21st Century Teaching Principles

• The Principles of Teaching for the 21st Century were written by Suzanne Donovan and John Bransford in 2005
• Teachers should address and build upon prior knowledge to promote student learning
• Students need factual and conceptual knowledge to develop understanding and apply knowledge in real-world contexts
• Students learning is more effective when they monitor and reflect on their learning

The Nine Categories of Instructional Strategies

• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback gives students direction for learning, information on their performance relative to learning objectives, and ways to improve

• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition enhances understanding of the relationship between effort and achievement

• This is achieved by addressing students' attitudes/beliefs and providing abstract tokens/praise for accomplishments related to goal attainment

• Cooperative Learning provides opportunities for students to interact for learning

• Cues, Questions and Advance Organizers enhances ability to retrieve, use, and organize knowledge about a topic

• Non-linguistic Representations enhances ability to represent and elaborate on knowledge using mental images

• Summarizing and Note-Taking enhances ability to synthesize information in a way that captures main ideas and supporting details

• Assigning Homework and Providing Practice extends opportunities to practice, review and apply knowledge, and to reach expected proficiency

• Identifying Similarities and Differences enhances understanding and ability to use knowledge by identifying ways in which items are alike and different

• Generating and Testing Hypotheses enhances understanding and ability to use knowledge by making and testing hypotheses

• The nine categories can be divided into 3 groups:

  • Creating a positive environment for learning
  • Helping students develop understanding
  • Helping students extend and apply knowledge

Creating the Environment for Learning

• Setting Objectives involves setting specific, but not restrictive learning objectives
• Objectives should be communicated to students and parents and connected to previous/future learning
• Students can set personal learning objectives to become self-directed learners

Providing Feedback

• Feedback should clarify what was correct/incorrect and what to do next
• It should be provided in time to meet students' needs and be criterion-referenced
• It is important to engage students in the feedback process

Reinforcing Effort

• Students must see that success comes from their effort

Providing Recognition

• Teachers should promote a mastery-goal orientation and use criterion-referenced assessment
• Praise should be specific and aligned with expected performance and behaviors

Cooperative Learning

• Activities should require collaboration and cooperation

Elements of the Cooperative Learning Model

• Positive Interdependence: Ensure individual success promotes success among group members
  • Requires establishing a cooperative goal structure and equally distributing resources
  • Focus on helping students develop a sense of shared success/failure
• Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction: Individuals should encourage and activate efforts to achieve and help one another learn
  • Discussion is encouraged and students shown the importance of effort and recognition
• Individual and Group Accountability: Ensure all members contribute to achievement of the goal and learn as individuals
  • Optimal group size must be established and individual assessments included
  • Students must understand that each person contributes to the group's success
• Interpersonal and Small-Group Skills: Ensure that all members clearly understand effective group skills
  • Initial and ongoing instruction on communication, decision-making, conflict resolution, leadership and trust is needed
• Group Processing: Promote group and individual reflection for maintenance of group effectiveness and success
  • Dedicated time for group reflection must be established using specific questions, learning logs or sentence stems that address function and improvement

Helping Students Develop Understanding

• Cues, questions and advance organizers are important, and explicit cues should be used
• This can be done by:
  • Giving a preview with pictures
  • Explaining learning outcomes
  • Providing a list of questions that students can answer at the end of the unit
• Inferential questions can be asked to encourage analysis and interpretation of the text
• Asking analytic questions is also useful:
  • Analyzing Errors: Requires finding errors in reasoning
  • Construction Support: Requires identifying support for a claim
  • Analyzing Perspectives: Requires explaining why someone might consider something good/bad/neutral
• Advance organizers give students what they are expected to learn before teaching
• Note that advance organizers differ from graphic organizers
• Using advance organizers at the beginning of a lesson or unit focuses learning on the content
• Advance organizers help students use background knowledge to learn new information, serving as mental scaffolding
• The four formats of advance organizers are expository, narrative, skimming, and graphic:
  • Expository advance organizer: Describes the content students are about to learn
  • Ex. anticipation guide/prediction guide gives clues and helps students set a purpose for learning
  • Narrative advance organizer: Presents lesson in a story form to relevant connection to the lesson
  • It may be given orally or shown using a video clip
  • Skimming: Quickly looking over a material to get a general idea of what the material is about
  • Graphic: Pertains to the use of graphic organizers to activate prior knowledge or schema

