During a unit the teacher administers a weekly quiz that addresses all of the material covered for the week. The quizzes are intended to motivate students to study for the summative unit as well as provide students with a sample of the types of questions they may encounter on the unit test.

During Round-robin reading, the teacher oversees a small reading group assigns each student in turn to read a section of the reading book aloud. Round-robin reading provides students with fluent modeling of reading, and opportunities to practice oral reading with performance feedback.

Formal Grammar Instruction is a writing practice that is focused primarily on explicit and systematic teaching of the parts of speech and structure of sentences.

Think-Pair-Share is a great strategy for providing opportunities for all students to respond during whole group discussion. Ask a question or propose a problem. Students first think of an answer or idea on their own (2-3 minutes). Next, students share, and possibly revise, their responses by sharing with a partner. Then open discussion to the whole group to share and compare answers and ideas.

Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning is used after students have had an opportunity to learn about a concept or concepts. Then students draw on their own conceptual understanding developed through instruction by asking questions of each other. The teacher provides students with a prompt directly related to the lesson or sequence of lessons the questions will target and gives them a few minutes to formulate questions using a list of question stems. For example, the teacher might say,

For the past few days we have been learning about rocks and the different processes that formed them. Think about what you have learned. Write down two or three questions you would like to ask your classmates that will help you improve your understanding of ___________ and ______________. You may use the question stems on the list to make up you questions or you may create your own.

Students then form small groups of three to four and take turns asking each other about the content they are learning using open-ended questions and discussing their answers. Each small group notes any questions they have difficulty with. The teacher can choose to help individual groups work through the questions or discuss them with the whole class.

Large-group lecture is an oral presentation or lesson intended to present a concept or topic to students as a whole class. It is one of the oldest forms of teaching and one of the most efficient means of transferring knowledge and concepts to the class as a whole. Large-group lectures convey critical information to students that they need in order to understand the concept or topic. Usually teachers stand at the front of the room and talk to the students about the content.

A Multiple-Choice Test is a flexible assessment format that can be used to measure a wide range of knowledge, skills, attitudes and abilities. It allows broad and even deep coverage of content in a relatively efficient way. A Multiple-Choice Test usually consists of a number of items that pose a question to which students must select the best possible answer (or answers) out of the choices from a number of choices. Items can also be statements to which students must find the best completion. Multiple-choice items, therefore, are fundamentally recognition tasks, where students must identify the correct response.

Lots of curriculum standards involve mastery of processes or computation tasks. The teacher asks the students to complete the task and then explain their answer or their process for finding the answer. For instance, a teacher might have students explain or justify their answer to _________________. This process holds students accountable to the content and whether or not they understood what they did and the reason they did it.

Persuasive Writing assignments require students to analyze an issue, take a position, and defend it. The key is that students have to know more than just the facts about an issue; they have to make judgments about those facts, organize them in a persuasive way, and use those facts to make their case. Through the Persuasive Writing students will reveal how well they have processed the information because they can generate new knowledge and can organize the information for a particular purpose. Students might, for example, construct an argument as to why a British account of the start of the American Revolution is more plausible than an American account, or why scatter plots are a better way to represent data about students’ grade performance on the last class quiz than bar graphs are.

Once students have learned a concept and identified the patterns, principles, and key elements of that concept, an Invention Task asks them to take what they have learned and create something of their own. For example, students might use the arrogance of a Shakespearean sonnet to write their own, following the principles of force and motion to design ways of protecting an egg dropped from the top of the school building, or apply what they’ve learned about nutrition to create their own diet plans. Asking students to use what they have learned to invent something new demonstrates their understanding of the concepts involved, as well as, their ability to apply and adapt these concepts to solve.

Capstone is project-based and is used after students have finished a unit or multiple units. Capstones are designed to answer the “So what?” of a unit. They involve students using all that they have learned to reflect on why they have learned what they have learned, and how the different part so the unit connects in a meaningful way. For example, if students have just completed a poetry unit they will now work in groups to create their own collection of poetry, selecting poems that contain an array of poetic devices and represent an array of styles. As a group, they would write the foreword to the anthologhy in which they explain why they selected the poems and also write introductions to each poem, pointing out key features and the explaining how that poem supports the anthology’s overall theme.

In an Error Analysis assessment, students are given problems and answers. Some of the answers are correct and some are incorrect. Students must identify each answer as correct or incorrect and then explain why. For example, after a unit on compound sentences, you might give students a set of 10 sentences, 4 of which are properly constructed compound sentences and 6 of which are not. Students must then identify which of the 10 are compound sentences and transform the ones that are not into properly constructed compound sentences. Error Analysis asks students to do more than reproduce the correct answer, and it helps the teacher assess whether students understand why an answer is correct and whether students can create correct answers form an incorrect one.

Literature Circles are small groups of students, arranged by readiness level or interest, reading a novel together. For example, the whole class may be reading novels by the same author or that have similar themes, but each literature group has a novel that is specifically appropriate for them. This allows for whole group discussion as well as small group work. The Lexile Framework , it is a great resource for identifying appropriate novels for each group.

Varied Products is possibly the easiest way to differentiate. Allow students to make choices about how they demonstrate what they’ve learned, whether they write an essay, make a poster, or act out a scene. Be clear about your expectations, possibly using a rubric; then allow them to meet the requirements in their own way. This also works well when you have limited resources because not all students need to same materials and equipment at the same time.

The word Synectics is derived from a Greek term meaning the fitting together of different apparently irrelevant element. This strategy uses analogies or metaphors to connect students’ ideas with a concept. Students are provided with a chart containing four to six boxes. They are given a category, seemingly unrelated to the identified concept, and asked to fill in the four squares with an item from that category. For example, if the category is “things at a fast-food restaurant,” students might record french fries, burgers, drive-thru window, and milk shakes. The students are then given a concept to relate each of the items to using the following completion sentence: A ________________ is like a _milk shake_____ because _______________. Analogies are a type of conceptual model that can give teachers a glimpse into student thinking.

Using Multiple Texts is a strategy that allows students to see differing perspectives intended by an author speech by comparing the primary source of material to a secondary source of information. Comparing several sources provides students an opportunity to see what the writer or speaker intended rather than how other writers interpreted him or her. There are many primary and secondary examples on the internet. For example, a written, audio, or video speech produced by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream", George W. Bush's speech just after the events of 9/11, or Susan B. Anthony's speech on a woman's right to vote are easily found in a search engine. Or, if you've just read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, use an author interview with Eric Carle about his writing process and discuss what students learned. Other options include comparing opinion-based articles with news articles, texts written from different perspectives such as the Three Little Pigs and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, or examples of debates. Whatever is chosen as a primary source, it is important to find a speech that suits your current content area, as well as, the developmental age of your students.

Super-Heroes is a fantasy-based boundary-stretching problem solving technique. Participants pretend to be a fictional (or real) superhero (Superman, the Incredible Hulk, Batman, James Bond, Wonder Woman, Sherlock Holmes, Spiderman, etc.) and use their 'super' characteristics to trigger ideas and answer questions. All 'superheroes' have skills and capacities that are outside 'normal' behavior, this means that (a) students tend to think outside of the norm and (b) having a role allows students to express more unusual ideas that they might not normally express.

Super-Hero stories also have strong elements of wish-fulfillment, and can therefore help students to express ideas.

In addition, allowing superheroes to work together could trigger other ideas. Perhaps if superman and wonder woman worked together they could produce an improved solution to the problem.

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