Instructional Strategies
Classroom Examples, Techniques, and Best Practices
Improving student achievement comes from more effective teaching. And effective teaching means educators have the right mindset, and training in a variety of classroom instructional strategies, tools and techniques. At Learning-Focused, we work with educators to improve their use of instructional strategies to accommodate for the different learning styles of all students. Check out our instructional strategies examples from the classroom, or as we like to call them “Classroom Chronicles.”
We have a variety of free and paid resources and trainings for school leaders and educators:
- Our popular High-Yield Instructional Strategies resource
- On-demand courses on individual instructional strategies (accelerating learning, collaborative pairs, effective questioning, higher order thinking, writing to raise achievement, and many more) or bundles (effective instruction, literacy, rigor, poverty and more)
- In-person and virtual professional development trainings and events open to all educators
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As the school year winds down and end-of-course exams and final assessments loom, it’s natural to want to jump into a full-blown end-of-year teaching review of everything students have learned. However, the key to effective EOY reviews isn’t simply re-teaching everything but targeting the appropriate level of instruction students need at the end of the…
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More and more of my 8th-grade English Language Arts students have been using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Grammarly to complete their writing assignments. This is concerning for several reasons, not the least of which is academic dishonesty. While it’s not difficult to pick out an essay written by ChatGPT, it can be difficult to…
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Last year, I visited classrooms with April Shackleford, the principal of Lucama Elementary, recently recognized as a Blue Ribbon School. We walked into a 4th-grade math classroom, and the first thing I noticed were students working in pairs and discussing math problems. As we walked around the classroom, it became clear that students were working…
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The end of the year always brings up an important topic: What is the best way to organize and provide student review strategies? However, if we only review at the end of the year, we have missed an opportunity to improve student outcomes. At its most effective, review is meant to be provided year-round and…
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In a 5th Grade Science classroom at Barnes Elementary School in Wilson County, the students and teachers had a secret folder. The folder was the idea of the 5th Grade Science Teacher. This one particular class was scoring in the 20s and 30s on assessments. This was about half of what the other three classes were scoring. So the teacher created…
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I have had the privilege of working with Dr. Rene Spry and her teachers at Oxford Elementary School in Catawba County. After attending Accelerating Learning with Previewing training, she recruited a few select teachers and began implementing Previewing this year. After visiting her school and hearing about the impact of Previewing, I followed up with…
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For the last two years, I have had the privilege to work with the Hiwassee Dam Elementary and Middle School teachers in Cherokee County, NC. In October, during a coaching conversation, a middle school teacher told me she intended to incorporate more writing in her 8th-grade math class. At that time, her students had already…
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