Commentary #4

For Commentary #4, discussion any successes or challenges you may have experienced using
any of these strategies. Did you know you were using a high-yield strategy in the first place?
How intentional are you when designing learning experiences for your students?

Upon reading through Marzanos Nine High Yield Instructional Strategies, I immediately found
two that I have been and continue to use regularly in the classroom, and am actively working to
improve. I was aware that these strategies are researched based successful teaching tools, as
they have been mentioned in one way or another in all the education classes and seminars that
I have taken. I was not aware that they were specifically called high-yield strategies or that
there were expected percentage gains associated with the use of each one. I have outlined
below how I am currently using or how I plan to incorporate the various strategies into my own
lesson structure as I continue to develop my teaching style.

Use Regularly:
Nonlinguistic representations (Yields a 27 percentile gain)

As a science teacher, kinesthetic learning is easily achieved by giving students laboratory

exploration activities. As regularly as possible I try to find hands-on building/drawing/mapping
activities that go along with the curriculum standards. Even though this is an area that I already
use regularly; I am constantly trying new activities that may permanently fit into student lessons
or that may need to be adapted or replaced for the next time I teach the lesson. Its challenging
to provide this type of learning experience to students in terms of the time and material
resources that it takes to develop and execute an activity. In my science teacher dream world I
would love to have at least one student centered lab activity per curriculum unit (chapter in the
book), in reality I expect it will take several years to get to this point.

Cooperative learning (Yields a 23 percentile gain)

I absolutely love using cooperative learning groups for student activities. I use groups to
activate self learning and hands-on activities for students. Giving them problems to solve and
the expectation of pooling their resources to find a solution has the effect of better buy-in from
the students. They are energized to own the product of their learning rather than just being told
by me what I expect them to produce. I also like observing the groups and adding to my mental
profile of my students as I watch them interact with different combinations of classmates.
Sometimes I let them choose groups, which tend to work out to ability grouping. The work
product that follows these lines is not surprising, but it does give insight into how the students
interact in a perceived casual environment (amongst friends they chose and with whom they are
comfortable interacting). I have tried engineering the groups, putting equal numbers of high,
middle, and low achieving students into the groups. The success of this seems to be dependent
on the maturity level of the students, but in general the higher achieving students in these
groups tend to lead and do most of the work whilst the lower students tag along for a free ride.
Random groups assignments lead to interesting and unexpected (in a good way) results in
terms of student product and interaction.

Developing:
Summarizing and note taking (Yields a 34 percentile gain)
Questions, cues, and advance organizers (Yields a 22 percentile gain)
I have been working to add note taking in the form of graphic organizers to my two middle
school classes. There are many reasons that I am actively working to develop this, chief among
them is our PLC Work Plan goals for this school year. Secondly is the poor note taking ability
that Ive seen in my high school classes that I would like to avoid in the coming years.
Regardless of reason, guiding the students to develop note taking and organizational skills will
(hopefully) benefit them through and past their high school years in terms of assessing
information to find the key ideas and linking past knowledge to new information.

Reinforcing effort and providing recognition (Yields a 29 percentile gain)

So easy to do, but so difficult to master. Time flies when youre in the classroom for hours
without a break and its so easy to fill your mind with thoughts of whats next. I find myself
having to stop what Im doing, turn to a student, and thank them for appropriate behaviors,
helping others, etc. It takes extra effort to build these relationships with students and genuinely
encourage them, but if youre playing the long game (which I am) its going to pay off in the end.
My investment in my middle school students self esteem now will pay off in two, three years
when the subject matter is more complicated and the class periods are longer and theyre just
tired of being there. If they know that I know that they are capable, there will be no room for
excuses. If they know that I see when they make gains academically and personally and
recognize their effort, they will (hopefully) be encouraged to try for more. Eventually I would
want them to be able to reinforce themselves and provide self recognition for their success. My
own goal is to slow down enough to empathize with and validate my students regardless of a
(real or perceived) time deadline.

Not Actively Using:

Identifying similarities and differences (Yields a 45 percentile gain)
Setting objectives and providing feedback (Yields a 23 percentile gain)
Generating and testing hypothesis (Yields a 23 percentile gain)
Homework and practice (Yields a 28 percentile gain)

Frankly there are so many teaching strategies, so many types of lessons to plan, so many
classes, so many students needs that nobody can do everything at once. I feel great being on
the right track with already using several of Marzanos High-Yield Strategies. I feel great about
having room to grow and direction for that growth. Im sure that if I were to look hard enough I
could find an example of my use of these three strategies, though they would be undeveloped
and likely a bi-product of a related strategy.