Nonlinguistic Representations

• Creating graphic organizers is useful, with six types commonly used:
  • Descriptive: Gathers facts about a topic, not necessarily in a specific order
  • Time-sequence: Organizes information in a sequential or chronological order
  • Process/cause-effect: Organizes information that leads to an outcome or shows steps to an end result
  • Episode: Combines multiple ways of organizing information about a specific event
  • Generalization/Principle: Presents the details and generalization arrived at
  • Concept patterns: Organizes information or declarative knowledge into patterns to show relationships and connections of concept
• Making physical models and manipulatives is valuable
• Manipulatives are physical teaching tools that engage students visually and physically
• Examples include coins, play money, blocks, puzzles, popsicle sticks, pebbles, maps, mock ups, and models of the different body systems
• Generating mental pictures, and images are representations of the physical world in a person's mind
• Creating pictures, illustrations and pictographs allows personalized learning
• Engaging students in kinesthetic activity is important because when students move around as part of learning activities, they create more neural networks in their brains, and learning stays with them longer

Summarizing and Note-Taking

• Using summary frames, which are a series of questions or statements that need to be completed, highlights the critical elements of a specific text pattern
• Engaging students in reciprocal teaching is valuable because, in this method, students become the teacher in small group reading sessions
• Teachers model and help students learn to guide group discussions using four strategies: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting
• The steps to do this are as follows:

1. Place students in groups of four
2. Distribute one note card to each member of the group identifying each person's unique role: summarizer, questioner, clarifier, and predictor
3. Have students read a few paragraphs of the assigned text selection using note-taking strategies to help better prepare for their role in the discussion
4. At the given stopping point, the Summarizer will highlight the key ideas up to this point in the reading
5. The Questioner will then pose questions about the selection: unclear parts, puzzling information and connections to other concepts already learned
6. The Clarifier will address confusing parts and attempt to answer the questions that were just posed
7. The Predictor can offer predictions about what the author will tell the group next or, if it's literary selection, the predictor might suggest what the next events in the story will be
8. The roles in the group then switch one person to the right, and the next selection is read, so students repeat the process using their new roles until the entire selection is read
9. Throughout the process, the teacher's role is to guide and nurture the students' ability to use the four strategies successfully within the small group, and that role lessens as skills develop

• Using note-taking skills is important and can be done by writing/drawing
• Three useful formats for note-taking: webbing, informal outlining, and a combination of the two
  • Webbing: Uses shapes, colors, and arrows to show relationships (e.g., spidergrams, mind maps, and concept maps)
  • Skeleton Prose: Informal outlining, structured as numbered points/paragraphs with headings and indentations

Assigning homework and providing practice

• Homework design should allow opportunity to practice skills and processes to increase speed, accuracy, fluency, conceptual understanding, or to extend learning, and provide feedback, aligned with the learning outcome/objective
• Practice sessions should be short, focused, and distributed over time, as short practice sessions in the early phase of the learning process result in more learning

Helping Students Extend and Apply Knowledge

• Identifying similarities and differences is crucial
  • Comparing: Showing similarities and differences
  • Classifying: Organizing groups and labeling them
  • Creating metaphors: Identifying a general or basic pattern in one topic and finding it in another that seems different
  • Creating analogies: Identifying relationships between pairs of concepts
• Generating and testing hypotheses applies principles learned, deepening understanding and is applicable across subjects