This short writing activity helps students summarize their understanding of material, evaluate that understanding for gaps in knowledge, and 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. The 5W Cube is a general strategy... Read more »
A group brainstorming strategy designed to promote thinking for a topic, concept, text, etc. Students engage to 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 »
Affinity Process is a strategy that engages students in organizing ideas into themes to summarize content or find points of agreement. Students respond to a prompt, then work in groups to organize the responses into themes. Read more »
Through the physical movement and discussion of this activity, 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 for how often they are true, which is especially useful in revealing whether they overgeneralize or under-generalize a given concept. Read more »
Anchor charts are an in-the-moment poster made with student input and then hung on the wall for later reference. Read more »
Annotating Text is a strategy that engages students in close reading to build their vocabulary and reading comprehension. Students identify difficult or confusing passages within a text and then seek to explain them. Read more »
This strategy can get multiple participants thinking, collaborating, and discussing together in a short amount of time. It can also be used as a way to pair students that can be easily referenced for use in the future. Read more »