes high-achieving students are afraid of letting others do any work for fear it won't be good enough," says Mark J., "and so they control all of the work, which leads to them doing everything." If that's the case, talk with the student about the importance of collaboration and letting go.
What do you do to ensure successful group work in the classroom? Come share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook! Also, check out 5 #teachertruths about group projects.

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5 Tips for Successful Group Work in the Classroom

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Picture it-you design an exciting, collaborative lesson that that you're sure your students are going to love. The best part about it? They get to work together in groups! Everything is going amazingly until: One group has that slacker who's not doing their fair share.

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Odyssey Teams, the team building and CSR leader

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Classroom Teamwork Activities Bring Students Together

Classroom teamwork activities can overcome the stale feeling school can create as students make their way through the semester. But more importantly, it can help students learn to relate and support one another to achieve a common goal.

Things like peer interaction, applied concepts, and team building are pushed to the way side for the more traditional power point guided "chalk and talk" style of teaching. This educational style is still vital for the school experience, but teachers need to make sure that students are engaging with one another in meaningful ways and not necessarily just with their friends.

Odyssey Teams if often asked to facilitate teamwork activities in schools and universities, and many academic institutions order our DIY kits to do philanthropic give-back activities with students.
If you want to know more about Odyssey Teams' programs, please reach out to us at learn@odysseyteams.com
Classroom Teamwork activities Are The Best Way To Build Interpersonal Communication

Breaking students up into groups and having them work together towards a common goal gives each student a chance to be heard. Without teacher involvement they solve the challenge by discussing various strategies, communicating their ideas, and putting their plans into action. This kind of team work is where students come to understand each other better and communicate interpersonally.

Classroom teamwork activities get students working together to make decisions based on creative thinking, communication, and collaboration. Here are three of these activities to get your classroom working together towards the common goal of teamwork.

This is the most flexible of the classroom teamwork activities. After you have broken the students into groups you give each one the same set of materials such as blocks, pipe cleaner, marshmallows, dried spaghetti, glue or tape. The goal is to work together in order to build. The end goal and parameters are both variables. Teachers can have everyone build a sturdy building or castle. See which team can replicate a famous statue, or build the tallest, most stable, structure. A variation on this game would be to have a community pile of materials for all the teams to use. There are several kits to use for this activity such as Odyssey Teams Helping Hands, or

. This game encourages communication and problem-solving.

Classrooms are generally smaller than your average corporate give back activity. So, you can employ games that require quiet and concentration. This game works in pairs. Teachers place various obstacles across an open area. (You may have to move some desks.) Then blindfold one student and the other student guides the blindfolded student through the minefield using just their voice. Don't maintain time. The objective is cooperation and not competition. This activity incorporates communication and trust building.

This is one of the most enjoyable classroom teamwork activities for all ages. Teachers create a mystery and a set of numbered mystery clues. Give each student a set of clues that they can't let each other read. They must present and then discuss their clues to one another. You can either imagine your own mystery or use these examples >Murder Mystery or Bank Robbery Mystery. This team building activity builds problem solving and communication.

Each one of these classroom teamwork activities requires no timer and one shouldn't be used. Nor should you give out any prizes for fastest or strongest. Instead, the focus of the discussion should be on HOW the teams solved each problem. Take the time to highlight how each team went about its creative process in order to accomplish the goal. By pointing out these positive ideas students begin to flourish from the inside out.
If you want to know more about classroom teamwork activities or if you want to bring Odyssey Teams to your school, please reach out to us at learn@odysseyteams.com

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3 Classroom Teamwork Activities for Adults and Children

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Classroom Teamwork Activities Bring Students Together Classroom teamwork activities can overcome the stale feeling school can create as students make their way through the semester. But more importantly, it can help students learn to relate and support one another to achieve a common goal.

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Teaching in the Inclusive Classroom: Using Choices to Teach Responsibility

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Active Learning Classrooms: Sharing responsibility for learning

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“Real World” Class Jobs: Sharing Responsibility in the Classroom (Virtual Tour)

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Students complete applications and performance reviews to obtain and keep classroom jobs that match their skills and interests.

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In every classroom, there are students who always have their hand raised to participate, and those who are hesitant to engage. Whether they're introverted, tend to think awhile before they contribute, or are just having a bad day, it can be hard to bring kids into discussions who are reluctant to add their voices.

The challenges of getting students to participate have intensified during remote learning, we've heard from many teachers. Digital platforms can create added communication barriers by making it hard to know when to talk, for example, or how to read subtle but important elements of discourse like a person's body language and facial expressions. Additionally, online discussions are often hindered by variability in students' access to technology and by privacy concerns, and consequently many teachers have had to rely on students' submitting work over isolated channels like email, which can leave back-and-forth between peers (and between students and the teacher) by the wayside.

Getting kids to contribute in virtual classrooms takes some work, it turns out. "We keep calling this generation digital natives as if they are simply whizzes at everything computerized. They aren't," wrote Tim O'Brien on Facebook. "They need personal support, scaffolding, and reassurance that technology does not provide. It is simply a tool, not a teacher."

To find out how to improve student discussions and participation in online learning, we culled through hundreds of comments on social media and followed up with more than 20 educators to see how they tackled the challenge last spring. Teachers offered a range of smart strategies, both synchronous and asynchronous, to integrate the values and the voices of all kids-even the quietest or those with disrupted schedules-into their classes this fall.

Synchronous Strategies

For synchronous learning, some teachers said they translated traditional discussion strategies from the classroom to live video chats, while others found that digital tools helped boost classroom participation.

