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Walk and Talk
I'm interested in this strategy because our school is moving to block scheduling, which I've never experienced.  Though there is no obvious inherent cognitive benefit, when students are used to 45-minute classes, this can prove beneficial in other (SEL) ways. Could work as a transitional element to introduce a lecture, independent work, etc.

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This is my jam. I am the Queen of the Routine!

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This seems more for English II or literary, but this would be a good strategy for literary circles or book club groups - roll the dice to have to talk about a pre-set idea/question for a student's independent reading.  Could also be used with jigsawed articles or research. - Catherine Schmid

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I do not teach in Texas so I have never seen these strategies presented in this format before today.  However, a lot of the strategies remind me of some literacy based training I have completed over the years.  For a long time, my school placed a lot of emphasis on the Collins Writing Program (https://collinsed.com/), which utilized strategies I saw on this document.  The specific strategies that stood out to me were 3-2-1, Academic Vocabulary, Concept Anchor Chart, Get to the Point, and Odd One Out.

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Bulletin Board New with Introductory Pricing The Retrieval Routine is an easy-to-implement instructional routine that incorporates best practices to establish academic habits, build classroom stamina, and improve learning. Preview The Retrieval Routine Purchase The Retrieval Routine Easy to Use Writing Assessment Tool Writing Roadmap provides everything K-12 writing teachers need to diagnose writing strengths and needs and [...]

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Metaphors
I am constantly using metaphors and extended metaphors to teach. The kids will often begin using my metaphor language to discuss ideas in whole/small group discussions. This method helps navigate abstract ideas and hard-to-describe nuances.

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I used Peardeck this past year to provide targeted feedback to students. It does not show their names but shows their work so that I can go over the work in front of the class.

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"Justify Your Answer" High Yield for Reading/ Writing MC

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"Justify Your Answer" High Yield for Reading/ Writing MC

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Since my scores were lowest to the mean for reading and writing MC the "Justify Your Answer" for both sections of questions: 1. Provide students a common text.
2. Provide groups of students a question about the reading. (Some groups will have
the same question.)
3. Provide groups either a correct or an incorrect answer to the question.
4. Students justify as to why the answer they were given could be the correct answer. 5. Student groups share/compare their justifications.
6. The justifications are presented to the class, and the class votes on the best.

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We're moving to a A/B modified block schedule, so I'll see my students every other day. Getting students to recall what they learned from the day before prior to starting to starting the lesson will be more important than ever.

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Make Student Thinking Visible - I've had students annotate/take notes on readings in previous years. However, this year I plan to add a section for them to explain their lines of reasoning and explain why the info they identified as important is actually important.

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I'd love to incorporate more of this skill as many students need to see a tangible connection between the skills they learn in the classroom and real-life. The times I have done this have all been beneficial to the students and as a beautiful by-product, the students feel empowered and that their voice matters:)

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Metacognitive Practices paired with revision

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Metacognitive Practices paired with revision

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Students were given back drafts with targeted feedback. They had to complete a reflection form that told me, in their words, what they needed to work on to improve the draft as well as how and where they actually improved the draft. This year, I will have them label their changes in the draft. I also want to use this strategy when getting them to improve their sentence fluency.

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After learning about the CRE Playbook through the NMSI sessions last year, I tried to incorporate some strategies into my classes. I think that having a name for a strategy is helpful because it allowed me to be intentional with what type of participation/discussion I wanted to have with my students. It also helped some of my more reluctant speakers to talk more because instead of me asking the students to just share, they were focusing on specific skills.

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Sentence frames are very valuable to teach format with "gradual release" when students become more confident about their writing. I use them for thesis statements, but will probably begin to use them to frame analysis paragraphs at the beginning of the year.

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This is such a simple concept that encompasses so many effective practices. Modeling and holding students accountable for skills like annotating helps to build thinking patterns and sets an effective model for those students who do not yet have refined thinking patterns, especially when it comes to reading comprehension.

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I provided a passage that was cut up into parts before they read it and had them work in groups to use the clues in the passage to put it in the order they felt it belonged in. Then I reviewed them on depth charging (topic strings, vertical elaboration---whatever you want to call the skill) and gave them a chance to think back over their organization of the passage before I revealed how the author chose to order them.

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Connect the Dots
I would use this strategy to give students practice in finding connections between claims and/or specific evidence from a brainstorm of their own in order to strengthen their ability to 1. create effective transitions between claims, 2. organize their essays effectively, and 3. discover nuances therein.

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I often tell students as the course begins that this is not their typical Eng course, that just about everything will be new to them, almost like learning a new language in a way. I like this strategy to help intro new concepts. Esp. like day 2, after things were introduced to them and before we get deeper with them. I also like that it ties well to rewarding discussion and allows diversity in "acceptable" responses. This reminds me of the Grab Bag I do with them already.

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Always/Sometimes/Never - I want to try this to help students sort out distractors and misconceptions.

