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