Classroom Strategies

Lesson Plans which incorporate strategies from Classroom Instruction That Works

Cooperative Learning

Research shows that organizing students into cooperative groups yields a positive effect on overall learning. During the last few weeks of March my 5th grade students learned about volume and surface area in math and science. One lesson from the Utah Core Academy which I use to teach surface area is called “Candies R Us”. The students work in pairs to design boxes with lids which will hold chocolate candies. They are asked to review all of the possible rectangular boxes with a volume of twelve and then present the model of the box they have chosen along with the reasons for choosing that box. They must brainstorm with their partner which requires continued communication about the concepts of volume and surface area. They must work together to build the boxes, assessing the results together, and then using higher reasoning to understand that although the volume of the boxes stays the same, the surface area will change. They must also work together to determine which box would be the most cost effective to make and to ship, understanding that the box with the least amount of surface area would be the best choice. This requires the partners to reason together, exchanging information, and learning from their attempts and successes. As stated in Marzano’s book, students must learn and master specific skills for working in groups. Throughout the year, my students have learned the communication and compromise skills in order to work in pairs and groups of four. This has led to the highly successful use of cooperative learning in my classroom.

Notetaking

Note taking requires students to identify what is most important about the knowledge they are learning and then state that knowledge in their own words. I teach students different ways to take notes, sometimes incorporating a T chart, a Venn diagram, or an outline form depending on the information that is in the lesson. One note taking strategy I learned from a Saturday Social Studies Seminar is “Stop and Write”. I have used this when teaching history as we view a video or read selections of text together. First the students write a sentence about something they already know about the topic. They then write three things they learn while watching the video or reading the text: I learned that . . ., I also learned that . . ., and However, the most interesting (or you could use important) thing I learned was . . .. Finally, the students write a question that they would still like answered. After taking notes in this way, I always have the students share one of their statements with the rest of the class.
Before I used this format, I would always have the students write three sentences about new information they learned from a video. But I prefer this note taking strategy because it has a place for them to write something they already know, activating prior knowledge before gaining new information. I also like the fact that it has the line “ the most important or interesting thing I learned” because it implies that the student will continue searching for new information until the end of the presentation instead of learning three new things in the first few minutes and then losing focus. I also like the final statement which gives students the opportunity to continue thinking about the topic and the chance to wonder and explore more. Students definitely pay more attention and retain more information from videos and texts when they take notes and we review them as a class. As a fifth grade teacher I understand the importance of helping students become good note takers so that when they enter middle school and are expected to record information from lectures, they will have this strategy in place.