Classroom Instruction That Works
by Robert J. Marzano, et. al.
This book would help focus the efforts of everyone squabbling over how to fix America’s schools. The current drive to measure student achievement is via standardized tests, so efforts at reform must begin within that framework. Their book covers nine categories of research-based strategies that can be applied to any subject in order to increase student achievement: Identifying Similarities and Differences, Summarizing and Note Taking, Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition, Homework and Practice, Nonlinguistic Representations, Cooperative Learning, Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback, Generating and Testing Hypotheses, Cues, Questions, and Advanced Organizers.
The authors point out that the levels of achievement from students who go to schools of varying quality will only vary by 10 percent. Those are factors beyond a school’s control. However, that 10 percent difference in student achievement for an average student at a good school equates to a percentile gain of approximately 23 points compared to an average student at a poor school. My school population consists mostly of students that come from homes of low socio-economic status, therefore we must find ways to close the gap and help our students become successful learners.
In my role as the Campus Technology Support Specialist (CTSS) and a member of the schools administrative team, the information acquired from reading this book will be used to come up with ways teachers can improve their instructional practices from a technological perspective. By meeting with the teachers and discovering what areas they feel they need extra help in, will allow a more focused effort towards finding activities that are online or computer based that will address the learners need.
The focus would be to ensure that the some of the 9 best practices to improve student achievement are incorporated in the program. Since finding similarities and...