High Impact Teaching Strategies

Example 2: Secondary – Year 10 History

A Year 10 History teacher introduced a unit on the Chinese Revolution. To engage students, the teacher used questioning to elicit prior knowledge, stimulate interest, and connect learning to real world experiences. She set challenging goals, including understanding the causes of the revolution, and developing cooperative learning skills. The assessment and performance requirements were made clear. The teacher had tried group work in the past, but students were resistant, and groups did not function effectively. Reflecting on those circumstances, this time the teacher decided to use the explicit teaching model. She explicitly taught her students to work as a team on an activity specifically designed to require each student to contribute, share their expertise and collaborate to successfully achieve the learning goals. Using the Jigsaw Strategy, the teacher organised students into ‘home’ groups, and each home group member was assigned a different text. Students then reformed into ‘expert’ groups to work with other students allocated the same text. Together they researched and discussed until they became experts on one issue. Finally, students returned to their home groups where they shared their knowledge with other group members. Students were responsible for learning their own parts and for teaching it to other group members. Learning goals of independence and interdependence became clear as students synthesised information from multiple sources and built their collective knowledge of the topic. The Jigsaw Strategy allowed the teacher to scaffold a large task into smaller chunks. It also provided for differentiation of content as the teacher allocated different texts to each home group member. Peer tutoring provided opportunities for students to become content experts, creating positive interdependence and mutual respect.