Course

Research has shown that helping students make connections to an upcoming topic prior to studying it improves student learning. Below are some teacher behaviours to help students frame the larger picture. 

A.Framing the Big Picture:

B. Getting Ready For Instruction

This section is the part of teaching after “activating” in which we are introducing new ideas and skills. 

A. Presenting Information Through Well-chosen Explanatory Devices.

There is a large repertoire of strategies to help present information and explain concepts. Because learners take in information auditorily, visually, and kinesthetically, we need to choose a wide range of these devices to reach the most learners.

1. Analogies – This help to understand because they connect new learning to something already known. For example, “The growth of a glacier is like a pancake batter being poured in a frying pan. As more is added to the middle, the edges spread farther out.” 
   
   
2. Models – An artefact students can see and sometimes touch, a model represents an idea or a concept. For example, cut out graph paper can represent the concept of multiplication. 
   
   
3. Mental imagery – A rarely used but powerful tool to help students make pictures in their heads. A teacher can conduct a guided imagery trip of a seed pod travelling from the mother plant to germination or to reconstruct conditions inside the Mayflower. 
   
   
4. Modelling thinking aloud – The teacher role-plays what a student would think in her head including being puzzled, making mistakes, self-correcting, and checking herself. It’s like a dialogue with oneself. In this example, the teacher thinks aloud for the class what she does when coming to a word she does not know, “Hmmm, what does this mean? ... better reread the sentence... still don’t get it. Maybe I’ll read ahead to see if it gets clearer... Nope, let’s see – do I recognize any of its parts?...” 
   
   
5. Graphic organizer – These are diagrams that represent relationships between ideas. There are many types – mind maps, story maps, webs, concept maps, clusters, etc. For example, if a text compares life in America today to life in 1776 a graphic organizer might have circles and links to show which items are the same in the two time periods, and which are distinct.

These strategies have to do with making learning accessible and avoiding obstacles to students’ understanding. 

 A. Explicitness:Making explicit and not leaving to chance the following:

The focus of questions – When teachers don’t provide explicit explanations, their questions serve as “guess what’s on the teacher’s mind” – a game that serves no purpose and is confusing to students. For example, a Latin teacher refers to a question in the text and asks, “What type of question is that?” Students don’t respond. What the teacher really means is, “Which of the six types of questions from yesterday’s handout – quid, cur, quis, quem, ubi, or quo – is this?” This confusion would have been avoided had the teacher been more explicit and provided that extra cue which shows the students how the question relates to their learning.

Necessary steps in directions – Sometimes we direct students to begin a task, but we leave out necessary steps. For example, “Unmute yourself and speak.” The teacher omitted the instruction to how to do so, because of which there might be a delay in the class.

B.Making Cognitive Connections

Making connections to material learned previously showing resemblance to student experience or something already learned – Students will better understand when new material is linked to what they’ve already been taught. For example, TEACHER: We learned that multiplication was related to addition – how? STUDENT: Multiplication is like adding over and over again. TEACHER: OK, Now this division we’ve been working on today is a lot like multiplication except it isn’t a short cut for adding, again and again, it’s ...? STUDENT: Subtracting it.

Asking students to compare and contrast – This is another way to have students base their new learning on what they already learned. For example, “Compare and contrast the Hemingway short story we just read to the O. Henry story we read last week.” This instructional practice is on Marzano’s list of those that have a high probability of enhancing student achievement. 

Making transitions between ideas or activities – These help students follow the road map as the teacher turns left, then right. One way is to relate the content just done to what is coming up immediately, “That’s how the commercial banking system creates new money. Now another way money gets created is through consumer credit.” Transitions also help when there will be a change in pace or a change in difficulty, “Now we’re moving on to three-step problems instead of two-step, but still with the same operations.

A.Summarizing - Explicitly Pulling Everything Together 

This can be done at the end or in the middle of a lesson. Summarizing can accomplish two important principles that support the retention of learning material: sequence and say-do. Sequence, states that what happens at the beginning or end of an event is what people tend to retain the longest. So, many teachers protect the last few minutes of class for summarizing to increase the chance the lessons learned will stick. The second principle, say-do, suggests that learners take in 70-90% of the material when they are actively involved with it. In summarizing, students must get active with the material in order to organize it and put it into their own words. There are many ways teachers can ask students to summarize. They can use entries in a learning log and answer questions like, “What did I learn today? What puzzled me? What did I enjoy? Dislike? What did I accomplish?” Teachers can also ask students to do this orally in pairs. In fact, some teachers do this after every 10 minutes of teacher-led instruction (the “10-2 rule”).