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Instructional Strategies 

A new paradigm is needed to construct a consistent vision of quality teaching—personalized, deeply engaging, focused on learning high-level content and complex skills, and enabled and enhanced by technology. The vision must be grounded in research on how students learn and effective instructional practice linked to important learning outcomes. Digital learning and technology can provide opportunities for teachers to apply evidence-based practices that support effective teaching and learning. The work of many researchers, including Charles Fisher,[1] David Berliner,[2] Robert Marzano,[3] and John Hattie,[4] demonstrates that well-designed and -implemented instructional practices produce gains in learning by increasing the amount of “relevant instructional time.” Students need extended opportunities to engage in meaningful and appropriate learning experiences that incorporate proven practices, as described below.

1. Clarifying learning goals. Active teaching involves a backward design from the desired results. Helping the learner define challenging learning goals and the criteria for success answers the question, “Where are we going?” Collaborative processes to set performance criteria, use of advance organizers, and showing completed examples can help clarify the intended learning outcomes. 
2. Providing meaningful and appropriate feedback. Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on student learning. The most effective feedback provides detailed information about task performance, the processes needed to understand or complete the task, and how the learner can evaluate and direct his or her learning. 
3. Assessing for learning to inform instruction. Well-designed formative assessment can have a strong impact on student learning by making thinking visible. This learner-centric process is used by teachers and students; it provides feedback to adjust ongoing instruction to improve students’ attainment of intended instructional outcomes.
4. Tracking progress and diagnosing learning needs. The curriculum must be specified as a progression of increasingly complex core concepts that point to grade-level learning goals. Assessing student progress should focus on what is learned rather than on what is taught, and it should provide specific diagnostic information about where the learner is and what is needed next.
5. Modeling strategies (e.g., reading, writing). The aim is to get students to learn the skills of teaching themselves and to self regulate their learning. Learning strategies require active engagement to process and organize knowledge, such as summarizing, monitoring comprehension, generating questions, making predictions, and planning and revising compositions. Students benefit from explicit instruction and modeling to become competent in using strategies to deepen their understanding and improve the quality of their work.
6. Providing guided and independent practice. For deliberative practice to be effective, it must be embedded into a higher-order set of learnings. Practice alone, without relating it to more challenging goals, may be repetitive and counter to engaging students in learning. Practice should be at an appropriate, challenging level of difficulty and enable successive refinement to enhance performance toward greater mastery and fluency, while increasing the learner’s confidence and self efficacy.
7. Using cooperative learning. Students work in small groups to solve a problem or complete a task. Cooperative learning serves as a social organization as well as an instructional tool that allows students to work together to deepen their understanding of concepts and procedures and receive feedback on finding a solution to a learning problem.
8. Scaffolding students’ task engagement and performance. Learning is a personal and primarily social activity based on what is already understood and believed. Designing effective learning experiences should take into account the learner’s progression of knowledge and understanding toward greater mastery and competence. Students require explicit instruction, modeling, and cues to learn how to organize knowledge, reason and solve problems, set learning goals, and monitor their own learning.
9. Creating experiences for the student to control his or her learning. Intellectual engagement involves a desire to explore and understand the world along with the confidence to take on new learning and persevere to attain challenging learning goals. High-level learning fosters the dispositions students need to plan how to approach a learning task, control the sequencing and pacing of instruction, evaluate progress, monitor understanding, and determine where, when, and how to use tactics, aids, and learning strategies.
10. Eliciting student work to demonstrate an understanding of specific language and concepts. Well-designed learning experiences bring to the fore what students know and can do. They are based upon up-to-date knowledge of students’ skill targets and progressions, and they couple instruction with clearly articulated performance expectations. Students need opportunities to express the meaning of words and concepts, integrate information from diverse sources, explain central concepts and ideas, and describe possible hypotheses and solutions.

The effective use of technology and digital learning provides opportunities for teachers and students to increase academic engaged time and the use of high-leverage instructional practices essential to personalizing the learning experiences for all students. The examples and links provided in this section of the toolkit provide a sampling of how lesson plans, tools, and resources work to incorporate some of these practices into teaching and learning.

For more information on research related to designing expanded and innovative learning opportunities, see the National Center on Universal Design for Learning. This site provides guidelines for a universal design for learning grounded in cognitive and learning sciences along with their application to digital technologies.

Endnotes