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I haven't used a card sort in forever. It's a great way to preview a text. It takes work to set up, but if you're going to read the same year after year (Abigail Adams, Banneker, Kelley, etc.) it would be worth it to put the effort into creating the cards.

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I chose multiple choice passages a week before I knew I would assign them, pulled difficult vocabulary (normally 5-8 words), and assigned the vocabulary to students. They basically had to complete a Frayer model for each word.

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I see this working well with reading and writing assignments. I've noticed the more I understand their thinking, their motivations for how they complete assignments, on top of noticing patterns, as the teacher, it never fails to surprise me, the things that never even dawned on me they were thinking.

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I love the idea of actively working toward having students activate what they already know to help them engage with a new concept or text. This is an excellent way to allow students to explore and make connections based on their perceptions instead of forcing a teacher perspective that may shape or inhibit student's engagement.

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I use 3-2-1 all the time in my classroom but never for test review. This is a strategy that I will implement this year.

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Enter names, spin wheel to pick a random winner. Customize look and feel, save and share wheels.

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Making Thinking Visible and Think Aloud Combination

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Making Thinking Visible and Think Aloud Combination

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I think this might be beneficial when looking at the subclaims generated and even how the evidence connects to those claims-this could also be beneificial for Multiple Choice...I do it with MC tests-I do think alouds with testers. I showed improvment this year, but still not as much as I want to see, so I am definitely interested in creating something that is a combination of the two strategies.

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Minute Paper for formative assessments-exit slips based on skills utilized per day

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What is a Minute Paper?

The Minute Paper is a feedback tool that teachers can use with their students to help get feedback about themselves while also giving students a chance to self-reflect. This tool gives students the opportunity to reflect on the day and where they are in the learning process. At the end of a class or instructional time, teachers give students one minute to answer two to three questions from the list below. Not asking the same questions every time makes the Minute Paper incredible flexible. This gives teachers and students feedback on the different parts of each day’s lesson.

8 Questions to ask

What was the most important (significant, crucial) thing you learned in today’s class?

What question(s) do you have about the material covered in today’s class?

How can I help you learn the concept that is giving you the most trouble?

What was the muddiest point in today’s lecture?

List the key concepts from today’s class.

What question did I ask students today that helped you the most? The least?

What examples did I use today that helped you the most? The least?

What is the main application of the material we discussed today?

Other effective ways to use these 8 questions

For a more in-depth answers to the questions, consider asking students to journal. This will provide teachers with more feedback and more reflective information from the student. Using the same questions you would for the minute paper, ask students to journal at the end of each class. This tools helps teachers see what each student needs to help them succeed in the classroom. The information from the journals could also be helpful during teacher-student conferences because teachers are already aware of students’ needs.

Featured Image: Essay Tigers • Additional Image: edutopia • Resource: Who’s Engaged? Book

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8 Questions to Ask Students While Completing the Minute Paper

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The Minute Paper is a feedback tool that teachers can use with their students to help get feedback about themselves while also giving students a chance to self-reflect. This tool gives students the opportunity to reflect. Learn this and more in the TeacherReady Online Teacher Certification Program.

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Which strategies do you want to try? How would they help your students? How might you adapt them for your own student population?

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This school year, I have the privilege of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers who are rolling up their sleeves and asking hard questions about how they can better serve their under-performing students who are disproportionately English learners, poor students, and students of color. They are working to incorporate culturally responsive practices into their classrooms.

I believe culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is a powerful method for accelerating student learning. But truth be told, most educators are not really sure what it is or what it looks like. For some, it seems mysterious. A number of leaders discount it because it seems too "touchy feely" or only focused on raising students' self-esteem, when they need to raise achievement levels. But CRT is so much more than that. It's the reason why I wroteCulturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. ( Brief podcast on CRT)

Two of the biggest challenges I see teachers struggle with when first embracing CRT, is understanding the role culture actually plays in instruction and how to operationalize culturally responsive practices. They worry that they have to learn 19 different cultures -- everyone's individual customs, holidays, foods, and language. This simply isn't true. Here are four other big ideas about culturally responsive teaching to keep in mind:

1. Culturally responsive teaching isn't the same as multicultural education or social justice education. Too often we use the terms culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education interchangeably, when they're different things. They are related, but only culturally responsive teaching focuses on building students' learning power. It's important to remember that CRT isn't about diversity training, but about helping students reach deeper levels of understanding.

2. Culturally responsive teaching builds students' brain power by Improving information processing skills using cultural learning tools.This isn't an aspect of CRT we talk about a lot. Instead, educators like to focus on the affective elements. Keep in mind one way that the achievement gap manifests itself is by creating dependent learners who find it hard to do critical thinking or independent learning. When we focus on using culture as a cognitive scaffold, then we're able to leverage students' neural pathways that make learning easier.

