George Lucas Educational Foundation
Edutopia

Teaching Strategies

Discover and share best practices for improving your teaching craft -- delivering instruction, engaging students, reaching struggling students, and more.

  • Students Think Lectures Are Best, But Research Suggests They’re Wrong

    A study reveals students prefer low-effort learning strategies—like listening to lectures—despite doing better with active learning.
    Youki Terada

  • How to Use Dictation in Spelling Instruction

    Though it’s sometimes seen as old-fashioned, dictation can be useful in teaching early elementary students to spell.
    Joanna Marsh

  • What Productive Talk Looks Like in the Elementary Grades

    Using sentence stems to scaffold classroom discussions guides students to speak, actively listen, and build on each others’ ideas.
    Susan O’Brien

  • 3 Ways to Ask Questions That Engage the Whole Class

    These techniques guide all students to process course content and then actively demonstrate their learning.
    Pérsida and Bill Himmele

  • Optimizing Station Rotations in Blended Learning

    Using three stations effectively—teacher-led, online, and offline—should provide your students with plenty of ways to collaborate.
    Laura Lee

  • 60-Second Strategy: Respond, Reflect, and Review

    This simple activity helps students practice giving and receiving peer feedback—and gets them out of their desks.

  • What Doesn’t Work: Literacy Practices We Should Abandon

    The number one concern that I hear from educators is lack of time, particularly lack of instructional time with students. Although we can't entirely solve the time problem, we can mitigate it by carefully analyzing our use of class time.
    Nell K. Duke

  • Inviting Participation With Thumbs-Up Responses

    A quick assessment strategy replaces raised hands, encouraging more students to contribute by accommodating their different processing needs.

  • 30 Techniques to Quiet a Noisy Class

    Most teachers have a method of calling for quiet, and we’ve collected a variety of good ideas for elementary, middle, and high school.
    Todd Finley

  • 3 Ways to Boost Students’ Conceptual Thinking

    Coaching students to think in terms of concepts helps them understand how to apply their learning in the future.
    Carla Marschall

  • Simple Ways to Integrate Four Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies

    Jennifer Gonzalez talks with a researcher and a teacher to tackle the science—and the logistics—behind teaching strategies like spaced practice and interleaving.
    Laura Lee

  • How Learning Happens

    In this video series, we explore how educators can guide all students, regardless of their developmental starting points, to become productive and engaged learners.

  • Accommodating Students With Dyslexia

    These five easy-to-implement accommodations can make class less stressful and more manageable for students with dyslexia.
    Jessica Hamman

  • Demonstrating Self-Regulation With Tone of Voice

    When teachers model self-regulation by using a voice that is calm, neutral, and assertive, they help students feel cared for—and ready to learn.

  • 6 Ways to Make the Most of Classroom Movies

    A Twitter thread on how to elicit real learning from movies draws over 150 teachers—and produces some fantastic ideas.
    Stephen Merrill