Engaging Students with High Yield Teaching Strategies and Technology

“Our students must learn not only how to use current technologies, but also how to evaluate which ones work best for particular tasks or projects,” write Howard Pitler, Elizabeth R. Hubbell, and Matt Kuhn in their latest edition of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works, 2nd Edition. In the digital age, that is the crux of our instructional problem: how do we give students the experiences with digital technologies that make them effective consumer-users? And, how do we do this without being technologically-tool centered, when the tools so rapidly change? Pitler, Hubbell, and Kuhn offer one effective approach: focus on the instructional methods that work, and then engage students in using technology while employing those research-based instructional strategies. Using the high-yield instructional strategies found in the book Classroom Instruction That Works, the authors show how technology might be employed in the service of using each of these instructional strategies:

• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Cooperative Learning
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Summarizing and Note Taking
• Assigning Homework and Providing Practice
• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses

Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works takes readers through each of these high-yield instructional strategies and then points out specific kinds of technologies that lend themselves to helping teachers engage in those teaching strategies. For example, Identifying Similarities and Differences is a strategy that research says brings  the highest levels of gains in student achievement. Pitler, Hubbell, and Kuhn’s book gives educators ideas on how  to engage students in the use of this instructional strategy through the use of different categories of technological tools. At the same time, the authors offer readers many examples of how practicing teachers are using those technologies in the manner they describe. The categories of technologies these authors focus on include:

• Word Processing Applications
• Organizing and Brainstorming Software
• Data Collection and Analysis Tools
• Communication and Collaboration Software
• Instructional Media (Learner as Consumer)
• Multimedia Creation (Learner as Producer)
• Instructional Interactives
• Database and Reference Resources
• Kinesthetic Technology

Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works is not a "how-to" book when it comes to employing technology in the engagement of instruction. Rather, it is a "big-picture" book that surveys the field of technological tools and helps the teacher connect with the kinds of technology she might wish to use in the classroom. Educators in the classroom up to district leaders, who are interested in what kinds of tools teachers and students can use with research-based instruction, will find this book quite useful.

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The Core Six: 6 Essential Teaching Strategies for Excellence

What if you only had time and money to use and purchase six tools to teach your entire curriculum? What would those six tools be? Authors Harvey Silver, R. Thomas Dewing, and Matthew Perini seem to do just that in their book The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with Common Core.

Many of us are right in the midst to implementing the Common Core Standards, whether we philosophically agree or disagree with the need for their existence. School leaders and teachers are scrambling to find and create tools for implementation, and the massively growing number of new books and materials about the Common Core aren’t making this task any easier. However, there are few that focus on the “essentials” to the degree that The Core Six does. This concise volume (it’s only 78 pages) lays what it calls “Six Core Practices Students Need to Cultivate to Become Independent Learners.”

According to this book, "The Core Six” are strategies that foster college and career-readiness, and at the same time, address the Common Core Standards. These six strategies, according to Silver, Dewing, and Perini are:

1. Reading for Meaning: This strategy helps students develop the skills to be proficient, effective readers and make sense of text.
2. Compare and Contrast: This strategy teaches students to conduct comparative analysis, thereby getting them to learn content at a much deeper level.
3. Inductive Learning: Inductive Learning as a strategy helps students see patterns and structures in content by using inductive processes.
4. Circle of Knowledge: Circle of Knowledge is a strategic framework for planning and conducting engaging classroom discussions that get students to think deeply and communicate thoughtfully.
5. Write to Learn: As a strategy, Write to Learn gives teachers a way to integrate writing into daily instruction and use writing skills to develop students’ ability to write in the “key text types” that they need to be college and career ready.
6. Vocabulary’s CODE: This “strategic approach” to vocabulary instruction gives students the ability to retain and use academic vocabulary.

Because of its straightforward, here-it-is style, The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core is far from being what I would call “engaging read.”  It’s strength, however, lies in this straightforward review of these six solid research-based teaching strategies.

With each of the “Core Six Essential Strategies” the authors begin with a brief description of the strategy, then they provide a quick list of reasons to use that strategy. Next, they describe the research supporting each strategy and provide the principles of implementation. They end the review of each "Core Six Essential" with some classroom examples of implementation, and things to consider when planning to use the strategy. This formula of presenting each strategy makes it quite easy to take what is learned back to the classroom.

If you are on a quest for a simple, straightforward book that gives teachers high-yield teaching strategies for the Common Core implementation efforts, then The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core is a solid choice.

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