When I plan lessons or professional development workshops I try to incorporate instructional strategies to engage students and teachers in the content. I’ve talked before about how helpful the instructional strategies are on the K20 Learn website. Another website that includes great resources to engage students is Facing History.

Facing History includes instructional strategies for text and video analysis, pre-writing, as well as kinesthetic strategies that have students move around the classroom while they engage in curriculum content. Since the Facing History website primarily focuses on social studies content some of the strategies may be more appropriate for a social studies classroom.

Two of the strategies that I have used include Create a Headline and Dissecting the Prompt. For Create a Headline students watch a video clip, view an image, or read a section of text and need to develop a headline to summarize it. The Dissecting the Prompt strategy demonstrates how students can decode a writing prompt or question to determine what the prompt is asking them to think and write about.

These instructional strategies are a great way to hold students accountable for the learning activities in your classroom and provide students with tools to explore curriculum content.

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