Successful Strategic Teaching Techniques
Engaging Activities Put the Focus on Students' Success
Feb 13, 2009
Strategic teaching is a complex activity and one of the more important skills new teachers need to know in order for their students to perform successfully. Discipline problems usually occur when students find a task too challenging, unclear, or doesn't speak to them. And when students become off-task, teachers become frustrated and discouraged by their efforts.
Teachers should focus on students' success already from the first five minutes of the lesson. They can do this by using engaging teaching techniques which help keep a smooth pace from one activity to another that also serves to maintain students' attention all throughout the lesson.
Steps to Successful Strategic Teaching
There are several things you need to do in order for strategic teaching to be successful.
Make sure you have a list of realistic goals and expectations of what your students can do. Use pre-assessment techniques to know who can read, write and speak and to what degree. Use pre-assessment results to drive your instruction.
Plan tasks based on what you know for a fact, students can do with minimal instruction from you and with some guided help and assistance.
Spend some time observing how students perform with various types of learning tasks.
When you are more informed with the possibilities about what your students can do, you are also more likely to make decisions based on what you know not based on what you think you know.
Teaching Techniques for Engaging Students and Maintaining Their Attention
Once teachers know their students' true capabilities, teachers can create engaging lessons that build on this knowledge using various teaching techniques.
Use specific teaching techniques such as strategic teaching. Strategic teaching starts off by building on what students already know, like predicting the contents of a story and then having students confirm their predictions.
Write a lesson plan that is true to your own teaching style. If you believe in cooperative learning groups, then use this method of teaching. Students feel your excitement when you are passionate about something and excitement is infectious.
Personalize parts of a lesson. The best time to personalize an activity is during the first five minutes of a lesson. That way, you have already created momentum for the rest of the lesson to take place.
Set up the lesson with activities that reinforce self-directed behavior. Think of beginning procedures that help set-up a routine and an atmosphere of learning that are also discipline-free. A good example is using a timer. Teachers write "Do Now" on the board and time their students' work.
Create easy to engage activities for the rest of the lesson. Make sure the activity is challenging but not too challenging and age appropriate otherwise students won't feel it is worth their time.
When teachers know their students' true capabilities, they can then plan engaging lessons using strategic teaching techniques that focus on the success of their students. Teachers need to give them the feeling that their students are in charge of their own learning.
