Instructional strategies are carefully crafted by teachers to enrich learning experiences for all students. Effective instructional strategies are anchored by curriculum design and formative assessment practices that provide students with choice, voice, and ownership of their learning.
The teacher has a strategic role as the instructional architect, designing learning experiences that reflect and address student needs, passions and curiosities.
By keeping learners at the centre, in which all activities revolve around their cognition and growth, teachers set the conditions for students to take responsibility for their learning and engage in the learning process in a deep and meaningful way.
Student success is fostered when instructional strategies are designed with a recognition that learning is influenced by: social and cultural context, background knowledge and understanding, and individual needs, interests and passions.
Learning thrives when teachers design instructional strategies that:
- encourage students to think creatively and critically, communicate skillfully, and demonstrate care for self and others;
- acknowledge the social nature of learning;
- tailor flexible groupings to enhance engagement and learning;
- allow for both physical and virtual collaboration;
- support the personal aspect to learning;
- differentiate content, processes, and products;
- promote risk-taking, wonder and curiosity;
- build connections across and within areas of knowledge;
- embed formative assessment practices such as learning intentions, criteria, questions, descriptive feedback, self and peer-assessment;
- inspire and stretch student thinking;
- promote student engagement;
- reflect the relationships between emotion, motivation and cognition;
- connect learning to the local and global communities;
- provide opportunities for students to share learning and reflect;
- utilize technologies and other tools in purposeful ways;
- involve explicit and intentional teaching; and,
- make learning visible, open, and transparent.