This collaborative strategy can be used to introduce new material or to review texts that students have read. 30-Second Expert helps students summarize and synthesize information in a brief, reciprocal activity. Read more »
This writing activity enables students to summarize their understanding of material, to evaluate understanding for gaps in knowledge, and to communicate this to their teacher. Read more »
Students focus on the main ideas of a text through collaboration in this summarization strategy. Read more »
The 5W Cube is a portable strategy to target open-ended questions (beginning with who, what, when, where, why, and how) as a means of exploring content and conversational speech. The 5W Cube helps students formulate questions and foster meaningful connections with content. This strategy can be used... Read more »
This collaborative strategy can be used to help a whole class or large groups come to a consensus of agreed upon ideas. 8-Up makes it possible for all students' ideas to be considered. Read more »
This group brainstorming strategy is designed to promote thinking about a specific topic, concept, or text. Students activate prior knowledge and make connections to new learning via other resources. Read more »
This strategy promotes critical thinking when analyzing information sources for research purposes. A-CLAP gives students a framework for evaluating the credibility of a website, article, book, or other source. Read more »
This strategy engages students in organizing ideas into themes to summarize content or find points of agreement. Students respond to a prompt and work in groups to organize the responses into themes. Read more »
Through discussion and physical movement, students practice persuasive communication and critically examine their own opinions. Read more »
When an assignment calls for thoughtful and measured responses, this strategy enables students to reply in an orderly and democratic fashion. Students sometimes shy away from responding after hearing a classmate give a particularly good response to a question or prompt. By ordering responses beforehand,... Read more »
Students evaluate statements based on how often they think they are true. This strategy is especially useful in revealing whether students overgeneralize or undergeneralize a given concept. Read more »
In this strategy, student input is used to create an in-the-moment poster about a given topic. The Anchor Chart is then hung on the wall for later reference. Read more »