Grouping Strategies

How we (the teacher) create the learning environment will have an impact on the student learning. Think about how you learn / work best. Is it alone? With a partner? In a small group? Whole class?

When considering how to group students consider each of the following areas:

Please share your thoughts and insights for grouping your students - what works best?

Multiple Intelligences

We all learn the same - differently!
Understanding how we learn best and how our students learn best provides a wonderful setting for learning to happen. Generally - we teach like we learn. By doing this, are we missing connecting with some of our students?

Howard Gardner identifies 8 (and growing) intelligences. Researchers agree that we all possess all 8 intelligences - just some are more developed than others. We must work to develop our weaknesses.

Using the Mutiple Intelligences (MI) theory is a great foundation to develop learning centers, menu of options or choices boards for almost any topic.

In class we looked at the Iditarod as a topic to help incorporate the MI theory for learning centers. Zuma's Paw Prints provides ongoing information about the race at various reading levels. (Sanka writes for the higher readers, Gypsy reaches the middle readers, and Libby helps out the struggling reader)

Please share the ideas you had for utilizing the MI theory in your classroom.

Questioning

What makes a question a good question? ....... A good question makes us THINK!
Using primary sources provides a great resource to generate questions. (see links below)

Remember - it's a two way street when it come to questions - What questions are we (the teacher) asking the students? Consider these questions from Richard DuFour:

• What do we want the students to learn?
• How will we know when they learn it?
• What do we do when students struggle to learn?

The other side is the student - What questions are they asking? Are we developing their critical thinking skills? Are we helping them to learn to ask better questions??

Some questioning techniques to consider:

• 5W and an H
• Three Story Intellect
• Bloom's Taxonomy
• Kaplan's Depth and Complexity

Please share the questions you generated. Be sure to include a brief description of the primary source you used.

Census.gov

100 Milestone Documents

Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons

George Eastman House Collections

Learning Centers

Learning Centers provide students with options for both learning and showing what they learned. As a teacher you may vary the content, process or product in a center to help address the learning needs of the students in your classroom.

Please share with us your experiences with learning centers.