Erudite colleagues, while in the euphoria of yuletide, I would want us to remind ourselves of this fascinating topic; “The Most Teaching Strategies to use in your School.”
Teaching strategies are methods and techniques that a teacher will use to support their pupils or students through the learning process; a teacher will chose the teaching strategy most suitable to the topic being studied, the level of expertise of the learner, and the stage in their learning journey.
In one lesson a teacher may use many different teaching strategies with different end goals. The most effective teaching strategies are those proven to work over large scale trials. There is no requirement for a teaching strategy to be innovative although of course some of them are.
These are the 13 most important teaching strategies that you and all the teachers in your school should at least have in your teaching toolkit.
No-one is suggesting you will use them in every lesson, but an awareness of what they are and the results you can expect is essential to move your practice on.
And of course if you’re a school leader, or responsible for CPD in your school, knowing what’s current and evidence-backed is key so that you can make an informed choice the next time somebody suggests implementing a new or innovative teaching technique:
1. Know Your Pupils and Develop Their Respect:
This may sound basic, but the basis of all good teaching is an understanding of your pupils and their learning needs. Allied to this is the respect you are held in by your pupils. The relationship between teacher and student is a vital element of the learning experience. Take time to get to know a new class from the first day, understand what motivates them their barriers to learning. This is an often overlooked teaching strategy.
2. Appropriate use of Summative and Formative Assessments:
The first stage here is making sure you know the difference between formative and summative assessment. It may sound obvious but you’d be surprised how many teachers don’t use each appropriately.
To cover them quickly:
Summative assessment refers to an assessment that takes place after a block of work has been completed, whether this is a term or a year. They are best thought of as assessments of learning.
Formative assessments are those that take place day-to-day and are used to gauge pupils’ understanding of a topic – they are assessments for learning. Formative assessment is often used in a diagnostic capacity, to help us identify whether pupils are struggling with a topic in the moment. This then guides and adapts our instruction during the lesson, to better meet children’s needs.
3. Teach the Vocabulary :
With the new focus in the curriculum on knowledge organisers, there’s no excuse for children being without the relevant topic vocabulary. They need the words to be able to create the thoughts and the sentences to confidently speak about a given topic.
- Explicit Instruction
Also known as direct instruction, this teaching strategy is highly teacher-led, and focuses on frequent questioning and guided practice to help pupils learn a topic.
The backbone of explicit instruction is the use of the worked example in an Example-Problem Pair. This involves demonstrating a worked example in its entirety in silence alongside a problem that pupils will then attempt.
4. Explicit Instruction:
Also known as direct instruction, this teaching strategy is highly teacher-led, and focuses on frequent questioning and guided practice to help pupils learn a topic.
The backbone of explicit instruction is the use of the worked example in an Example-Problem Pair. This involves demonstrating a worked example in its entirety in silence alongside a problem that pupils will then attempt.Silence is important in order to ensure pupils’ attention is not split between the example and the spoken explanation, making it more likely that both will be more fully absorbed and retained.
5. Effective Questioning Techniques:
While we are all aware of the importance of questioning as a tool to gauge pupils’ understanding of a topic, there are definite techniques to improve the efficacy of your questioning in the classroom.
Questions such as “Are you sure?” and “How do you know?” encourage pupils to engage in some basic critical thinking to establish how confident they are in an answer and why, while others such as “Is there another way?” help to highlight where multiple methods to derive a solution may exist.
6. Deliberate Practice:
One of the most effective ways of introducing new concepts to a class, Deliberate Practice involves breaking learning down into a series of sub skills, each of which is deliberately practiced in turn.
The 5 steps involved in deliberate practice are:
👉Isolate the skill
👉Develop the skill
👉Assess the skill
👉Final performance
👉Retrieval practice later
You can find a full explanation of each of these stages in our blog post on deliberate practice in education.
7. Differentiation:
Far more than simply “splitting the whole class into small groups based on attainment”, positive and effective differentiation at the primary school level can be difficult to achieve – poor differentiation strategies risk actually widening the attainment gap we’re attempting to close.
8. Reinforcing Effort/Providing Recognition:
Helping pupils make a link between putting effort into a task and receiving recognition is an important step in developing a classroom environment that fosters active learning.
