Designing Instruction to Support Strategic Learning

Different learners aiming for the same goal generate different plans and steps for getting there. Because individuals have their own optimal pathways for learning strategic skills, teaching approaches and tools need to be varied. Based on our knowledge of how strategic networks function, we can recommend the following teaching methods to support strategic learning.

Teaching Method 1: Provide Flexible Models of Skilled Performance

Learning to generate patterns (how to do something) requires developing a mental model of the pattern in question. Developing internal models requires exposure to external models of expert performance and to counter-examples that demonstrate incorrect execution.

Consider learning to play tennis—and for the sake of this example, just learning how to serve. Before the aspiring tennis player can serve well, she must first have a mental model of skilled serving. What does the complete stroke look like when an expert does it? Where must the ball land to be counted "in"? What are the most effective placements and bounces for making the serve difficult to return? Important counter-examples include what a poor serve looks like and what kinds of mistakes contribute to one.

Teachers can present models of processes in a variety of contexts (as one-on-one instruction, in small groups or as a whole class, live or at a distance, online or in person), using a variety of media (video, speech, text, diagram, animation). Exposure to multiple models showing different, effective ways to do something helps learners distill the critical features of a process, different ways it can be accomplished, and where the opportunities exist to inject their own creative means to that end. Think again of Dick Fosbury, who identified the critical features of high jumping and then developed his own new approach for getting over the bar. Or to stick with our tennis example, consider Arthur Ashe, who revolutionized the backhand with an idiosyncratic, powerful, two-handed stroke.

Digital tools and media can extend teachers' ability to present multiple models for strategic teaching. Using the World Wide Web or a local network, we can collect models over time, link these models to a home page, and offer students an increasing array of choices including examples of completed work, steps in a process, demonstrations of skilled execution, or connections to experts willing to share the way they work. We can provide these models in a variety of media to make them accessible and useful for diverse sets of students.

Teaching Method 2: Provide Opportunities to Practice with Supports

To achieve complex strategic goals like playing tennis, driving a car, or writing a research paper, a learner must automatize, or over-learn, the individual steps in the process until each is automatic. Only when the subcomponents come automatically can a tennis player concentrate on game strategy, a driver concentrate on destination and route, and a student concentrate on the style and clarity of the research paper. This requires extensive practice.

Because complex strategic patterns are impossible to learn all at once, teachers usually direct students to practice individual subcomponents of the process. But we also know that practicing skills in context is more effective than practicing skills in isolation. To support contextual practice, teachers can scaffold some parts of the process so that learners can focus on strengthening their abilities in other parts. Scaffolds reduce the degrees of freedom in order to focus the learning in specific areas. Examples include the training wheels or parental hand on the back of the bicycle that supports a beginning bike rider's balance; the passenger-side steering wheel a driving instructor can use to monitor a new driver's steering; and a tennis instructor's practice of guiding the arms of the novice server through the motion of the overhead stroke.

Electronic media are ideal for providing scaffolds in the context of learning. Features such as text-to-speech "translation" supports decoding so that learners can focus on strategic reading or content learning; spell checkers support mechanics so that learners can focus on expressing their ideas and improving their writing fluency; built-in calculators scaffold math facts so that learners can focus on mathematical reasoning. Ideally, scaffolds should be optional and assignable to individual students, the better to accommodate individual progress and differences between learners.

Teaching Method 3: Provide Multiple Media and Formats

Delivering ongoing, relevant feedback is critical when teaching skills. Learners need to know if they are practicing effectively, and if not, which aspects of the practice process they need to change. If the ball is repeatedly hitting the net, the novice server knows that something is wrong—but what? Is the toss too low? Is the swing too late? Is the step forward too large? Without feedback, the learner doesn't even know if these are the right questions to ask!

Feedback can come in many forms. The aspiring tennis player can watch a video of herself, listen to her coach's observations, watch a demonstration of what she is doing versus the correct approach, or read a write-up of her game in the newspaper. And it is important to point out that feedback is most effective when it is provided in an ongoing fashion—supporting course corrections and building learners' confidence about things that are going well. But even students fortunate enough to have one-to-one instruction don't have their teachers around during every practice session. Thus, helping learners develop self-monitoring skills may be the very best way to ensure ongoing feedback for all practice.

Software tools and digital networks can be an excellent source of ongoing feedback, particularly if students are shown how to take advantage of everything these tools offer. A tool as simple as text-to-speech embedded in a word processor enables students to hear how their writing sounds when read aloud and then to revise as they work. Software programs designed to develop skills such as typing or arithmetic routinely offer specific feedback about performance as students work. And online connections to mentors and peers offer students the chance to seek comments from others outside the classroom.

Teaching Method 4: Offer Flexible Opportunities for Demonstrating Skill

Another essential part of teaching a strategic skill is providing learners with chances to demonstrate that skill. Demonstration challenges learners to consolidate and apply all parts of the process. It also elicits feedback from a broader audience. The budding pianist performs in recitals; the student gives an oral presentation, displays a poster, or shares a written paper. In this way, demonstrating skills and knowledge can factor powerfully into motivation, helping learners experience the "why" of learning.

Digital media offer widely varied supports and opportunities to help students demonstrate knowledge and skills. Publishing on the World Wide Web or on a class home page invites feedback from an expansive audience and can provide a sense of accomplishment. Presentation tools such as HyperStudio and PowerPoint provide templates and tools for incorporating multiple media and for structuring presentations. Publishing software helps students incorporate images and lay out printed work in a professional manner.

