Notes on Strategies

1. Notes on Strategies By: Candice M. de Ausen 01.05.10 FHM Honduras

2. Content Objectives: • Select learning strategies appropriate to a lesson’s objectives • Incorporate explicit instruction and student practice of metacognitive and cognitive strategies in lesson plans • Recognize the value of scaffolding instruction and identify techniques to scaffold for verbal, procedural, and instructional understanding

3. Language Objectives: • Identify language learning strategies to use with students • Discuss the importance of asking higher-order questions to students of all proficiency levels • Write a set of questions with increasing levels of difficulty on one topic

4. Background • Information is retained and connected in the brain through “mental pathways” that are linked to an individual’s existing schema.

5. Background • If schemata are well-developed and personally meaningful, new information is easier to retain and recall, and proficient learners initiate and activate their associations between new and old learning.

6. Learning Strategies • Mental processes that enhance comprehension, learning, and retention of information • Special thoughts or behaviors that individuals use to help learners comprehend, learn, or retain new information

7. Strategies • Teaching students many self-regulating strategies improves student learning and reading • Self-regulated learning improves autonomy and control by the individual who monitors, directs, and regulates actions toward goals of information acquisition, expanding expertise, and self-improvement

8. 3 Types of Learning Strategies • Metacognitive Strategies • Cognitive Strategies • Social/ Affective Strategies

9. Metacognitive Strategies • Metacognition • process of purposefully monitoring our thinking

10. Metacognitive Strategies • Characteristics: • Matching thinking and problem-solving strategies to particular learning situations • Clarifying purposes for learning • Monitoring one’s own comprehension through self-questioning • Taking corrective action if understanding fails

11. Metacognitive Strategies • Use of these implies awareness, reflection, and interaction • Strategies used in an integrated, interrelated, and recursive manner • When taught explicitly, improves reading comprehension

12. Metacognitive Strategies • Characteristics: • Matching thinking and problem-solving strategies to particular learning situations • Clarifying purposes for learning • Monitoring one’s own comprehension through self-questioning • Taking corrective action if understanding fails

13. Cognitive Strategies • Help students organize the information they are expected to learn through the process of self-regulated learning • Directly related to individual learning tasks and are used by learners when they mentally and/or physically manipulate material, or when they apply a specific technique to a learning task

14. Examples of Cognitive Strategies • previewing a story before reading • establishing a purpose of reading • consciously making connections between personal experiences and what is happening in the story • taking notes during a lecture • completing a graphic organizer • creating a semantic map

15. Social/Affective Strategies • Identified as the social and affective influences on learning • Learning can be enhanced when people interact with each other. • Examples: • group discussion • cooperative learning group to solve a problem

16. Continuum of Strategies (Muth and Alvermann, 1999)

17. Strategies • Ultimate goal: students to develop independence in self-monitoring and self-regulation through practice with peer-assisted and student-centered strategies • Many ELs have difficulty taking an active role in using strategies because they are focusing their energy on developing their language skills. • Therefore, it is important for SI teachers to scaffold to provide opportunities for them to use the strategies.

18. Suggested Behaviors for Teachers: • Focusing attention selectively; that is, focusing on the big picture and most important information • Situating new learning in context; that is, building on what students already know and what is familiar • Applying self-monitoring and self-corrective strategies to build and expand a knowledge base; that is, knowing how to “fix-it” when comprehension is impeded • Evaluating one’s own success in a completed learning task; that is, self-assessing one’s competence and knowledge

19. Suggested Behaviors for Teachers: • Recognizing the need for and seeking assistance appropriately from others • Imitating the behaviors of native English speakers to complete tasks successfully • Knowing when to use native language resources (human and material) to promote understanding

20. REMEMBER: • Strategies should be taught through explicit instruction, careful modeling, and scaffolding.

21. DYAD/TRIAD ACTIVITY: • Facilitator will call on some participants to choose their partners. • Choose a strategy stated in the hand-out. • Show the audience how this is going to be done. Use any medium you want to use. Be creative. • Preparation Time: 5 minutes • Presentation Time: 3 minutes

22. Approaches: • Mnemonics • memory system involving visualization and/or acronyms • Examples: • ROYGBIV – for the colors of the rainbow • Every good boy does fine. – for the notes on the staff

23. Approaches: • SQP2RS • Surveying – scanning the text to be read for 1 to 2 minutes • Questioning – having the students generate questions likely to be answered by reading the text, with teacher guidance • Predicting – stating 1 to 3 things students think they will learn based on the questions that were generated • Reading – searching for answers to questions and confirming/disconfirming predictions • Responding – answering questions and formulating new ones for the next selection of text to be read • Summarizing – orally or in writing summarizing the text’s key concepts

24. Approaches: • PENS • Preview Ideas • Explore Words • Note words in a complete sentence • See if sentence is okay • GIST • Get the gist of the story

25. Approaches: • Rehearsal • Graphic Organizers • Comprehension Strategies • prediction • self-questioning • monitoring • determining importance • summarizing

26. Scaffolding Techniques: • Verbal • Paraphrasing • Using “Think-Alouds” • Reinforcing Contextual Definition • Procedural • Instructional • graphic organizers

27. Questioning: • Move from literal to critical • Students write their own questions before they use the internet • Consciously plan and incorporate questions to promote linguistic thinking

28. Reference: • Echevarria, Jana, Vogt, MaryEllen, Short, Deborah J. Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The Siop Model, 2nd ed.