Introducing Instructional Strategies and Tactics at KVS
June 2017
During a recent workshop with teachers at Kopila Valley School, I began by inviting teachers to complete the statement, "Students learn best when instruction is...". The goal of this activity was to highlight that students learn best when instruction is:
Teachers were introduced to numerous concepts and ideas related to Instructional Intelligence (Bennet, B., and Rolheiser, C., 2001). With a focus on instructional tactics and instructional strategies, it was my intention to help teachers come up with more interactive, thoughtful, and interesting lessons to help improve student participation and learning.
Teachers were given the opportunity to practice each new instructional tactic and strategy during the workshop. The instructional tactics included simple graphic organizers (card clusters, graffiti, placemats, KWL charts) and cooperative learning structures (brainstorms, four corners, 3-step interviews, circle talk, jigsaw, think-pair-share). With each new instructional tactic, teachers were also encouraged to try and identify which levels of Bloom's Taxonomy were supported.
As the teachers gained confidence with the instructional tactics, we then moved on to discuss more complex instructional strategies. These are more complicated cooperative learning structures, which include more complex graphic organizers. I began by introducing more simple graphic organizers such as time lines and flow charts and then we discussed and developed increasingly complex graphic organizers including word webs, fish bone diagrams, cluster maps, mind maps and concept maps.
Post workshop, I have noticed that fishbone diagrams are a very popular graphic organizer used my many of our teachers across primary and secondary grades. I have been supporting teachers to slowly make an effort to teach our students how to develop more complex graphic organizers such as word webs and mind maps. The challenge is to help teachers understand and hopefully appreciate the benefits of using these types of instructional strategies as a means of more clearly presenting information and as a way to help students see the connections between concepts and ideas and ultimately learn more easily and deeply.
During a recent workshop with teachers at Kopila Valley School, I began by inviting teachers to complete the statement, "Students learn best when instruction is...". The goal of this activity was to highlight that students learn best when instruction is:
- Appropriately challenging
- Based on real-world problems and situations
- Purposeful
- Meaningful and interesting
Teachers were introduced to numerous concepts and ideas related to Instructional Intelligence (Bennet, B., and Rolheiser, C., 2001). With a focus on instructional tactics and instructional strategies, it was my intention to help teachers come up with more interactive, thoughtful, and interesting lessons to help improve student participation and learning.
Teachers were given the opportunity to practice each new instructional tactic and strategy during the workshop. The instructional tactics included simple graphic organizers (card clusters, graffiti, placemats, KWL charts) and cooperative learning structures (brainstorms, four corners, 3-step interviews, circle talk, jigsaw, think-pair-share). With each new instructional tactic, teachers were also encouraged to try and identify which levels of Bloom's Taxonomy were supported.
As the teachers gained confidence with the instructional tactics, we then moved on to discuss more complex instructional strategies. These are more complicated cooperative learning structures, which include more complex graphic organizers. I began by introducing more simple graphic organizers such as time lines and flow charts and then we discussed and developed increasingly complex graphic organizers including word webs, fish bone diagrams, cluster maps, mind maps and concept maps.
Post workshop, I have noticed that fishbone diagrams are a very popular graphic organizer used my many of our teachers across primary and secondary grades. I have been supporting teachers to slowly make an effort to teach our students how to develop more complex graphic organizers such as word webs and mind maps. The challenge is to help teachers understand and hopefully appreciate the benefits of using these types of instructional strategies as a means of more clearly presenting information and as a way to help students see the connections between concepts and ideas and ultimately learn more easily and deeply.
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