The classroom teacher is the conductor of the instruction that occurs in his/her classroom. Each teacher has within her control the lessons he/she chooses to teach, the reactions to events that occur in the classroom, and the atmosphere of the classroom environment. When teaching the young at risk learner, it is vitally important to purposely choose the instructional strategies which will succeed with each learner.
Community and Home/School Communication Strategies:
1) Get to know your student’s families. Build a positive and supportive relationship. Provide referrals to community agencies that can support the family.
2) Find out from your families their most reliable mode of contact. Is it email, their cell phone, a note in the student’s backpack? And when are they available to conference with you? What options other than coming in to school are possible for conferences (phone, Skype, etc.)? Remember for parents who work at hourly jobs, conferences during their working hours means a loss of pay.
3) Have parent-teacher conferences regularly with parents to share their child’s progress. For Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers complete and share developmental checklists at least twice yearly. For school age children, make sure that you include social-emotional growth as well as academic growth plus check annually for vision, hearing, and motor skills.
4) For the family who does not speak English, figure out who at school will act as the translator for notes, phone calls, etc.
5) Make sure to have your newsletter and any school information sent home in their native home language. Not only will this build better parent participation and provide clearer communication, in some cases it also is the law.
6) Share materials, books, games, etc. with parents to enrich the home learning.
7) Encourage parents to read with their child daily and to spend one on one time talking positively about their day. For ELL students, make sure parents understand the importance of exposing their child to their home language through reading, telling stories, teaching about their culture, etc.
8) Have an “open door” policy and allow parents free access to your classroom. Encourage them to volunteer and observe. If they cannot spend time in the classroom, they can be involved by cutting out materials, sewing, coming to evening activities, etc.
9) Encourage your administration to have the school be a site for community activities. Holding parenting classes, allowing after hours use of the gym, and locating community agencies within the school by provide a healthy school-community relationship and build parent participation.
10) Get to know the contact information for family support agencies in your community and make a resource list. (Ex.: Food Bank, TANF, parenting classes, CPS, Clothing Closet, translators, etc.)
11) Build relationships with outside community businesses and agencies. They can be a wealth of support for you by providing classroom volunteers, school supplies, field trips, etc.
12) Work with your School Counselor. He/she can provide resources for families as well as
community referrals. She/He also can provide insight into a child’s behavior, background
history, and needs. She/He is your resource person for social skills curriculum materials.
Classroom Based Environmental Strategies:
1) Provide a secure and a safe environment. Take into consideration the student’s rest and
nutritional needs. Ensure the environment is free from hazards and is clean.
2) Provide consistency, predictability, structure, and routine. Many of your students will not
experience any structure or routines at home. Yet they need it to feel safe and secure.
3) Supplies should be easily accessible. Materials should have an obvious place where they
belong. Organization can reduce chaos!
4) Have your classroom rules posted. At the beginning of the year, have your students help you
craft the rules. Review them after each school break. Teach expected behaviors and routines.
5) Always use a calm voice and non-threatening body language. Share intimacy and safe touches
in appropriate ways
6) Promote positive self-identity, acceptance, and a sense of belonging.
7) Provide plenty of encouragement.
8) Take time to listen every day.
9) Provide an enriched environment. Use music as a learning tool or for calming the atmosphere;
display art and rich visuals; provide aromas; have plants and class pets in the classroom and
teach the children to care for them.
10) Ensure your classroom environment is reflective of the diversity of your students and contains
materials/toys with no bias.
11) Actively move about the room and interact positively and frequently with each student.
12) Control the stress in your classroom. Many of your students may be experiencing stress at
home and may need some transition time in the morning.
13) Give students a sense of self-control by giving them choices, offering jobs in the classroom,
allowing time for free choice activities, etc.
14) Understand the student’s point of view and background experiences. Remember the
differences between the child’s home culture and experiences and that of school
expectations.
15) Set high expectations and believe that all students can succeed.
16) Support the WHOLE child. Provide opportunities for growth in all areas of development.
Instructional Strategies:
1. Link concepts to experience and use concrete, hands-on strategies. Build background
information through hands on experiences, field trips, videos and pictures, etc.
2. Give plenty of clarification and teach student’s to use context clues by pointing out what is
happening in a picture, key words, key signs like plus or minus, etc.
3. Provide for multiple learning styles, differing abilities and interests, different cultural
knowledge sets, and multi-sensory experiences.
4. Keep a lively but appropriate pace of instruction. One third of all inappropriate behavior
occurs due to boredom! And too fast a pace will discourage students from trying.
5. Use scaffolding techniques to support the student’s learning.
6. Provide for needed accommodations for students. (Ex. preferential seating, frequent breaks,
reduced assignments, adult support, teacher proximity, etc.)
7. For special education and ELL students, modify the curriculum to their learning needs.
8. Engage their attention and curiosity by making your instruction novel, relevant to their lives,
& interesting.
9. Monitor developmental delays and make referrals for additional support services as needed.
10. Provide a language enriched environment. Label things in your classroom, provide a library of
books, use songs to teach concepts, etc.
11. Teach academic vocabulary needed to understand the lesson/concept. Use academic
vocabulary and enriched language yourself so students expand their vocabulary.
