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characteristics. Langer studied 26 secondary literacy teachers in the “beating the odds” schools and 12
typical secondary literacy teachers in typical schools. Langer found that there were major differences
among literacy teachers and typical teachers in their focus on teaching strategies. Every teacher in the
beating the odds schools (26 of 26 teachers) made cognitive strategy instruction an important emphasis. In
contrast, only 2 of the 12 typical teachers provided cognitive strategy instruction. The following examples
illustrate differences between the two groups of teachers.
Example of strategy instruction in a “beating the odds” school. Cathy Starr, a teacher at Hudson
Middle School, was a teacher who was beating the odds. She decided to teach her students how to use
strategies as a means of reflecting on how well they were doing. After completing the activity, the students
were told to evaluate their performance on the research they did and the writing they finished by using self-
developed rubrics. Some of the questions on these rubrics include:
“1.... Did you keep going until you had learned enough to write your report?
2.... Did you plan what you were going to say? Did you think about it? Did you review it and revise it
before putting it in the back?
3. Did you edit?... “ (Langer, 2001, p. 868).
Cathy thus worked explicitly with students to help them develop and understand criteria for evaluating their
performance.
Example of strategy instruction in a typical school. Carol McGuiness was a teacher at a typical
school. In one tenth grade class, she gave students an assignment to put 24 events in sequential order. Of
the three groups in her class, only one of the groups was able to make a successful start at this task. The
other groups were struggling. Instead of discussing possible strategies to solve the problem, Carol only
said, ‘OK. Divide your slips into thirds. OK? This is research. Start with the beginning, the middle, and
then end and put the strips into three different piles. Get this done and you’ll have a method.’ However, this
instruction was not effective. The students did not understand what she meant, and they did not reach a
better understanding of the task. Thus, unlike Cathy, whose instruction made strategies clear to students,
Cathy was not effective at helping students learn strategies to help them carry out the assignment (Langer
2001, p. 869).
Implications for Teachers
As we have just read, these is a large body of research that supports the conclusion that teachers should
make strategies and strategy instruction a central part of the curriculum. By teaching strategies and helping
students learn to become self-regulated learners, teachers can greatly increase their students’ capacity to
learn on their own. There are at least three major implications of these research findings for you as a
teacher.
- As a future teacher, you should develop a repertoire of strategies that you can teach students in
your classes. Throughout the rest of this chapter, you will learn about a broad range of strategies that you
can integrate into your own instruction. - You should become skilled at evaluating your students’ strategy use. To understand what strategies
your students need to learn, and to check whether students are learning the strategies that you are teaching,
you will need to become adept at evaluating which strategies students are using and whether they are using
strategies well. In the remainder of this chapter, you will learn several methods for evaluating students’
strategy use. - You should become skilled at teaching strategies to students. Although this issue will be addressed
primarily in later chapters, we will discuss one important instructional technique near the end of this
chapter: encouraging students to make their thinking public.
In order to teach cognitive strategies to your students, you will need a good understanding of a variety
of strategies that will help your students become better learners, problems solvers, and reasoners. In the
next and longest section of this chapter, we will examine a broad range of strategies that you will want your
future students to master.