Approaches to Teaching & Learning
Six Approaches to Teaching
Six Approaches to Teaching
#1 Inquiry
#1 Inquiry
- Teaching is based on inquiry
- Developing student’s natural curiosity
- Developing their abilities to autonomous lifelong learners
- Active engagement in their own learning
- Constructing their own understanding of interpretation and issues
- Through comprehension, analysis, interpretation, and contextualization
- Activating curiosity
- Application
- Students developing a line of inquiry
- Student choice in developing and choosing tasks
- Encouraging students creative expression (written, oral, and visual)
- Developing research skills on group and individual areas of interest
- Using problem-solving approaches to find connections between texts and critical perspectives
#2 Concepts
#2 Concepts
- Teaching is based on concepts
- Exploring concepts helps student to engage in complex issues for higher level thinking
- Moving from concrete to abstract thinking to understand new contexts
- Focus on seven concepts: identity, culture, creativity, communication, representation, transformation, and perspective
- Application
- Close readings of texts to explore conceptual ideas
- Understanding the rhetorical situation of format, purpose, audience, and context
- Transforming and modernizing texts to understand the concept of intertextuality between genres and texts
- Understanding text features and how they play into representation of ideas
#3 Global Contexts
#3 Global Contexts
- Teaching is based on global context
- Contextualized teaching allows students to see between ideas and local and global ideas in order to develop international-mindedness
- Analyzing audience, purpose, and literary form allow students to see how texts are produced and consumed and how they are interpreted
Application
- Bringing the outside world into schools
- Drawing on student’s backgrounds, experiences in contrast with other cultures
- Including creative and cross-curricular connections
- Providing students with cultural-frameworks in order to connect to texts
#4 Collaboration
#4 Collaboration
- Learning is based on collaboration
- Shared learning allows for a complex interaction of minds within different specific contexts
- Language by its very nature involves interaction to create meaning in how they are produced and received
Application
- Activities designed to encourage interaction and negotiation of meaning with texts
- Literary circles, Socratic seminars, discussion techniques can allow for students to foster opinions together
- Allowing students freedom to choose lines of inquiry and assessments
#5 Differentiation
#5 Differentiation
- Teaching is based on differentiation
- Accommodating the different ways students learn in order to build on self-esteem, value prior knowledge, and scaffold and extend learning
- Student choice in texts, activities, and assessments allow for greater differentiation and engagement
Application
- Student selection of texts
- Planning a wide range of activities geared to learning preferences
- Creating in-class groupings for collaboration
- Use of multimodal texts (visual, auditory, written)
- Timely and relevant feedback
#6 Teaching Informed by Assessment
#6 Teaching Informed by Assessment
- Teaching is based on formative and summative assessments
- Using data to inform instruction
- Using assessment and feedback to foster student learning and growth
Application
- Self-assessment by the student
- Scaffolding in stages (brainstorming, free-writing, journal response, critical reflection)
- Online, collaborative forum discussions where students can negotiate meaning with each other
- Using mini-lessons based on data to improve student learning
Five Approaches to Learning
Five Approaches to Learning
#1 Thinking Skills
#1 Thinking Skills
- Teacher functions as facilitator to shape learning
- Students develop skills of metacognition, reflection, critical and creative thinking, transfer
- Open-ended questions engage deliberate thinking and authentic learning
- Students engage in reading, listening, viewing texts to produce insightful responses to texts
Application
- Encouraging connections between texts to transfer their learning
- Allowing students to formulate hypotheses about a text’s meaning and discover how the meaning is constructed
- Fostering thinking through juxtaposing different literary forms, time periods, text types, and cultures
#2 Communication
#2 Communication
- Teacher functions as facilitator for communication
- Form and maintain an atmosphere of congeniality to develop self confidence
- Every aspect of language and literature is related to the development of communication
- Reading, viewing, writing, speaking, listening, performing
Application
- Group and individual presentations that engage active listening of the audiences
- Well developed and supported responses to texts
- Using digital tools to enrich learning and communication
#3 Social Skills
#3 Social Skills
- Teacher functions as facilitator to develop social skills
- Introversion and extroversion impact communication and respecting differences is important
- Different cultures share different ways of communication to form relationships, so register is important in the awareness of the impact of language
- Helping students engage in contrasting opinions that may oppose their own and respecting differences
- Students working together to negotiate meaning of a text through varying perspectives by substanting their ideas with evidence and reasons
- Application
- Classroom norms
- Safe classroom environment
- Balanced use of group and private response
- Active listening of different perspectives
- Teacher modeling varied responses
- Classroom norms
#4 Self-Management Skills
#4 Self-Management Skills
- Teacher functions as facilitator to shape self management skills
- Perseverance and resilience in learning through organization, goal setting, time management, affective skills (managing state of mind) in order to learn independently
Application
- Deadline management
- Plan of study into scaffolded steps
- Study techniques such as note-taking, text marking, digital organizational tools
- Self-reflection on progress of standards and aims of the course
- Increasing autonomy and responsibility of learning
- Awareness of strengths and areas for growth
#5 Research Skills
#5 Research Skills
- Teacher functions as facilitator to learn research
- Academically-honest way to use others’ information to build on synthesis and creation
- Formulating focused and intriguing research questions, appraising sources and recording, evaluating, and synthesizing information
Application
- Teacher models effective research skills beyond the basic internet search
- School databases, advanced Google searches
- Questioning the interpretation of a text, validity and credibility of a source
- Guidance on how to use databases and online sources
- Research on historical contexts, linguistic, and literary history