Encouraging pupils to put more effort into activities only goes so far without something to provide them with the motivation to do so. Praise and recognition are motivators that pupils are already familiar with; shifting them from being correct to giving full effort can be highly effective.
9. Metacognition
Literally ‘thinking about thinking’, metacognition has been recognised by the EEF as one of the most effective, lowest cost teaching strategies there is, with pupil making an average of seven months’ additional progress.
Metacognition in primary schools often incorporates some of the other effective teaching strategies, such as questioning in the classroom – “How do you know?” not only asks pupils to justify their solutions, but has them thinking about their own thought processes for deriving that solution.
Teaching pupils how to plan, monitor and self-evaluate their learning also improves pupil motivation and encourages them to work harder in lessons, tying into another teaching strategy.
10. Personalised Learning:
It might sound obvious, but pupils are more likely to engage with learning when is more targeted to them and appeals to their interests! This may be difficult to achieve early on – especially with a full class of 30 pupils – but as familiarity and rapport builds throughout the year it should become easier to make activities and even questions more personalised to individual children.
11. Collaborative Learning:
Also referred to as ‘cooperative learning’, the idea of having pupils work in groups for certain classroom activities won’t be new to most teachers.
The concept of ‘competitive’ collaborative learning (where groups of students compete against one another) has been shown to have some impact, but caution is advised in case pupils focus more on the competition rather than the learning.
12. Explicitly Teach Thinking Skills & Problem Solving Techniques:
Mathenatical problem solving techniques don’t always come naturally to pupils; while metacognitive strategies such as those mentioned above make it more likely that pupils will be able to apply critical thinking to a problem, there is no set way to ensure that this will happen.
Research into the topic suggests that context-agnostic deployment of problem solving techniques only occurs once pupils have secure domain knowledge, and the opportunity to practise.
Without these, pupils often fall into the trap of attributing importance to the so-called ‘surface features’ of a problem, which we naturally discount as irrelevant to the actual maths involved.
That said, explicit teaching of thinking skills is still of considerable importance; once domain knowledge has been (relatively) secured, teaching pupils how to recognise and focus on the ‘deep structure’ of problems enables them to apply their knowledge more effectively.
13. Modelling and Scaffolding:
You may already be familiar with the “I do, We do, You do” method of scaffolding, but it’s worth taking some time to dive into why it’s as effective as it is.
Modelling is one of the most important factors in ensuring student learning of a particular topic, but it is most impactful when it can introduce new concepts without increasing pupils’ cognitive load – hence the ‘I, We You’ approach.
By building from teacher-led, to joint construction, to independent working, we create a structure that presents learning as less of a step-change and more of an actual process. It also allows us greater flexibility; more time can be spent on one stage e.g. joint construction is it becomes necessary.
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Other Teaching Strategies To Consider:
The teaching strategies above form the basis of our one-to-one lessons, but some other teaching practices you’ll need to consider in your own classroom include :Use of education technology
Knowing when and where to bring technology into the classroom is a delicate balancing act. While children tend to react well to technology-based lessons, there’s always the risk that they focus on the tech over the learning.
1️⃣Behaviour management:
Effective classroom management is its own topic, but there’s no doubt that a well-behaved class (not necessarily a perfectly-behaved one) is far more likely to engage with lessons.
2️⃣Inquiry-based learning:
While triggering the curiosity of your pupils for a topic is the necessary first step in inquiry-based learning, presenting them with the opportunity to research and report on the topic is where learning really occurs.
3️⃣How you manage class discussions e.g. ‘Think, pair, share’:
Somewhat related to behaviour management, class or group discussions are most beneficial when they have a clear, well-established structure to them. Students should not only feel they have the opportunity to share their thoughts, but understand that others’ thoughts also have value.
4️⃣Feedback process and understanding:
The single most impactful teaching strategy when used correctly, feedback (whether from the teacher or another source e.g. peer marking) needs to be specific, encouraging and actionable – pupils need to be able to understand where they could improve, and how.
5️⃣Growth Mindset:
Separate from praise and rewarding effort, developing growth mindset can be a very valuable tool in developing pupils’ resilience and fostering a more positive attitude towards both maths specifically and learning in general.
Anxiously waiting to see you all at the citadel of excellence in 2022…
Thanks.✍️
Hon. Master John
