Instruction
Section IV of the Michigan Curriculum Framework provides standards of authentic instruction. Authentic instruction is meaningful instruction. It helps learners move beyond memorization by creating learning experiences which demand sustained, disciplined, and critical thought on topics that have relevance to life beyond school. Research shows that when teachers and students engage in authentic instruction and learning, student achievement increases. Fred M. Newmann, Walter G. Secada, and Gary G. Wehlage at the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research have synthesized much of the research that relates to student achievement in A Guide to Authentic Instruction and Assessment: Vision, Standards, and Scoring. They tell us that students are most successful when they use and apply the knowledge they are learning and the abilities they are developing to solve real-world problems and conduct relevant investigations.
The four standards of authentic instruction described by Newmann, Secada, and Wehlage are integral to the content standards and benchmarks. Each helps form a foundation from which increased learning and understanding stems. They provide a structure for instructional design in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. These standards are:
- Higher-Order Thinking: Instruction involves students in manipulating information and ideas by synthesizing, generalizing, explaining, or arriving at conclusions that produce new meaning and understandings for them.
- Deep Knowledge: Instruction addresses central ideas of a topic or discipline with enough thoroughness to explore connections and relationships and to produce relatively complex understanding.
- Substantive Conversation: Students engage in extended conversational exchanges with the teacher and/or peers about subject matter in a way that builds an improved and shared understanding of ideas or topics.
- Connections to the World Beyond the Classroom: Students make connections between substantive knowledge and either public problems or personal experiences.
Considering these standards help individual teachers and instructional teams ensure that they are providing students with authentic learning opportunities, incorporating the standards into instructional decisions helps create effective experiences for learning the knowledge and abilities described in the content standards and benchmarks. The standards of authentic instruction are embedded in the content standards and benchmarks. They help teachers enhance student learning by providing them with instructional opportunities that move them past a superficial understanding to an in-depth application of the knowledge and skills they are learning.
MARZANO'S NINE ESSENTIAL INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES
Researchers at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) have identified nine instructional strategies that are most likely to improve student achievement across all content areas and across all grade levels. These strategies are explained in the book Classroom Instruction That Works by Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock.
1. Identifying similarities and differences
2. Summarizing and note taking
3. Reinforcing effort and providing recognition
4. Homework and practice
5. Nonlinguistic representations
6. Cooperative learning
7. Setting objectives and providing feedback
8. Generating and testing hypotheses
9. Cues, questions, and advance organizers
For elaboration on each one of the strategies, go to this website.
For other resources related to the nine essential strategies, go to this website.
