Presentation Strategies
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Communication Strategies
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Story Board
The storyboard teaching strategy helps students keep track of main ideas and supporting details in a narrative by having them illustrate important scenes in a story. Storyboarding can be used when texts are read aloud, or it can be used to help students summarize and retain main ideas of a story they have read to themselves. Checking the thoroughness and accuracy of students’ storyboards is an effective way to evaluate reading comprehension before moving on to more analytic tasks. Political Cartoons
Political cartoons are vivid primary sources that offer intriguing and entertaining insights into the public mood, the underlying cultural assumptions of an age, and attitudes toward key events or trends of the times. Political cartoons employ complex visual strategies to make a point quickly in a confined space. Teachers must help students master the language of cartoons if they are to benefit from these fascinating sources of insight into our past. |
Jigsaw
Using the jigsaw teaching strategy is one way to help students understand and retain information, while they develop their collaboration skills. This strategy asks a group of students to become “experts” on a specific text or body of knowledge and then share that material with another group of students. These “teaching” groups contain one student from each of the “expert” groups. Students often feel more accountable for learning material when they know they are responsible for teaching the content to their peers. The jigsaw strategy is most effective when students know that they will be using the information they have learned from each other to create a final product, participate in a class discussion, or acquire material that will be on a test. Think, Write, Pair, Share
This discussion technique gives students the opportunity to thoughtfully respond to questions in written form and to engage in meaningful dialogues with other students around these issues. Asking students to write and discuss ideas with a partner before sharing with the larger group gives students more time to compose their ideas. This format helps students build confidence, encourages greater participation and often results in more thoughtful discussions. |
Interaction Strategies
Simulation and Interactives
involve critical-thinking, active engagement with content and application of knowledge. Collection StrategiesFinding Primary Sources
Primary sources are the evidence of history, original records or objects created by participants or observers at the time historical events occurred or even well after events, as in memoirs and oral histories. Primary sources may include but are not limited to: letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, maps, speeches, interviews, documents produced by government agencies, photographs, audio or video recordings, born-digital items (e.g. emails), research data, and objects or artifacts (such as works of art or ancient roads, buildings, tools, and weapons). These sources serve as the raw materials historians use to interpret and analyze the past. Being able to find and analyze these sources are critical in the study of history. |
Organization Strategies
Two-Column Note-Taking
Two-column note-taking encourages students to identify important information in a lecture, film or reading and to respond to this material. These notes prepare students to participate in a discussion or begin a writing activity. They can also be used to recognize students’ misconceptions and questions, and to evaluate students’ understanding of material. Graphic Organizer
Graphic organizers are introduced and defined as graphic or visual displays that depict the relationships between facts, terms, and/or ideas within a learning task. Various examples of graphic organizers are covered, including applications across curriculum areas. Evidence for effectiveness as a learning enhancement is reviewed, addressing important questions about graphic organizers that are relevant to classroom practice, including whether graphic organizers are beneficial to students with disabilities and what instructional context makes them most effective. |