Teaching styles often vary from classroom to classroom. Further, students learn in multi-faceted ways. But, modifying your teaching style to accommodate doesn’t have to be intimidating. To ease your stress this year, try these teaching strategies for every classroom!
There are many teaching strategies perfect for the secondary classroom. These five simple strategies will engage your students. Test them out in your next lesson! I promise your students will notice!
Simple and Effective Teaching Strategies
Chunked Reading
Chunked reading is a method used to help students engage successfully with the content. By breaking larger concepts into smaller ideas, students can focus on subtopics. This prevents them from getting overwhelmed by large amounts of text.
Highlighting
Highlighting is a great tool to help students not only find the main ideas in texts, but also find keywords. This allows them to form a better understanding of the topic at hand. Also, highlighters allow students to categorize topics by color coding.
Categorization
Categorization is breaking down information into smaller theme-based pods. The best way to do this is to use acronyms to tie to the Social Studies themes. For history classrooms, SPRITE is one of the best categorization tools. GRAPES is ideal for lower grades and classes with a focus on geography.
Image Analysis
To help reach visual learners and reinforce content for all learners, image analysis is the best strategy. Teaching students to see history and break down images for better understanding leads them to critical thinking. Then, by developing historical thinking patterns, this simple and accessible strategy introduces higher order thinking skills to content-based lessons. Your visual learners will really benefit.
Introduce your students to Primary Source Analysis to develop this skill.
Annotation
Annotation goes hand-in-hand with image analysis. Teaching annotation is one of the simplest strategies teachers can use. This helps students process information. So, discourage “textbook-thinking” and encourage snippet writing to develop inquiry and historical thinking skills. Then, as a bonus, use family photos as a fun way to teach annotation! Students love using their own families.
Utilizing These Teaching Strategies in Your Classroom
By pairing these strategies with your existing lessons, or trying one or two together, you can further engage your students. Because you are appealing to many different learning styles, these teaching strategies are impactful in the classroom. Encourage your students to dive head-first into learning and reward them for a hands-on approach! Try these simple teaching strategies in your next lesson!
Also, consider decorating with Social Studies Classroom Posters or other posters this year! Create the perfect learning environment. Set your students up for success! Let these teaching styles direct your lessons. Your students will thank you!
Happy Teaching!
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