3. Culturally responsive teaching is grounded in social and cognitive neuroscience. Neuroscience is giving us new findings every day that support why culturally responsive practices work. For example, social neuroscience reminds us that relationships are the on-ramp to learning, meaning if a student doesn't feel heard or seen, then it leads to increased stress. Stress hormones like cortisol impair the brain's executive function. So in order to create a learning environment conducive to all students learning, we need to lower stress hormones by building those relationships.

4. Culturally responsive teaching requires teachers to recognize the cultural orientation we call "collectivism."Teachers are often confused about how culture plays a role in culturally responsive teaching. They think they have to mention race, ethnicity, or cultural artifacts like ethnic food, music, or literature all the time for every different group. Instead, a key starting point to making cultural responsiveness manageable is to organize instructional activities around collectivist cultural principles -- group harmony and interdependence. Vygotsky talks about this as "socio-cultural learning" and highlights that it is necessary to move students into their zone of proximal development.

Here's another important point to make: Culturally responsive teaching isn't a program or set of strategies. First and foremost, it is a mindset. That means that it's equally important to do the ongoing "inside-out" work to build your social-emotional capacity to work across social, linguistic, racial, and/or economic difference with students and their families. Too often I hear educators say that they are "color-blind" or don't understand the socio-political issues that lead to inequities in education -- like disproportionate discipline outcomes for boys of color or low achievement data for English learners, poor students, and students of color in general.

We have to make it our personal business to build our emotional stamina to address our own blind spots and biases. One of the nation's leading implicit bias scholars, Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin, compares implicit bias to habits that, with intention and practice, can be broken. Her research has found that three conditions need to be in place for individuals to successfully "de-bias":

1. Intention: You have to acknowledge that you harbor unconscious biases and are motivated to change.

2. Attention: You have to pay attention to your triggers and know when stereotypical responses or assumptions are activated.

3. Time: You have to make time to practice new strategies designed to "break" your automatic associations that link a negative judgment to behavior that is culturally different from yours.

"De-biasing" requires a level of metacognition. In this case, you're not thinking about your thinking, but thinking about your unconscious reacting. Remember, it isn't about getting rid of our biases, it's about rewiring our brains to not respond unconsciously to the negative dominant narratives about the learning capacity of poor students, students of color, and English learners. We have to tame our amygdala, our brain's fight or flight defense mechanism, and take advantage of neuroplasticity - our brain's ability to change itself and respond differently to emotionally charged situations, like talking about race, culture, and inequity.

At the end of professional development sessions with teachers, I usually share this quote from Atul Gawande, author of the Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right: "Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try." Operationalizing CRT may seem overwhelming, but start with something small but high leverage, and grow your comfort and skill level. We can do this!

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Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain

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This school year, I have the privilege of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers who are rolling up their sleeves and asking hard questions about how they can better serve their under-performing students who are disproportionately English learners, poor students, and students of color.

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Which strategies do you want to try? How would they help your students? How might you adapt them for your own student population?

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Description: Questioning is one of the most frequently used classroom instructional strategies. One study proposed that teachers ask an average of 300 to 400 questions each day and for a variety of purposes - to engage students, focus learning, help students connect to their background knowledge, collect evidence of learning, spark conversations, enhance listening skills, increase the depth of learning, and often just to see who is paying attention. It also lets us check students' understanding at key points during the lesson, and then make adjustments as needed and to promote thinking. This is why effective questioning requires purposeful planning of not only when to ask a question, but that the expected student response will provide evidence of the targeted Learning Goal. For example, recall questions neither give evidence of understanding nor do they promote thinking. They simply show that students have memorized surface-level information. A math example would be, "Explain your strategy for solving the problem? How else could you solve the problem?"; while for English Language Arts, "Which of the details from the text best helps the reader understand the meaning of______?" Both of the examples elicit evidence of the students' ability to justify answers with evidence.

1. Plan questions for each part of Lesson Instruction based on either the Levels of Learning or Comprehension Strategy of each Learning Goal.

2. Write the questions in the lesson plan at the point where they will be asked.

3. Plan response strategies for each question to ensure that all students are engaged and responding to the questions.

4. Use wait time and follow-up strategies to support quality answers.

5. Provide opportunities for students to develop and use their own questions.

Digital Adaptation: While online tools like Kahoot or Nearpod are trendy ways of questioning students as part of class discussion, it is important to consider choices that give you flexibility in how you pose questions and also gather students' responses. For example, quick polls can give you a snapshot of Level 1: Recall thinking, while other tools like open responses allow for explanation or justification of thinking. These are needed for Level 2: Represent and Level 3: Analyze and Reasoning questions.

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High Yield Instructional Strategies 101 - Learning Focused

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Description: Questioning is one of the most frequently used classroom instructional strategies. One study proposed that teachers ask an average of 300 to 400 questions each day and for a variety of purposes - to engage students, focus learning, help students connect to their background knowledge, collect evidence of learning, spark conversations, enhance listening skills, increase the depth of learning, and often just to see who is paying attention.