Designing Motivating Instruction

By Author: Adela
Total Articles: 74
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The kinds of texts and text-based activities that are motivating and intriguing to students can be incorporated into lessons in a variety of content areas. These instructional strategies include the following:

Offering literacy-based activities that facilitate applying content concepts or skills to real-life problems or situations providing students with opportunities to practice their thinking skills through inductive and deductive reasoning

Facilitating students' interactions with a variety f textual forms and text-based activities
Providing interactive activities in which students form opinions and discuss them in collaboration with others

Each of these strategies is interrelated, capitalizes on the others, and can be combined in instructional activities that promote application of course concepts. These recommended strategies are based on observations Tag Heuer Replica of and interviews with students as they engaged in literate activity and reflected on their interactions with texts. These strategies tie literacy to ...
... content as social activities in which students learn to think and act like members of a professional community who work together by reading, writing, and talking (Lemke, 2004).

Although this article focuses on science, teachers in any content area can design these kinds of instructional activities. Instructional strategies such as small-group discussions to solve a problem or predict an outcome allow for giving and getting different perspectives to consider and evaluate and promote critical inquiry. These approaches allow students to be at the forefront of their own learning and become dominant in the teaching-learning process.

Sharon's unit demonstrates how a variety of everyday texts can be brought into the classroom to supplement and enhance academic texts. Students can practice and gain inquiry skills by reading and discussing news articles, WebPages, journal articles, trade books, and student-authored stories and reviews on a class blog as well as excerpts from textbooks. Science teachers may take Tag Heuer Replica Watches the resources Sharon used and adapt them to fit their own contexts or use this unit as a model to follow in constructing lessons on other topics. Doing so can blur the lines between learning inside and outside of school and can help to affect students' attitudes, interests, and achievement. Ultimately, using nontraditional texts, text-based activities, and textual forms can demonstrate teachers' understanding and appreciation for the kinds of literate activity that today's students find functional and challenging.