Below find an example of a presentation my team and I gave on developing learning strategies for struggling students. Some information is redacted for privacy purposes but the copy was written entirely by me.
Writing Example 1: Educational Focus
ELA Curriculum Shifting and Re-thinking Planning
With roughly 40% of all 9th and 10th Grade students in the county struggling to achieve proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA), we have identified some key statistics that we believe can help facilitate learning gains across the high school level without significantly impacting your ability to deliver compelling and exciting instruction in your classroom.
Rotating Instruction
A key measurement for student learning is engagement. Research shows that student engagement plays a major role in both retention and receptiveness to new concepts (NIH, 2023). A core strategy we want to implement going into the 2024-2025 school year is the idea of “rotating instruction,” which looks to accomplish two things:
- Diversify classroom instruction
- Ensure student learning needs are being met
The idea behind rotating instruction is to break away from traditional lecture-style classroom environments to focus more on a variety of learning strategies. Best practices dictate that we should be implementing differentiated instruction into the classroom, but it can be easy for us to rely too heavily on the lecture-work model as a supplement. Consider the average block schedule of 90-minute classroom rotations. What does the average day look like?
- 10-minute bellringer activity
- 30-40 minute lecture period
- 30-40 minute work period
- Teacher-facilitated D.I. is implemented here to facilitate learning gains
- Students are tiered to ensure their diverse needs are met
- 10 minute exit ticket activity
While these core concepts are fundamental to ensuring our students receive rigorous instruction, they can also create a very stagnant learning experience for our struggling students. Rotating instruction seeks to shift things up by incorporating Kagan strategies, exemplar modeling, and other minor additions to foster classbuilding, teambuilding, and higher order thinking that should hopefully result in measurable student-learning gains.
Kagan Strategies
The question that logically follows is, “What is a Kagan strategy?” Developed since the 1980’s, Dr. Spencer Kagan’s strategies rely on the scientific principle that students learn based on the situations they are placed in. Classroom environments that target their specific needs and provide different outlets for learning and participation are significantly more likely to see students more engaged and more willing to learn than those that rely solely, or near-exclusively, on lecture-style content delivery with work periods that follow.
These strategies typically involve clustered group activities that facilitate student participation as one of their key components. As an example, students might be asked to complete a “RoundTable” activity. During this activity, let’s assume they are tasked with identifying the motivations of a character in a story. In their groups, they would have to communicate these ideas nonverbally, affording students the opportunity to present ideas in creative and unique ways, rather than more traditional oral response methods.
The implementation of these strategies will be discussed later in the presentation, but be mindful that these strategies do not seek to replace traditional lectures. Rather, they function as a supplement and should be used in conjunction with other best practices in order to maximize student learning gains. More than anything, the goal is to offer variety, rather than to replace core teaching strategies.
Modeling Writing and Teacher Input
The FAST (Florida Assessment of Student Thinking) will be evaluating student writing as a major element of their final, overall assessment grade in the 2024-2025 school year. This is a shift from previous years, and the now-defunct FSA Exam (Florida Standards Assessment) which gave only nominal points towards the essay writing portion of the exam.
Because of this, we’re looking to create higher student engagement through Teacher Exemplar strategies. Our tests in classrooms across the county have seen significant and measurable learning gains when teachers provide the model and exemplars expected of students for their essays. Traditionally, your textbook might provide a sample essay that you would review with students in order to illustrate the fundamentals of good writing. However, our research shows that these strategies, while somewhat effective, fail to help students conceptualize and grasp the smaller nuances of essay writing.
This is especially true of students who are primarily kinesthetic learners. With students who self-identified as kinesthetic learners, 64% of them claimed that essays were difficult for them to complete because they felt they were not given enough examples. One of the ways we seek to address this is by having our instructors demonstrate their mastery of the subject by writing essays with the students. In general, a lesson might be broken up as follows:
- Essay Review Day: Review the style of essay students will be writing (Informative, Personal, Argumentative, etc.) and provide them with real-world applications.
- Learning objective should be to define the essay.
- Introduction Day: Review the components of an introductory paragraph and, as the instructor, model the process step-by-step for students.
- Use effective chunking and gradual release on each of the three essay components.
- Model your expectations for students.
- Allow for oral responses and use student contributions to model your own paper.
This will be covered in more detail later in the presentation, but the idea here is to make essays less intimidating by allowing opportunities for student contribution through consequence-free participation, as well as growth opportunities by having them see, in real-time, how an essay should look and sound (an exemplar) when written by their instructor.
ALEXANDER M. ABREU 