Professional Learning for Busy Educators

"Once students learn how to sound out words, reading is easy. They can speak the words they see. But whether they understand them is a different question entirely. Reading comprehension is complicated. Teachers, though, can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by teaching them how to think as they read.

Marianne Stewart teaches eighth grade English at Lexington Junior High near Anaheim, California. She recently asked her students to gather in groups to discuss books where characters face difficulties. Students could choose from 11 different books but in each group one student took on the role of "discussion director," whose task was to create questions for the group to discuss together. Stewart created prompts to help them come up with questions that require deep reading.

Marianne Stewart, English teacher at Lexington Junior High
This process of questioning while reading is one of a number of “cognitive strategies” Stewart teaches her students. The strategies focus on what research has shown to be the thought processes of good readers. Others include planning and goal-setting, tapping prior knowledge, making connections, visualizing and forming interpretations. By mastering these strategies explicitly, students learn that reading is an active process, not one in which they simply sound out words in their heads.

And it’s incredibly effective at improving their reading comprehension."

Typical strategies for getting the best work from students focus on extrinsic motivation and gamification—points, grades, badges, certificates, stars, trophies, glowing feedback, encouragement, pep talks, ‘pressure,’ and other ways to ‘motivate students.’ That these strategies are underwhelming in effect—and tend to not yield the life-long learners education seeks to create—shouldn’t be surprising.


Below, I’ve offered 12 strategies for getting the best work from your students. Some are obvious (provide student choice) and many you may already do. The idea here is to clarify the kinds of teaching practices and learning strategies that give your students the best chance to do their best–to consistently do their very best work, and grow the most as students over the course of a school year.

Even students who’ve had years of active involvement in learning activities don’t automatically use strategies that best foster learning. However, working smarter through the use of specific success strategies can have a profound influence on learning outcomes. In this article, we share practical strategies teachers can use with students to help them learn smarter and with greater independence.

Untangling education research can often feel overwhelming, which may be why many research-based practices take a long time to show up in real classrooms. It could also be one reason John Hattie’s work and book, Visible Learning, appeals to so many educators. Rather than focusing on one aspect of teaching, Hattie synthesizes education research done all over the world in a variety of settings into meta analyses, trying to understand what works in classrooms.

He has calculated the effect sizes of every teaching technique from outlining to project-based learning, which often tempts people to believe the strategies with low effect sizes don’t work and the ones with large effect sizes do. But Hattie — who is director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute at the University of Melbourne — is the first to disavow this interpretation of his work. Instead, he and colleague Gregory Donoghue have developed a model of learning that proposes why different strategies may be effective at different stages of the learning cycle.

We interviewed educators with decades of experience in teaching ELLs and tapped a network of experts and observers to find the strategies that work.

Everyone is unique. From the fingerprints on our fingers to the way we learn, our uniqueness is what makes us different from everyone else. For teachers, learning to complement the unique learning styles of their students can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, using differentiated learning strategies has greatly improved the ability to cater to students’ individual needs.

It’s extremely hard to teach a certain topic to an entire class when the students aren’t on the same level of knowledge. Teachers who deploy differentiated learning strategies attempt to reach everyone in the class at the same time. At the same time, they still understand that everyone is on a different level.

Chances are you’ve heard of this teaching method but maybe you’ve never put it to use. On the other hand, perhaps you’re currently using differentiated learning strategies but not enjoying as much success with them as you thought. Whatever your case may be, we’ve put together a helpful go-to guide for you to lean on.

20 Simple Assessment Strategies You Can Use Every Day

Innovative ideas – projects, processes, curricula, and more – that are transforming how we teach and learn.