What are teaching strategies?

Teaching strategies, or instructional strategies, are methods you can use to deliver course material in ways that keep students engaged and practising different kinds of skills. Teachers can select different teaching strategies according to the unit topic, learning level, class size, and available classroom resources. Various instructional strategies are used to achieve teaching and learning goals and support different kinds of students. Specific strategies can also be employed to teach particular skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking and cooperative learning.

Using teaching strategies in the classroom

Effective teachers know that innovative teaching strategies are vital for significant learning and growth in the classroom. These strategies form part of a positive classroom culture, where students feel connected with you, each other and the class content. Using a range of teaching strategies can provide a space for students to grow and take calculated risks.

Examples of teaching strategies

The teaching strategy of setting goals may use the SMART goal framework, while collaborative learning encourages a range of collaborative learning activities and group work opportunities. Add an interactive video question layer to use the teaching strategy of questioning, transforming the learning experience from passive to active instantly. Personalised playlists and scaffolded interactives help differentiate learning and teaching for the different learning styles and needs within your class.

FAQs

What are high impact teaching strategies (HITS)?
The HITS are 10 instructional practices that reliably increase student learning wherever they are applied. 
  • Setting Goals: Lessons have clear learning intentions with goals that clarify what success looks like. 
  • Structuring Lessons: Planned sequencing of teaching and learning activities stimulates and maintains engagement by linking lesson and unit learning. 
  • Explicit Teaching: When teachers adopt explicit teaching practices, they clearly show students what to do and how to do it.
  • Worked Examples: By scaffolding the learning, worked examples support skill acquisition and reduce a learner’s cognitive load. 
  • Collaborative Learning: This occurs when students work in small groups and everyone participates in a learning task, actively negotiating roles, responsibilities and outcomes. 
  • Multiple Exposures: Multiple exposures provide students with multiple opportunities to encounter, engage with, and elaborate on new knowledge and skills. 
  • Questioning: Questioning engages students, stimulates interest and curiosity in learning, and makes links to students’ lives. 
  • Feedback: Feedback redirects or refocuses teacher and student actions so the student can align effort and activity with a clear outcome that leads to achieving a learning goal. 
  • Metacognitive Strategies: Metacognitive strategies teach students to think about their thinking to help them gain control over their learning. 
  • Differentiated teaching: Differentiated teaching is methods teachers use to extend the knowledge and skills of every student in every class, regardless of their starting point.
Which teaching strategies work best for EAL students?
Team teaching is an effective strategy to use when working with EAL students. This is where the classroom teacher and an EAL teacher share responsibility for assessing students, planning and teaching an EAL program. Team teaching is a particularly useful strategy for activities where EAL learners are introduced to new tasks or new information. Team teaching provides the flexibility to include small group work and a range of classroom configurations and activities.
What strategies can I use to teach reading?
Teaching vocabulary helps students understand more of what they hear. Improving students’ overall language skills means they are more likely to understand the words they encounter in written text. Students should also be directly taught comprehension skills such as sequencing, story structure, inference and more. Students should have various opportunities to practise their reading with text that they hear the teacher read aloud, and also with text that they read independently at their level.
Which teaching strategies work best with primary students?
Differentiation has a definite place in the primary classroom. By differentiating your teaching by allocating tasks based on students’ abilities, no one gets left behind. Individuals with higher academic capabilities have the opportunity to be stretched, while those who are struggling can access the appropriate support. Differentiation might look like varying task options or setting up a range of workstations for students to choose from.
Which teaching strategies suit the secondary classroom?
Integrating technology into the classroom is a great way to empower students to stay connected, motivated and engaged in their learning. Some ways you could do this are through creating web-based lessons or multimedia presentations, taking your class on a virtual excursion, participating in an online research project, or creating a class website.