Research-Based Strategy Instruction

ALS has selected key instructional strategies proven effective in improving achievement for all students, including English Learner, Special Education, and GATE students. These strategies are aligned with the California State Frameworks and State Board of Education-adopted textbooks for grades K-8. These strategies fall into three categories: Direct Instruction, Strategy Instruction, and Performance Instruction.

• Direct Instruction relates to early and developmental reading programs essential to pre-teaching of vocabulary to English Learners and special needs populations.
• Strategy Instruction is a model for teaching processes that involve a complex interaction of component skills.

Performance Instruction requires teachers to design contextualized “performances” and to teach students to access, interpret, produce, and disseminate content in authentic ways to show mastery of underlying standards.

Direct Instruction
Participants learn to use Direct Instruction (Interactive Instruction) techniques. Direct Instruction refers to teaching activities where goals are clear to students, time allocated for instruction is sufficient, and content is strongly congruent with skills and concepts most often associated with basic skills and foundational concepts. Direct Instruction as a set of teacher behaviors can be applied to all content areas and grade levels.

Reciprocal Teaching
Participants learn to use Reciprocal Teaching “talk groups” in order to explicitly teach students the skills employed by good readers. These skills include questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting. This research-based process has proven to increase reading comprehension in all content areas, grades K–12.

Expository Text Handling
Participants learn to scaffold instruction, teaching cognitive structures to students, then reinforcing and re-teaching as needed, enabling all students to access information from a variety of text types.

Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE)
Participants learn to explicitly scaffold instruction by developing standards-based lessons that include components for accessing, interpreting, producing, and disseminating. Lesson design scaffolds include connecting, building background, developing schema, recreating text, and structuring interaction. Lesson delivery includes modeling, demonstration, checking for understanding, and pacing and chunking.

Balanced Approach to Mathematics
Participants are provided with a set of strategies to enhance all areas of mathematics—computation, conceptualization, and problem solving.

Cooperative Group Work
Participants are provided with a structured format for effective student collaboration, including the use of roles and norms and a process for providing feedback. Assessment and accountability are also addressed.

Process Writing
Participants learn to develop standards-based prompts, specific
to grade-level writing types, and create the instructional sequences needed in order for students to complete high quality work. Models of good writing, rubrics, and grammar and conventions mini-lessons are included. To be most effective, the skills and processes of writing must be aligned school wide.

Complex Instruction
This training guides teachers to develop a system for developing standards-based group projects that strengthens each student's ability to work cooperatively. Teachers are provided with strategies for implementing roles and norms in the classroom and learn to provide students with constructive feedback that promotes student to student interaction. Participants are introduced to current research about the development of status in the classroom and the role this plays in students' academic achievement.

Test Preparation Strategies
This training guides teachers to develop a year-long program for preparing students for high stakes assessments. Teachers explore the statewide assessment landscape so they understand the state and federal guidelines. Teachers look specifically of the content, context and level of cognition that students must master and learn specific, easy to implement strategies for helping students demonstrate what they know.