Teachers should employ a variety of instructional strategies to address the diverse needs of learners and the goals of the curriculum. These strategies need to provide room for differentiation, to address the core concepts of the discipline, and above all, engage and motivate students. Strategies should range across the variety of learning styles, should build on student knowledge and backgrounds, but must stay focused on the core learning concepts the teacher has identified.
Providing multiple avenues for students to demonstrate an essential skill and using varied methods to teach the skill allows the teacher to address multiple learning styles, diverse learner backgrounds, and builds stronger synaptic connections to make the skill more retrievable.
image courtesy of: https://www.brainfacts.org/
Using assessment and their practical knowledge, teachers need to identify student learning preferences, background knowledge, and match instruction to student need to ensure understanding. Examples of multiple instructional strategies could include blending individual and collaborative learning in a task like identifying symbolism in Lord of the Flies. Here is the Symbolism Chart the students were completing after reading Chapter Three in the novel, and they were first instructed to read and complete the chart as they could on their own, then drawn into their groups to discuss, then we came together as a whole class to discuss. This lesson drew on multiple intelligences, used multiple modalities and taught students to work independently and collaboratively.
Another instructional technique that I use to meet the strategies standard is to offer students multiple ways to develop their understanding of the content. Some students will thrive with a purely verbal-linguistic approach to literature, others will construct meaning more effectively in another way. I introduced the culminating assessment for the Siddhartha novel unit earlier, and the map option offered another path for students to demonstrate their understanding. Here is one student’s map:
