An ASCD Study Guide for The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson

Most of the questions contained in this study guide are ones you can think about on your own, but you might consider pairing with a colleague or forming a study group with others who have read (or are reading) The Strategic Teacher.

Before You Read the Introduction

In one important sense we are all strategic teachers. Whether we teach in a classroom, lead a school, or mentor our colleagues, we all use strategies (techniques, methods, and tools) in the pursuit of our goals.

Think of five strategies you have used in the last year. (For now, don't worry about names or definitions.) Try to include one or two strategies that did not work out as well as you wished. For each strategy, identify

• Why you chose it,
• How well it worked on a 5-point scale, and
• Why you think it worked or didn't work.

As You Read the Introduction

Our Introduction seeks to answer three questions: (1) What is a teaching strategy? (2)Why do teachers (and leaders) need a repertoire of strategies? (3) How can we select the right strategy for every lesson?

As you read, keep your eye on how our answers to these questions resemble or differ from your own.

After Reading the Introduction

Our introduction lists six reasons for maintaining a repertoire of strategies, namely that strategies are tools for designing thoughtful lessons and units, differentiating teaching and learning, bringing lessons alive, building skills for tests, improving student achievement, and building different kinds of knowledge. Which three of these do you consider most important? Why? Select one of the strategies you identified earlier and create your own dashboard for it by filling out the panels on Figure A.

Figure A. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

Now, use the dashboard to think through a needs assessment. As you consider your current teaching situation—or those of your school and colleagues—respond to the questions in each panel on Figure B.

Figure B. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

At the Core of The Strategic Teacher

We wrote The Strategic Teacher to be something more than a book you simply read and put down. We sought to create a practical resource you can use and return to again and again as new needs arise. We also wanted the book to be well adapted to the study groups that so many schools use as an important part of their professional development. With study groups and the individual users in mind, we describe three different reading plans for this book—one traditional approach along with two variations.

The Direct Reading Plan: This approach offers a comprehensive guide for the individual reader; we have developed thoughtful and guiding questions for you to consider before, as, and after you read each of the five remaining sections of the book.

The Study Team Plan: This collaborative approach directs a small team of educators through their exploration of a particular style of strategies. By following this plan together, team members enhance their understanding of individual strategies and improve their abilities to implement the strategies effectively in their classrooms.

The Perfect Fit Plan: This approach presents readers with thoughtful questions organized around seven steps that can be used to guide their selection and implementation of the right strategies for their current and future classroom situations.

We suggest that you review these three options and pick the plan that works best for you.

The Direct Reading Plan for The Strategic Teacher

The book is divided into five parts arranged according to style.

• Mastery Strategies
• Understanding Strategies
• Self-Expressive Strategies
• Interpersonal Strategies
• Four-Style Strategies

Let's take them one at a time.

Before Reading the Mastery Strategies

1. Mastery strategies work to develop students' memories of important declarative and procedural knowledge. If we think about the four styles of thinking as: memory (Mastery), reason (Understanding), imagination (Self-Expressive), and the ability to relate personally and make connections (Interpersonal), how important is memory in your curriculum?
2. What percent of your teaching time and your students learning focuses on memory as opposed to the other three?
3. What strategies do you currently use to build students memories?
4. Think about one or two students whose memory work is not what you would like it to be. What obstacles might be impairing their progress?

As You Read the Mastery Strategies

Bear in mind that Mastery strategies enhance students' sense of control by defining clear tasks, providing easy-to-grasp structures, and ensuring timely feedback. As you read through each of the following four strategies, keep these aspects in mind. Complete Figure C.

Figure C. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

After Reading the Mastery Strategies

1. Many teachers avoid lecture as much as possible. Why might the New American Lecture work better for them and their students than the traditional lectures they are used to?
2. Compare Direct Instruction with The New American Lecture. Why would one be a better choice for procedural knowledge while the other works best when the content is declarative?
3. Imagine a colleague tells you that he frowns upon the Graduated Difficulty strategy. "Think about it," he says, "If you offer students a choice between work at different levels of difficulty, they'll always take the easy one." How would you respond to your colleague?
4. Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT) demands a significant amount of teacher preparation. In the real world, where time counts and there is not much of it, why might TGT be uniquely worth the time invested in it? Why does TGT have one of the best records of any strategy when it comes to increasing students' memories and performances on tests?
5. Jot down the names of the four Mastery strategies and rank them in terms of their adaptability to your teaching situation. Select one and develop a plan to apply it (or one of its variations) in your class next week. Pair up with a colleague who is planning to use one of the other strategies and compare notes on how your plans worked out. Why do you think your lessons worked out the way they did?
6. Before you read about the four Mastery strategies, you thought about some of your students who struggle when working with their memory. Which of these four strategies do you think might make the biggest difference with one or more of these students? Why do you think so?

Before Reading the Understanding Strategies

Every strategy motivates and provides comfort to some students while it simultaneously challenges other students and causes them to stretch. Why is it that strategies based on reason are intimidating to some students and attractive to others? Could we ask the same question about teachers or leaders?

As You Read the Understanding Strategies

Understanding strategies gain their power by inviting students to think, focusing attention on observation and evidence, and providing procedures for resolving differences and reaching conclusions.

As you read about the four Understanding strategies, keep these three criteria in mind. Use Figure D to collect your thoughts as you examine these four strategies.

Figure D. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

After Reading the Understanding Strategies

1. Now that you have read about the four Understanding strategies, take a minute and consider those students who are likely to feel more challenged by strategies based on reason than those based on memory. Which of the Understanding strategies would they find least challenging and which would they find most challenging? Why on both counts?
2. We sometimes say that Compare and Contrast represents a thorough approach to comparison as opposed to a simple listing of similarities and differences. Why might students need a more thorough approach? When would a simple listing be more appropriate?
3. You could say that the simple principle "statements provoke more thinking than questions" underlies the success of the Reading for Meaning strategy. Why might this be so? Do you agree with this evaluation?
4. What does it mean to know a word well? One common answer would say, "When you can use it in writing, speaking, and understand it in reading and listening." Concept Attainment answers a little differently: "You understand our most important words and concepts when you know:
   • The bigger idea the concept is part of;
   • The essential traits that define the concept;
   • Examples of the concept as well as non-examples or opposing concepts; and finally
   • You are thinking about the concept as you learn it (as opposed to only memorizing its definition and spelling)."
   
   So here's the question: What are some words or concepts your students need to know this well? Pick three and create your own key word organizer for each.
5. We developed the Mystery strategy in order to answer a delightful provocation from Grant Wiggins almost 20 years ago. Grant told us (along with three or four hundred other people in the room) that "Certainly one of the goals of history ought to be learning how to think like a historian. Why shouldn't history classes be apprenticeships in doing history?" Good question. How does the Mystery strategy answer Grant's challenge? Will it work as well for science, math, and literature?
6. As you think about your next week of teaching, which of these situations is most likely to occur?
   • A chance to eliminate confusion through comparison (Compare and Contrast).
   • A text your students might interpret, by examining statements and weighing evidence (Reading for Meaning).
   • A concept that needs to be grasped deeply and well (Concept Attainment).
   • An opportunity to provoke thinking by looking at a variety of texts or evidence (Mystery).
   
   Select one situation and develop a plan to apply the strategy (or a variation) in your class. When you have your plan, consider this question: What kinds of evidence would I collect before, during, or after the class to discover how the strategy affected my students' thinking? Now put your plan into action and team up with a colleague using a different strategy. After the two of you have put your plans into action, compare your notes and evidence using the organizer in Figure E.

Figure E. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

Before Reading the Self-Expressive Strategies

People rarely say "My memory is too good!" or, when commenting on a friend or student, "Brad is a little too reasonable."—although a friend may occasionally say "You're being too logical." On the other hand, people often say or think "She's way too imaginative!" If imagination is a talent, why is it so often seen as something of an obstacle to success in school? Consider the questions in Figure F and generate two lists—which list is longer?

Figure F. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

You could say that strategies teach students the disciplines of thought. So, Mastery strategies teach the discipline of memory just as Understanding strategies teach the discipline of reason. And Self-Expressive strategies provide students with tools for developing a disciplined imagination. So, what role does imagination play in your classroom? What strategies or methods do you use that put students' imaginations to work?

Write down the names of four students who are not achieving at a level you wish (two students who you suspect area little too imaginative; two students who you think might have trouble thinking imaginatively).

As You Read the Self-Expressive Strategies

Self-Expressive strategies help students develop disciplined imaginations by focusing their attention on a particular object; modeling first and then asking them to create an imaginative product; and guiding them to reflect on both the object and their creation

Keep these three ideas in mind as you read about the four Self-Expressive strategies. How do these strategies differ? Use the chart in Figure G to organize your thoughts and what you know about the strategies.

Figure G. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

After Reading the Self-Expressive Strategies

1. The acts of classifying and hypothesizing are often pictured as more logical than creative. Why, then, would the Inductive Learning strategy, which relies on more logical kinds of thinking, be so attractive to Self-Expressive learners who thrive on imagination?
2. Consider the steps in the Metaphorical Expression strategy and the reasons for its effectiveness. Now, create a metaphor for the strategy—one that might convince a teacher of a different style (even Mastery) to try out the strategy in her classroom.
3. In Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe describe six different facets of understanding.
   • Explanation
   • Interpretation
   • Application
   • Perspective
   • Empathy
   • Self-Knowledge
   
   (See the Introduction to The Strategic Teacher for a description of each facet.)

