In this series of Strategy Guides, you'll learn about different methods and activities to encourage inquiry-based learning in your classroom.
Inquiry-Based Learning
Facilitating Participation with Silent Conversations
This guide introduces silent conversations, a collaborative learning technique that has students
thinking, sharing, and reflecting about important questions—but through writing rather than talk.
Conducting Inner-Outer Circle Discussions
This guide shares the steps to take to get more students talking by dividing the group into speaking and non-speaking circles.
The Art of the Doodle: Writing with Imagination
Use independent, imaginative artwork and varied writing prompts to assess understanding of a given topic for a student body with differentiated needs.
ICED: The Key to Elaboration
Most students struggle when adding detail to their body paragraphs. This guide serves as a means of instruction and provides models for the students to master development.
Consensus Decision Making
This strategy guide introduces Consensus Decision Making, a method for facilitating and engaging students in a critical discussion of the central ideas of a text.
Developing Evidence-Based Arguments from Texts
This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text.
Developing Persuasive Writing Strategies
This strategy guide describes the techniques used in effective persuasive writing and shares activities you can use to help students understand and use persuasion in their writing and critical thinking.
Using Partner Talk to Strengthen Student Collaboration and Understanding
In this strategy guide, you'll learn about Partner Talk—a way to provide students with another learning opportunity to make learning their own through collaboration and discussion.
Teaching with Zooming Slideshows through Prezi
Through Prezi, a web application, students create "zooming" presentations for various purposes, such as presenting research, defending an opinion, or sharing a digital story.
Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto
Using Animoto, a free Web 2.0 tool, students can develop short digital videos that include music, photos, video clips, and text as well as share their creations electronically.
Speak to Me: Teaching with Voki
Through Voki, a Web 2.0 tool, students create customizable avatars for class presentations for various purposes, such as presenting biographical information, expressing an opinion, or reading a poem.
Promoting Student-Directed Inquiry with the I-Search Paper
The sense of curiosity behind research writing gets lost in some school-based assignments. This Strategy Guide provides the foundation for cultivating interest and authority through I-Search writing, including publishing online.
Power Notes
The strategy examined in this Strategy Guide teaches students an outlining technique to help them differentiate between main ideas and details in their reading and writing.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
New Visions for Linking Literature and Mathematics
David and Phyllis Whitin offer K–6 teachers a wealth of ideas for integrating literature and mathematics.
Go Public!: Encouraging Student Writers to Publish
Intended for middle and high school teachers, Go Public! offers specific writing ideas and classroom activities to help students develop the confidence and ability to publish in a wide market.
Designing Writing Assignments
Traci Gardner offers practical tips, starting points, and a companion website to help secondary and college teachers design effective writing assignments.
Writing at the Threshold: Featuring 56 Ways to Prepare High School and College Students to Think and Write at the College Level
This book offers both an eloquent philosophy of composition instruction and a useful set of classroom-tested teaching ideas distilled from the author's 28 years of teaching writing.
What Is "College-Level" Writing?
Just what defines "college-level" writing? This collection seeks to engage this essential question with care, patience, and pragmatism.