What works in education? How can we identify these? And how can they be applied to help individual students?
- Summarizing and Notetaking:
These are skills that can contribute to making classroom learning efficient. Students should learn to delete unnecessary information during lessons, keep relevant information and write and analyze information. They can do this through summarizing teacher models, identifying key concepts in lessons, being able to utilize bullets, outlines, and clusters, summarizing journals, breaking down assignments, creating simple reports among others.
- Reinforcing effort and providing recognition:
Teachers should reward students based on standards of performance. They can use symbolic recognition rather than just tangible rewards. Praising students’ effort, encouraging students to share ideas and express their thoughts, honoring individual student learning styles and dialoguing individually with students boost student recognition.
- Homework and practice:
Teachers should vary the amount of homework based on student grade level (less at the elementary level and more at the secondary school). Parent involvement in homework must be kept to a minimum, but parents must be informed of the goals and objectives of the lessons taught at school by teachers.
- Cooperative learning:
With this, teachers must limit the use of ability groups. They must keep student groups small, apply strategy consistently and systematically in order to achieve the desired results. They can also integrate content and language through group engagement, reader’s theater, shared reading and writing, plays, science projects, debates, jigsaw, group reports and many others.
The application of the above among others provide benefits in improving classroom learning.
Based on: http://www.oswego.org/instruction.cfm?subpage=7770