1. Select one facet of understanding and describe how you might use the Pattern Maker strategy to help students become better at demonstrating the chosen facet in their work.
2. Compare and contrast how you might use the Mind's Eye strategy when dealing with declarative and procedural knowledge in the content you teach. Would the two applications be more similar or more different?
3. At the beginning of our study of the Self-Expressive strategies, we introduced the concept of "a disciplined imagination." Which of these strategies uses a kind of imaginative thought you would like to see developed to a higher level in your students' thinking?
   • Inductive Learning – the skills of classifying and formulating hypotheses
   • Metaphorical Expression – the ability to make deep and thoughtful connections
   • Pattern Making – the capacity to create original products
   • Mind's Eye – the talents for visualizing and revising perspectives
   
   Select one strategy and use it develop a lesson plan you can use during the next week. Before you implement your lesson, confer with a colleague. Each of you will take a turn using the Mind's Eye strategy to visualize what the lesson will look like when you put your plan into action. Your listening partner should transcribe the imagined description and save it. After you and your partner have tried out your lesson, you should meet to compare your actual lesson with the one you imagined. What did you and your partner learn about yourselves as teachers through this shared act of imagination, action, and reflection?

Before Reading the Interpersonal Strategies

An Interpersonal style of teaching and learning lays down its motivational chips on the bright red square called relationships. Humans don't just struggle with their relationships with others; humans are designed to form, nourish, explore, and expand them. Sociologically speaking, people learn to relate by playing certain roles at home, on the streets, and in school. Through role playing, they acquire the Interpersonal skills they need to keep their relationships strong.

1. What roles to students play in a typical week in your classroom?
2. What are some roles you have explicitly taught your students?
3. How did you go about helping them to understand how to play these roles and how to improve their performances in them?
4. Which roles seem to come naturally to your students?
5. Which roles seem to cause them more difficulty?
6. What roles do you wish they could play better?

As You Read the Interpersonal Strategies

The four Interpersonal strategies discussed in this section guide students to stronger learning by defining both the group they will be joining and the roles they will play; stimulating certain kinds of thinking; promoting values; and initiating reflection on both what they learned and the process they used to learn it.

As you read about the Interpersonal strategies, use Figure H to take notes on how the different strategies work through these factors.

Figure H. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

After Reading the Interpersonal Strategies

1. Sometimes a teacher who has only a brief acquaintance with Reciprocal Learning will say "We do that. We have kids work with partners all the time." How would you explain the key differences between working in pairs and genuine Reciprocal Learning? Why are these differences important?
2. Think about a decision you or someone you know has made that, in retrospect, seems to have been poorly made. Now list five ways in which the Decision Making strategy might have lead to a better outcome.
3. Develop a poster that simply and attractively describes for your students the roles they will play in the Jigsaw strategy.
4. Community Circle is a strategy that falls in and out of favor every five years or so. Why do you suppose it tends to disappear and how do we come to realize we need it again?
5. Pull together a small team (three to five members) and use the Decision Making strategy to select an Interpersonal strategy you will all try out in your own classrooms. Each of you should develop your own plan, then on the day you put your plan into action, ask your team members to drop by and collect notes on what occurs. After all the team members have taught a lesson with the strategy, pull the team together to compare notes and discuss what you learned together.

Before You Read the Four-Style Strategies

Diversity and differentiation are two words with similar definitions but very different meanings. Differentiation reminds us to adjust instruction, curriculum, and assessment to make sure all of our different students can reach the same high goals. Diversity reminds us of our responsibility not to simply overcome differences or merely celebrate them; diversity says our job as teachers and leaders is to nurture differences and help them flourish.

Four-Style strategies are uniquely equipped to do this because they provide us with the tools we need to advance four unique and different styles of thought.

Before you read the part on Four-Style strategies, take a minute and ask yourself what you've done recently to preserve and advance each of these four different kinds of mind? Which ones find it easier to flourish in your school or classroom? Which ones are more likely to be neglected? What causes these differences?

As You Read the Four-Style Strategies

Each of the four strategies in this part takes a different approach to creating a home for different minds:

• One creates an open forum where differences can appear and interact.
• One takes a single text as its focus and approaches if from four different perspectives.
• One uses each of the four styles as a lens to both direct and expand attention.
• One provides a map that guides us in ways we can design assessments for all kinds of minds.

As you read, use the framework in Figure I to collect and organize your thoughts.