1. Spider web discussion: During remote learning this spring, students in Shai Klima's high school class led their own discussions over Google Meet. Before the live class, students answered questions independently, and then shared their responses at the start of the meeting as a jumping-off point for a broader class discussion.

While students conversed on video, Klima listened and drew lines on a sheet of paper tracking the flow of the conversation, resulting in a spider web. At the end of the discussion, Klima shared the drawing over video, and then asked students to reflect on the experience and what they learned about who talked, who listened, and who built on the ideas of others.

"It has been successful as a means to get kids to credit their peers with helping them come up with new ideas, which helps build rapport," said Klima, who let students struggling with bandwidth call in to the meetings.

2. Using chat to check for understanding: After giving lessons last spring, Paul France had his third-grade students use the Google Chat feature to ask and answer questions or type in emojis, like a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, to show whether they understood a concept. To create structure around the responses, he guided his students in creating norms around using the chat feature-they decided as a group to use only one emoji at a time, for example. France said the practice helped him check for student understanding and pushed students to engage more with the content.

Kindergarten teacher Ruth Calkins, meanwhile, used Zoom chat when holding live lessons with her kindergarten students. She said they enjoyed typing "T" or "F" for true and false questions while answering math problems in the chat box, and some even attempted to write sentences in response to her questions. Typing responses also provided a lot of keyboard practice for her young students.

3. Flip your classroom to stimulate deeper discussion: Forrest Hinton, a high school math teacher, says he found that a blend of asynchronous and synchronous instruction worked well to stimulate student discussion during remote learning.

First, he taught new content asynchronously through recorded videos and online activities. At the start of his live class, students briefly summarized the concepts they had learned together and then divided into breakout rooms to solve related problems in small groups. Flipping his classroom allowed Hinton to spend less class time in direct instruction-and listening to students at the start of class and in small groups helped him identify, and then address, where his students were struggling. "This has allowed me to clarify concepts in a more targeted way and better assist students," said Hinton.

4. Adapting think-pair-share to Zoom: Ryan Tahmaseb, director of library services, says he found that giving more project-based learning activities to his elementary and middle school students-and allowing them more autonomy over assignments-naturally encouraged richer discussions in virtual learning. "If we give students as much freedom as possible to experiment, research, and pursue interests within our content area, then they inevitably have a lot more to say," said Tahmaseb.

When it came to class discussions, Tahmaseb adapted think-pair-share to Zoom. Students were given a prompt, broken into groups, and then placed into breakout rooms to discuss and record their answers on a shared Google doc, which allowed students to share their thinking in writing or read aloud. Since Tahmaseb wasn't in each breakout room to listen to the conversations, the Google doc kept students accountable. Once they returned to the whole class, volunteers from each group shared their answers with everyone.

5. A new twist on show-and-tell: To get students comfortable with online participation, Brittany Collins, the teaching and learning coordinator at Write the World, a global online writing community for middle and high school students, converted the familiar show-and-tell activity into "think, write, share."

In one activity, Collins asked middle and high school students to find a photo, painting, or drawing that represented intergenerational connection and independently respond by writing to the following questions from the Making Thinking Visible Framework before discussing them over video as a class: What are we looking at? What makes you say that? What do you notice (see, feel, know)? What more can we uncover? What do you wonder? "It helps to break the ice in a virtual learning setting where unplanned participation can prove challenging for some students," said Collins.

Asynchronous Strategies

Although some teachers-and students-said that synchronous discussions were more engaging because they resembled a traditional classroom, many educators found that asynchronous discussions were more equitable because they opened up participation to students with low bandwidth, who had schedule limitations, or who were uncomfortable engaging with the full class.

6. Online forums create back-and-forth dialogue: Angelina Murphy, a high school English teacher, said she used Google Classroom's question feature to get her class to respond to readings and discussion prompts during remote learning this past spring. When each student commented, Murphy replied with clarifying questions to create a back-and-forth dialogue and also asked every student to respond to at least two of their peers' comments to create a broader base of discussion.

Fifth-grade teacher Raquel Linares said she used Nearpod Collaborate (Apple, Android), a virtual collaboration board, to get students to share images or write a response to show what they had learned about an article they read. To inspire connection and reflection among classmates, Linares also used Flipgrid (Apple, Android), so that students could hear their peers' voices even though they were remote.

7. Seeing and critiquing peer work through virtual gallery walks: Virtual "gallery walks" give students an opportunity to view their classmates' projects while learning from each other, according to Joe Marangell, a high school social studies teacher. After his students presented their own projects through five-minute screencasts, they were then required to give feedback to at least two other students on theirs.

Using Google Sheets, students provided feedback to their peers by answering the following prompts: What's something new I learned about this topic?; What's something that surprised me about this topic?; What's something I liked about this presentation? The online format gave every student the opportunity to see their peers' work and their assessment on theirs for deeper reflection, Marangell said.

8. Moving station brainstorming online: When carousel or station brainstorming activities are conducted in traditional classroom environments, small groups of students rotate around the room to different stations to answer prompts-and view and add to each groups' responses.

To translate this online, Marangell divided his students into groups online and created shared Google docs-or a series of Google slides-for the prompts/questions. Each group left their thoughts under the questions by the assigned date and then followed up by commenting on the other groups' responses the next day. "The strategy still allows them to maintain a sense of classroom community [in a virtual setting]," said Marangell.

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8 Strategies to Improve Participation in Your Virtual Classroom

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Educators share their best synchronous and asynchronous strategies to boost student participation during online learning.