In sum, approaches for teaching skills must be flexible and must reflect the way strategic networks learn. As Dick Fosbury and Arthur Ashe demonstrated, there are many ways to skin the strategic cat, and providing options opens the door to creativity and success for diverse learners. By assembling digital content, multimedia software, and Internet resources, teachers can build a collection of options that makes individualization feasible. These resources allow us to vary the media, models, supports, and feedback we offer to our students. To illustrate, let's turn once again to a classroom example.

Supporting Strategic Learning with UDL

Let's imagine Ms. Chen's 5th grade class includes Charlie (the student who has difficulty self-monitoring and staying on task), Jamal (who has good strategic planning skills and a motor disability), and Patrick (who has language-based learning disabilities). Ms. Chen has set the following goal: "Students will demonstrate competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process." Although several of her students have difficulty with text, she keeps the goal focused on writing because she knows that written literacy is critical as her students move on to 6th grade. She also knows that the UDL framework will help her individualize the instruction she provides. Ms. Chen reviews the teaching methods most helpful for strategic learning and considers the multimedia, networked tools, and scaffolds she might use to foster success for all her students.

Concentrating on the skill of writing narratives, Ms. Chen encourages her students to select story subjects they find interesting. To help them envision the stories they will be creating, she provides many models of fiction and nonfiction stories in text, sound, video, and image form. She builds a classroom story collection of printed books, tapes, and videos and uses Inspiration software to create a story home page, with links to a library of digital stories—including some written by former students and some that she has found on the Web. The software also allows her to group these stories into different categories, such as fiction and nonfiction, and even further, into narrative genres such as detective stories, fables, and adventures.

Ms. Chen reads many of these stories aloud for and with her students, leading discussions of what students liked and didn't like and highlighting story elements. She also collects models that call attention to story structures and the writing process, including "famous first drafts" that illustrate the heavily revised beginnings of some well-known works. The story home page provides links to author-focused Web sites so that students can learn from the insights of professional writers who model their working process.

By providing so many different kinds of models, varying in content, medium, and context, Ms. Chen ensures that everyone will find appropriate models to emulate as they begin to develop their own narratives.

All of Ms. Chen's students need to practice at their own level of challenge. To support students at different stages of proficiency, she provides scaffolds such as multimedia story templates, a variety of "clip" media, drawing tools, and tools they can use to digitize images they bring from home or even their own voices. Students who have trouble generating text often begin by creating a series of images or recorded sounds to help them develop their plot and characters; with this foundation, they usually find that text flows more easily. Because this particular learning goal is focused on the writing process, Ms. Chen also encourages students to use scaffolds like spell checkers when editing their work.

Ms. Chen is familiar with the work of Lynne Anderson-Inman and her colleagues at the University of Oregon showing that diverse students benefit from working with graphic organizer software like Inspiration and Kidspiration (Anderson-Inman & Horney, 1996/97). She teaches her students to use these tools, knowing that visualizing story elements as interconnected geometric shapes will help them plan their stories structurally.

Different students in the class rely on scaffolds according to their needs:

• To support Jamal in focusing and condensing his lengthy story, Ms. Chen encourages him to strip it down to its main elements using Inspiration.
• To get Charlie "unstuck" when he can't select a topic, Ms. Chen gives him a deadline, provides him with some rubrics for choosing a topic, and writes out a concrete schedule of steps, each with a mini-deadline.
• To help Patrick through his anxiety about producing text, Ms. Chen provides a multimedia story template and helps him scan in pictures of his favorite baseball player. The series of pictures will form the structure for his story.

To generate ongoing feedback and build students' self-monitoring capabilities, Ms. Chen encourages them to exchange drafts and review each other's work within a structured format that includes constructive suggestions. She also encourages students to use e-mail to solicit opinions from each other and from outside experts. For students who are ready, she suggests submitting drafts to Web sites where they can obtain outside reactions, including the Stone Soup site (http://www.stonesoup.com), which posts student work. Such online connections extend her ability to help students obtain regular, ongoing feedback from a variety of sources.

Ms. Chen also helps her students build their self-monitoring skills by encouraging them to compare their work to external models and compare their drafts to their mental models of their stories. Using a digital microphone, students record themselves telling their stories. Next, they write the text of the story in a word processor and use text-to-speech to listen to how what they've written sounds when read out loud. Comparing the recorded "target" stories with the way their written stories sound provides a supported context for self-monitoring.

To meet the writing standard, Ms. Chen's students need to produce their final story in text. But she encourages them to use other media, supporting alternative modes of expression and skill demonstration in conjunction with text (see Gardner, 1993; Sizer, 1992a, 1992b). Ms. Chen provides a variety of multimedia tools including word processors, HyperStudio, digitizing software, and publishing programs. With these tools, the students enhance the text they produce with images, sounds, and animations. Some students produce artwork on paper or in clay to go along with their stories. By encouraging these diverse expressive pathways, Ms. Chen helps all students reach the text-based goal.

Rich resources and tools enable teachers to diversify strategy instruction. By combining traditional tools, multimedia, and networked resources, teachers can provide every student with customized models, expressive options, supports, and feedback. These options give diverse learners a much better chance to succeed.