High Impact Teaching Strategies

Examples tHAT illustrate the Strategy

Example 1: Levels 9-10 – Critical and Creative Thinking

A Humanities teacher decided to help her students develop metacognitive skills. From the start of the year every lesson included a planned discussion in which students shared the strategies they had used to complete lesson tasks and which strategies were most effective. The benefits of attention to metacognitive strategies were clear from the increasingly articulate manner in which her students explained their thinking processes. In term two she realised that the metacognitive strategies would be more effective if embedded into learning activities. Her thinking led her to devise a plan for a unit on the Reconciliation Movement in Australia that emphasised metacognitive strategies. The learning goals related to students’ knowledge of the Reconciliation Movement, and to their skills in interpreting and evaluating multiple evidence sources. The teacher selected a range of primary and secondary sources, including videos and transcripts of Prime Minister Keating’s 1992 ‘Redfern Address’ and Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 ‘Sorry Speech’. Throughout the unit, she assisted students to describe strategies that supported them to achieve the learning goals, including whole class discussion, small group work, independent research and analysis. She demonstrated the links between particular strategies and productively engaging with the content knowledge. Students researched government initiatives and policies during the 16 years between both speeches. They speculated on why it took so long to make the ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations’. She scaffolded tasks with self-monitoring checklists and peer feedback. In the final assessment task students acted as journalists covering the ‘Apology’ speech and wrote about its part in the Reconciliation Movement. Students were frequently reminded to think about how to approach learning tasks, evaluate progress, monitor comprehension, and when to redirect effort. Explicitly teaching metacognitive skills supported students to develop self-regulation and proactively take control of, and responsibility for, their own learning.