120 hr. TEFL Course Module 8-Lesson Planning (Pt.13 Teaching Strategies)

Module 8: Lesson planning

8.4 Teaching strategies

Going through all the existing teaching strategies would take an entire course, so we are instead going to focus on a few effective strategies that appeal to students with different learning styles.

Jigsaw: A jigsaw is a great cooperative learning strategy because it gives students the opportunity to take control of their learning, but it also is a natural scaffold. In a jigsaw, you group your student to interact with new knowledge and give them a short amount of time to focus on a specific topic. Each group has a different topic, so at the end of this short period of time, you rearrange the groups, and students become experts on their original topic. For example, you can split your class of twenty-five students into five groups of five students each and have each group researching a different European country. Then you can go to each group and give each member a number from 1 to 5 and have the students rearrange based on those numbers. Now you have five groups, each containing one student who has researched each European country. Now the students teach each other.

Think-pair-share: This is a very versatile strategy because it can be used for a 5-minute initiation or for a class-long activity. Put simply, you give your students something to think about, then you ask them to get into pairs, and then you ask them to share what they came up with. This can be done as formally or informally as you would like, and it works with all different types of content.

Fishbowl: This is a modified Socratic seminar that asks students to participate in a discussion and evaluate each other’s performance during the discussion. Essentially, students are structured into two circles, one inside the other. Inside the circle, students are given a topic, question, or idea to discuss. In the outer circle, students are paying attention to the inner circle and evaluating the strength of their discussion. The most effective fishbowls ask the students in the outer circle to focus on specific parts of the discussion. Teachers can either ask each outer student to focus on one inner student or ask each outer student to focus on one skill, idea, or form of discussion.



Testing a hypothesis: As we mentioned in the previous section, asking students to pose hypotheses, test their hypotheses, and then draw conclusions is asking them to access very high levels of thinking. This does not have to be a strategy that only works in science classes. In an English class, you might ask students to read a selection from an author and then create a hypothesis that guesses what another piece by that author is going to focus on. This will require the students to understand the piece at a high level and be able to use that understanding to make predictions about a related text.