Do you wish to connect with your students? Then cultivate the art of storytelling. A good story can enliven a dull lesson, and it can expand the horizons of an interesting one. Storytelling can be used as an advance organizer for introducing a new unit of thought, or it can work equally well as a capstone for what has already been learned. Great…

This book provides more than 50 classroom-ready tools that make it easy to implement the nine categories of effective teaching strategies from McREL's bestselling book, "Classroom Instruction That Works" (2012) across grade levels and content areas. By incorporating these tools into your daily practice, you can turn your classroom into a…

With the pervasiveness of digital technology, elementary students almost instinctively begin inquiry-based instruction with a bias. Visual information from digital devices competes with elementary science inquiry. To counteract this effect, teachers can use advance organizers. The advance organizer is a tool or a mental learning aid to help…

In this article, the authors examine the role revision memos played in composition classrooms. Both authors used the memos to help students reflect on their writing and continue revising. The memos also served as guides for the instructors as they responded to their students' writing. The memos were a reminder that the instructors needed to focus…

It's much easier to spread the insights and strategies from ASCD's (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) best-selling "Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners" to everyone in your school when you have this guide for conducting a workshop or professional development meeting on how to improve the academic…

Everyone who participates in your workshop on "Classroom Instruction That Works with English Language Learners" needs this participant's workbook to gain expertise in strategies that are effective with ELL (English Language Learners) students.

Students have continued to perform poorly in KCSE examinations in certain mathematics topics taught in secondary schools in Kenya. One such topic is commercial arithmetic. Successful teaching of mathematics depends partly on correct use of teaching methods in classroom settings. This study sought to examine how the use of advance organisers during…

The metabolic versatility of bacteria is a source of learning difficulty for students in classical microbiology courses. To facilitate the learning process, the authors developed an advance organizer. It consists of a set of six diagrams of metabolic pathways describing the basic living requirements of several types of bacteria: energy, carbon…

Performance of engineering students taught with behavioral objectives is compared to performance of similar students taught with advance organizers. Since results indicate little difference in achievement, subsequent work will be directed toward finding possible links between personality types (measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) and…

The article describes a four-step procedure for constructing two types of graphic organizers (hierarchical and compare/contrast) to help secondary academically handicapped students gain information from textbooks. Implementation methods include teacher-directed, student-directed with text references, and student-directed with clues. Testing…

Offers guidelines for a homework assignment in which parents and children collaborate to construct a "personal timeline" of the child's life. Suggestions are offered regarding the introduction of timelines, timeline topics and strategies, timelines as advance organizers, and other ways to use timelines in the curriculum. Research on…

Describes the use of a biology guidebook which contains a course outline, syllabus, reading list, handouts, and sample tests all bound together in booklet form for better organization and teacher effectiveness. (RT)

Offers explicit methods for the preparation, presentation, and utilization of handouts for lectures or seminars. Suggests that successful implementation of these methods can encourage students to take these handouts home, to read them, to refer to them again, and to recognize the contents when it appears later in the course of study. (JJK)

While most people know how conversations, narratives, and other types of discourse are created in their native language, it is difficult for students to know how they are created in a second language. To deal with texts in a new language, the learner needs extensive exposure to a variety of language in realistic situations. The immediate recall…

Specific teaching strategies to help hearing-impaired secondary students comprehend abstract concepts include (1) pinpointing facts and fallacies, (2) organizing information visually, (3) categorizing ideas, and (4) reinforcing new vocabulary and concepts. Figures provide examples of strategy applications. (DB)