Six Approaches to Teaching

#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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

#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

• 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

• 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

#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

• 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