Scaffolding or Differentiating Instructi

Scaffolding or Differentiating Instruction

Think-Pair-Share

This approach develops their academic language and function skills by engaging students in the content through a variety of learning tasks such as reading, writing, and reflecting on what they learned. This strategy will help students understands how a text presents information and determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development as well as summarize the key supporting details and ideas. This method is a learning task that develops students’ academic language through interactive peer dialog. For social studies, students will read an article or part of a text and can write down their ideas of the text then they will be paired up by the instructor to discuss what they read. Students can then record any new ideas or thoughts before being paired with another student. Students will be paired up with different students to verbally articulate their learning through discussion of the content. After students discuss their ideas, they can write down their thoughts and reflections and have a full class discussion of the topic.

The following web link is a great resource explaining the think, pair, share strategy.

http://www.readingquest.org/strat/tps.html

This strategy would work with any type of social studies text or resource and is a great method for differentiating instruction. This strategy works well for most students as students will be reading, writing, and discussing content and their ideas. This method provides a variety of learners to participate in the learning task which helps engage student in learning.

Verbal and Visual Word Association

This strategy can help students determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. This method helps students build their academic language skills and aids in the development of understanding textual structure (discourse). The Verbal and Visual Word Association graphic organizer helps students learn and understand new social studies vocabulary through visual and personal associations with the word. This strategy helps students retain new history vocabulary through visual characteristic associations. This method also provides multiple practice opportunities to familiarize students with the new terms through writing, hearing, and saying the words. The visualization approach teaches students to visualize the word as a means of recall as students see, write and say the words repeatedly. Students will first write the word in the vocabulary term box. Students then write a brief definition followed by a personal association for the word and an illustration representing the vocabulary term.

The following web link is a great resource detailing how to properly implement the verbal and visual word association strategy:

http://prezi.com/zoqxcoikyeqc/the-verbal-visual-word-association-strategy/

This strategy works well with all students and is especially effective with second language learners in all content area classes. Linking the student’s own experiences by writing personal associations will strengthen the connections between the classroom and life outside the classroom and makes instruction an enriching experience for students.