What is classroom instruction that works?
المؤلف:
Jane D. Hill Kathleen M. Flynn
المصدر:
Classroom Instruction that works with English Language Learners
الجزء والصفحة:
P5-C1
2025-08-30
273
What is classroom instruction that works?
“Research-based” is today’s buzzword for teachers when it comes to choosing modes of instruction, curricula, and forms of assessment. Particularly since the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), teachers can no longer rely solely on their knowledge of best practices or their years of experience.
In the late 1990s, researchers at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) were at the forefront of this paradigm shift—a shift, essentially, from viewing teaching as an art toward viewing it as a science. Another shift in educational thinking was under way at the same time: Researchers were realizing that studies from the 1960s and 1970s indicating that school quality accounted for only 10 percent of differences in students’ academic performance (Coleman et al., 1966; Jencks et al., 1972) were not entirely accurate. In particular, researchers found that even if a school was not highly effective in raising student performance, individual teachers could still have a powerful effect on students’ academic achievement (Brophe & Good, 1986; Sanders & Horn, 1994; Wright, Horn, & Sanders, 1997).
Buoyed by this new line of research, McREL researchers began looking at studies of various instructional strategies that could be used by individual teachers. An instructional strategy was defined as an alterable behavior on the part of teachers or students. Using meta-analysis, these researchers analyzed over 100 studies of instructional strategies, spanning 30 years. (A meta-analysis combines the results of many studies to determine the average effect of a technique or strategy. Because of the large sample size, this is considered an especially strong method of identifying what works in educational practice.) Through its meta-analysis, McREL researchers identified nine categories of instructional strategies that proved to be exceptionally effective in increasing student performance:
• Setting objectives and providing feedback
• Nonlinguistic representations
• Cues, questions, and advance organizers
• Cooperative learning
• Summarizing and note taking
• Homework and practice
• Reinforcing effort and providing recognition
• Generating and testing hypotheses
• Identifying similarities and differences
The results of this research are presented in a practitioner-friendly format in Classroom Instruction That Works (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001) and the accompanying resource manual, A Handbook for Classroom Instruction That Works (Marzano, Norford, Paynter, Pickering, & Gaddy, 2001). Classroom Instruction That Works provides an overview of the research on each category, offers generalizations regarding the use of each category, and presents examples of actual classroom implementation of relevant instructional strategies. Before differentiating these strategies for ELLs in detail, we present here a quick overview of each category, including definitions and some generalizations drawn from the research.
If you have already read Classroom Instruction That Works and are familiar with the nine categories of instructional strategies, feel free to move right ahead to THE STAGES OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, where we discuss the process of second language acquisition.
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