The 20 Strategies That Blew My Mind

Creating our own curriculum activities. I’m surprised that it has taken this long into my university career in the Concurrent-Education program to tackle such a task. But at the same time, perhaps it would be unreasonable to do so without everything else I’ve learned along the way.

Our assignment group has decided to make our curriculum activity integrated, pulling together Math subjects and also Geography. The main thing that we all agreed on before we started our project was that we wanted the outcome of whatever we made to be fun and engaging for the students. After seeing all the examples put forward in class and ones that some of us have done though our own education, it becomes clear that the more fun a student is having, the more interested and engaged they will be in the material being learned.

After our first brain-storming session together I couldn’t stop thinking about what I could bring to our activity to make it more engaging. Although I was way ahead of myself and our group was not nearly at this stage in the process, I decided to do a little research.

The same basic ideas kept coming up on my computer screen; full-class engagement, address all types of intelligences, students must be an active part of the learning process, engage, engage, engage. But not a lot came up about the specifics in how to go about doing this, and then I remembered. Two years ago when I started my new job at the Dufferin-Peel CDSB I was able to attend a teacher development session they were holding for new teachers. I was working with the Staff Development Department so opportunities like this came up a lot and they always encouraged me to go knowing I hoped to be a teacher myself.

The first session blew me away! It was given by Marcia Tate, an educationalist who has studied how the brain works and develops and the need to start teaching students in order for them to retain information more efficiently. Thinking back to the presentation, one thing that stood out to me was that I remembered so much of what Marcia talked about. From two years ago, I still remember much of the presentation. She had developed 20 Strategies to implement into every lesson given to your students in order to engage their attention and more importantly their Brain.

Marcia’s 20 Strategies were:

1. Brainstorming and discussion
2. Drawing and artwork
3. Field trips
4. Games
5. Graphic organizers, semantic maps, and world webs
6. Humour
7. Manipulative, experiments, labs, and models
8. Metaphors, analogies, and similes
9. Mnemonic devices
10. Movement
11. Music, rhythm, rhyme
12. Project-based and problem-based instruction
13. Reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning
14. Role plays, drama, pantomimes, and charades
15. Storytelling
16. Technology
17. Visualization and guided imagery
18. Visuals
19. Work-study and apprenticeships
20. Writing

 Now obviously she was not implying that all 20 Strategies be implemented in one lesson, but if 1-3 were put into practice the difference would be tremendous. The presentation went on to discuss all different strategies and we were all given workbooks that have explicit instruction on how to bring these strategies into any classroom.

Looking back to this presentation and all the ‘Brain Engaging’ strategies, it’s amazing how well they apply and help with our ongoing curriculum assignment. We have already made plans to implement many of the strategies into our integrated curriculum such as Storytelling, Technology, Visuals, and Role playing in order to further engage our perspective students. I also will continue to keep these strategies in mind when thinking about my own personal curriculum philosophies.