Figure I. The Strategic Teacher: A Study Guide

After You Read the Four-Style Strategies

1. Select one of the four strategies and use Window Notes to collect and organize your thoughts about it.
2. Looking back over your experience reading about the Circle of Knowledge, collect evidence to support and refute this statement: The Circle of Knowledge creates a forum where all four styles can feel equally at home.
3. Design a plan for using the Do You Know What I Hear? strategy for a short poem.
4. How is the Task Rotation strategy like a game of baseball? Try to identify at least eight similarities.
5. Select 10 students from one of your classes and, considering what you have learned about thinking and motivational styles, identify the style you feel plays the strongest role in their motivational profile. Now, select one of the Four-Style strategies and use it to design an upcoming lesson. After you have put your plan into action, survey your students using a questionnaire with these questions:
   • What was the most important purpose of this lesson?
   • How effective was the lesson at reaching its purpose on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 = poorly, 4 = very effectively)?
   • How interesting did you find the lesson on a scale of one to four (1 = dull, 4 = very interesting)?
   • What part of the lesson did you enjoy the most?
   • What part of the lesson did you find least difficult?
   
   After you have collected the surveys, compare the answers of the 10 students you selected earlier. Do you notice any interesting patterns when you compare your students' answers with your preliminary identification of their strongest styles?

A Study Team Approach to Reading The Strategic Teacher

The Strategic Teacher is deliberately and carefully designed to maximize its use by three or more readers working and studying together. After the Introduction, the book is divided into five parts (one for each of the four motivational styles and a concluding section for the four-style strategies) and each part contains four strategies, with each strategy accompanied by its own set of variations. What follows is a set of recommendations for making the best use of this structure when reading The Strategic Teacher as part of a study team.

As a team, select one of the four styles as your focus.

Ask each member of your team to be responsible for one of the four strategies from the chosen style.

As each team member reads and prepares to report to the team about a strategy, he should ask and answer four questions:

1. What does the strategy look like in action?
2. What is the strategy for?
3. How would you evaluate the strategy?
4. How would you adapt the strategy to your curriculum and for your students?

After all team members have reported back on their strategies, use the chart from each style's study guide to collate your learning as a team.

For deeper and lasting learning, team members should plan to use and report back on the effects of at least one strategy.

The Perfect Fit Approach to Reading The Strategic Teacher

Our deepest hope is that we have written The Strategic Teacher in a way that will cause you to return to it again and again. Not to reread it again cover to cover, but as a book you can count on to help you find the strategy that will fit perfectly with new demands and new students as they emerge in your teaching life. The Perfect Fit Approach is designed for this situation. Here's how it works:

• Step 1: Decide what kind of strategy you need.
  • Is there a particular style of thinking or motivation you want to explore?
  • Are you introducing a new topic or presenting new content? Perhaps you want your students to practice a skill or need to assess their progress or provoke them to reflect on their own learning?
  • Will the Hidden Skills of Academic Literacy guide your choice or are you looking to explore a particular line of classroom research?
  • Is an upcoming lesson more focused on declarative or procedural knowledge, or is there a facet of understanding you want your students to attain?
  • In other words, what parts of the Strategic Dashboard are most important to you and your teaching situation?
• Step 2: Browse the strategic dashboards until you find a strategy that seems to fit your needs.
• Step 3: As you read about the strategy you selected, ask and answer these questions:
  • What are the key elements in the strategy?
  • How does the strategy resemble teaching I already do?
  • How does the strategy differ from the ways I ordinarily teach?
  • What have I learned from reading about this strategy that I want to apply to my next lesson?
• Step 4: Plan your lesson.
• Step 5: Decide what kinds of evidence you will look for in order to determine what kinds of effects your use of the strategy had on your students' learning. Once again, the Strategic Dashboard can help.
  • Are you interested in your students' levels of engagement and motivation?
  • Is there a skill of academic literacy you want to see improved?
  • Is there an affect of classroom research you want to apply?
  • Is there a style of thinking you want your students to engage in (Mastery, Understanding, Self-Expressive, Interpersonal)?
  • Is there a facet of understanding you want to advance (Explanation, Interpretation, Application, Perspective, Empathy, Self-Knowledge)?
• Step 6: Teach your plan. Collect your evidence and evaluate.
• Step 7: Remember the next time you need a strategy, you know where and how to look.

The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson was written by Harvey F. Silver, Richard W. Strong, and Matthew J. Perini. This 271-page, 8 1/2" × 11" book (Stock #107059; ISBN-13: 978-1-4166-0609-3) is available from ASCD for $21.95 (ASCD member) or $27.95 (nonmember). Copyright © 2007 by Thoughtful Education Press. To order a copy, call ASCD at 1-800-933-2723 (in Virginia 1-703-578-9600) and press 2 for the Service Center. Or buy the book from ASCD's Online Store.