Instructional Strategies

Instructional Strategies: iCheck4Understanding

- An all-in-one-place resource with 24-hour access to hundreds of instructional strategies that are considered best teaching practices for today’s learners, including English Language Learners and students with special needs.

DESIGN AND USE

- Strategies are focused on student engagement activities that provide Checking for Understanding during any part of a Lesson Design.

- The application will sort the instructional teaching strategies Alphabetically, by Independent or Group/Collaborative activity, by the amount of Time, by the Focus, Practice or Closure part of the lesson, and by the domain of Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking.

- You can choose one or multiple items to sort by to arrive at the optimal activity to use for a lesson.

- The 106 strategies include 52 that are designed for cooperative groups, 41 for independent, and 13 that can be used for both.

- The strategies can be utilized with cutting edge technology, including

* SmartBoards
* wireless slates
* projectors
* document cameras
* overhead projectors
* student laptops

- The strategies are designed to be used at all grade levels and all content areas of learning, with suggestions of how to use the activity in other “VARIATIONS”, thus actually providing an additional 95 instructional strategies for over 200 strategies total.

LESSON PLANNING

- Each strategy states a purpose and gives explicit instructions for how to implement the activity.

- The instructional strategies provides structured student interactions in all four domains of communication:

* reading
* writing
* listening
* speaking

- 49 of the interactive activities use all four domains of communication during the activity, and most activities overlap two or three domains.

- In planning for a lesson, the instructional strategies are predominantly designed for the Practice phase of a Three-Phase Lesson Design when teachers are implementing the Gradual Release of Responsibility model (“I do”, “We do”, “You do Together”, and “You do Alone”) for guided, structured, collaborative and independent practice of the skills being taught.

- Many of the strategies can be used in more than one of the phases of the Focus, Practice and Closure (Beginning, Middle, End/Into, Through, Beyond) parts of a lesson.

- Strategies are planned so that in preparation, materials can be made to be reused for more than one year and/or to be shared amongst teachers.

TIME ALLOCATION

- Each strategy has a time listed that denotes the range of expected time to implement the complete strategy, based on the experience of teachers. Time indicated would be maximum time, but varies with the depth of the activity and amount of content included.

- Several activities can be used in more than one time frame, depending on the intent of how the strategy is to be implemented. The activities have been consistently implemented in the middle school and high school levels, which is how the times were calibrated.

Number of strategies listed at each time level:

* 2-5 minutes: 14
* 5-15 minutes: 40
* 15-30 minutes: 25
* 30-50 minutes: 34
* Projects: 12

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