Authentic Lessons for 21st Century Learning
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 »