As part of my studies, I’m looking in depth at Marzano’s Instructional Strategies That Work. To learn more, I recommend the following books:

• Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement (2001)
• A Handbook for Classroom Instruction That Works (2004)
• Building Academic Vocabulary (2005)
• Building Background Knowledge (2004)
• Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works (2007)

As you know, I’ve been sharing/publishing the Planning Kid2Kid Videoconference Projects booklet for the last 3 years. For this summer’s revision, I want to add templates for Marzano’s instructional strategies. As I’ve learned in a workshop on Marzano’s strategies, we as teachers may feel that we’re using that strategy already. However if we can improve and refine our practice of that strategy, we can raise our students’ achievement. So it seems worth our time to consider how we can create videoconference project templates that can refine our use of these instructional strategies.

Note to content providers: To those content providers reading this blog, I encourage you to evaluate your current programs to see how these strategies could also improve your practice!

The 11 Strategies

The Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works book reorganizes Marzano’s original nine strategies into eleven. Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback are split in two, and Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition are split in two. In addition, the strategies are reorganized around four guiding questions as follows.

What will students learn?

• 1. Setting Objectives

Which strategies will provide evidence of student learning?

• 2. Providing Feedback
• 3. Providing Recognition

Which strategies will help students acquire and integrate learning?

• 4. Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
• 5. Nonlinguistic Representation
• 6. Summarizing and Note Taking
• 7. Cooperative Learning
• 8. Reinforcing Effort

Which strategies will help students practice, review, and apply learning?

• 9. Identifying Similarities and Differences
• 10. Homework and Practice
• 11. Generating and Testing Hypotheses

Invitation
So as I think about these strategies in the next 11 posts, I encourage you to comment and share your thoughts, ideas you have, and questions that are raised. Let’s create some new ideas together!