Strategies to Boost Student Learning

This week's article summary is 6 Counterintuitive Strategies to Boost Student Learning.

What are the best ways for teachers to optimize student learning?

During Preplanning, I talked about the importance of the new 3 Rs of education: repetition, routine, and relationships.

But as you’ll see in the article below, equally important is having high expectations and standards of your students and ensuring they are aware of why, what, and how they are learning, i.e., metacognitive thinking.

More student-to-student conversation; more low-stake, formative quizzing and reviewing of material; and more challenging content empower students in the classroom and aid in their learning. 

In an elementary school like Trinity, our pedagogy typically involves ample opportunities for student active learning, yet the recommendations below are a reminder of how we can best support our students in their learning.

Joe

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Below are six unconventional, research-backed strategies for improving teaching and learning:

Assess More, Grade Less: The more you have to grade, the less you can assign. Conscientious educators naturally want to give feedback on every substantive piece of student work, but teachers’ workload can quickly become unmanageable, creating a strong incentive to not ask students to do a lot of writing. Also, too much formal grading often causes students to focus on the grades themselves, rather than thinking about and addressing their actual learning gaps. But if students are going to become more proficient writers, they need to write every day, so what’s a teacher to do? Here are three ways out of this bind: (a) getting students to edit their early drafts, supported by a rubric and exemplars of good writing; (b) having students edit their classmates’ writing; and (c) when students’ finished papers are submitted to the teacher, using the 2+1 feedback approach: address two higher-order concerns (e.g., organization and quality of argument) and one lower-order concern (e.g., punctuation and spelling). 

Have students read above-level texts: According to literacy guru Timothy Shanahan, regularly exposing students to texts 2-4 grades above their current reading level produces “robust gains in oral reading fluency and comprehension” and builds students’ ability to handle difficult texts in higher grades. But it’s important that challenging texts are engaging and high-interest. Many students fall out of love with reading in middle school, and they need to find books they really want to read. There also needs to be time for reading below-level books, which builds vocabulary, fluency, background knowledge, confidence, and positive feelings about reading.

Orchestrate productive struggle: Lessons should regularly include concepts and activities just beyond students’ reach – on which they’ll experience some frustration and make mistakes. The right kind of interaction and support from peers and the teacher can double student learning. 

Quiz students before a lesson or unit: Studies have shown that when students take a low-stakes pretest on material they’re about to learn, which involves making lots of mistakes, they learn more when the lesson is taught. That’s because the pretest sparks curiosity and primes students to be more receptive to concepts and skills when the content is presented. Student learning is deeper and more durable when students get things wrong and do the work of correcting their misconceptions and mistakes.

Minimize “teacher talk” and get students doing more of the heavy lifting: Reducing the amount of time you commit to answering student questions while gently guiding them to direct their own inquiry, solutions, and discussion, can reap academic rewards and boost student confidence. Asking students questions like ‘What makes this hard?’ or ‘What have we tried?’ can get groups of students, or the whole class, thinking through possible solutions before a teacher steps in to provide the clarity they’re looking for. Of course students need scaffolding and direct instruction on working independently and having productive discussions with classmates. 

Make space for informal conversations and mental breaks: This might be a couple of minutes at the beginning and end of a lesson for students to pair up and chat about something they’re really looking forward to, or asking if a student has a story they want to share with the class – or just having students get up, stretch, and take a few deep breaths.