Strategies should become part of selected classroom discourse

Strategies should become part of selected classroom discourse

I have just shown that promoting strategy use is really a matter of investigating what works best for individual learners in the context of particular tasks. Teaching learning strategies is not teaching in the traditional sense. We select a specific task that lends itself particularly well to strategy work because it poses a problem.
Then we set students to work on the task, and, as they work through it, or just after they have finished working on it, we sort of "weave in" a moment of reflection and discussion on the strategies that they have used - or perhaps not used. When I say "weave in", I really mean integrating this discussion within classroom discourse, within what we and our students actually say when we are together, working on the same task. When we interact, we are not just speakers or listeners: in the same way, when we are working on strategies, we are exchanging information, thoughts and feelings - students presenting their strategies and us weaving in our own strategies, discussing and negotiating possible ways of approaching the problems posed by the task..

If we look at things like this, we can start viewing the question of time in a different way. One of the most frequent reservations and even criticisms about strategies instruction is that it takes time, and time is at a premium today. But if we view strategy work as part of our normal, routine interaction with students, then it is mainly a question of checking the results of a task not just in terms of right or wrong answers (the "product"), but also in terms of the strategies used ("the process"). This will not necessarily take much time - a few minutes here and there may be enough, if this becomes part of our systematic way of dealing with tasks. Of course, it is part of our job as teachers to select the most appropriate tasks and the most appropriate moments to "weave in" this thread of strategic work; it is a question of selecting and evaluating times and circumstances.

My last main point can thus be summarized by using the word evaluative - to remind us that we need to evaluate what strategies to focus on in which contexts; but also, to remind us that students too need to evaluate their use of strategies.