12. Provide opportunities for choices and control over their environment
13. Teach study skills and organizational strategies.
14. Give students additional time to think and organize answers.
15. Teach them how to plan for the future and explore/teach vocational skills. Include
occupations in your dramatic play center, have a fireman or policeman visit your class, take
field trips to businesses, etc. Build the understanding that as an adult they can have a
satisfying job that will provide for their family.
16. Use emotional hooks to capture student interest/attention. Know what each child’s special
interests are and capitalize on them to engage the student.
17. Vary your teaching strategies. Use cooperative learning, direct instruction, small group, and
large group instruction.
18. Give your students feedback daily. Ensure they receive more positive than negative feedback.
19. Use research based strategies such as identifying similarities & differences; summarizing;
reinforcing effort; cooperative learning; generating and testing hypotheses; and providing
appropriate cues and questions to aid learning.
20. Use non-linguistic representation of knowledge like charts, graphs, physical models, pictures,
and having the student draw what they learned. This provides a “picture in their mind” to
help remember the concept.
21. Incorporate movement and kinesthetic activities into your lessons. Research is showing the
benefit of movement to cement in new learning.
22. Check frequently for understanding. This can be done by asking questions, checking written
work, waiting for a response, probing for deeper explanations, connecting new learning to
previous concepts, etc.
Curriculum Strategies:
1) Follow your curriculum with fidelity. Understand the scope and sequence of the entire
curriculum as well as the learning targets for the specific lesson. Always know what is
taught next so you can build understanding. Even if you are working with toddler’s and
preschooler’s you should have a curriculum which outlines the concepts and experiences
you should be teaching and exposing children to throughout the year.
2) Give meaning to the curriculum – build new knowledge by hooking it to past knowledge
and experiences.
3) Make assignments fun, realistic, complex, and rich. Ensure assignments are
developmentally appropriate and fit the child’s academic level.
4) Understand the goal and purpose of the lessons you are teaching. Explain to students
what the learning goal of the lesson is and post the learning target.
5) Teach academic vocabulary. Many students will not be familiar with the formal
vocabulary used in schools.
6) Teach for understanding and mastery.
7) Ensure your curriculum is relevant to the lives of your students. Is it culturally respectful,
does it reflect the student’s life experience, are there any religious conflicts, etc.?
8) Present the “big picture” so students understand the meaning before you present smaller
chunks of information. Tie new concepts into previous knowledge and patterns to help
the student’s build meaning.
9) Integrate learning between subject areas. Help students see how what they are learning
in reading is tied to science or math.
10) Ensure your curriculum is developmentally appropriate for each student.
11) Build background knowledge before introducing a concept. Tie what they are learning to
previous experiences.
12) Examine similarities and differences.
13) Examine errors in reasoning and let children explore possibilities and end results.
14) Reflect on what they have learned that day or quarter so they can see growth.
15) Communicate high expectations while giving the support necessary for success.
Assessment:
1) Make sure your assessment approaches consider the unique needs and strengths of each
individual. Test only in their native language. Be cognizant of any cultural biases in the
assessment (example: pictures of objects the child may not have encountered like an umbrella
when testing children who live in the desert!)
2) Assess learning over time and in short sessions.
3) Use both individual and group assessment.
4) Keep anecdotal notes about student progress and incidents.
5) Help the student feel safe about the assessment process by using familiar tools, giving
encouragement, having the tester be a familiar adult, etc.
Social-emotional Strategies:
1) Teach classroom expectations of behavior, routines, etc. Don’t assume they know how to
behave in new situations!
2) Validate and respect their feelings + teach emotional management. Provide an appropriate
outlet for their feeling such as clay to pound when angry or a quiet area for when they are sad
or tired.
3) Provide an enriched, stimulating environment that represents the cultural diversity of your
school.
4) Ensure you plan for gender, developmental, experiential, and cultural differences in your
classroom.
5) Allow children time to adjust to school each AM and connect daily with students.
6) Provide for basic physiological and safety needs. Remember that the food they eat at school
may be the only meal of nutritional value throughout their day.
7) Provide opportunities for social and emotional growth. Help them to practice skills such as
asking others to play, expressing frustration appropriately, and feelings management.
8) Reward positive behaviors and don’t let negative behavior work. When a child is exhibiting
negative behavior, look for the cause behind the behavior and address it.
9) Recognize that they may have poor impulse control so don’t put them in situations where
they need to self-monitor or where they will fail due to lack of support.
10) Teach the social and problem solving skills they lack.
11) Provide opportunities for students to work together and learn from each other.
12) Refuse to “bail” the child out of a problem. Instead acknowledge the problem or
disappointment as well as the accompanying feelings. Then support the child in focusing on
solutions rather than failures. Share examples of disappointments or mistakes other’s have
made and how they solved the problem (stories can provide examples).
13) Incorporate social skills education into the daily curriculum by:
a) When reading a story, talk about what the characters were feeling, what choices theySchoolwide Strategies:
made, whether the outcome would have been different if they made a different choice,
and how they resolved disputes in a healthy or unhealthy manner.
b) Use the teachable moment. When something comes up in the classroom, at school, or in
the community, talk about what happened, why it happened, how it might have been
prevented, what other choices might have been available, etc.
c) Model and promote social skills and peace in your classroom. Develop a class code of
conduct, recognize and praise positive and friendly behaviors, and be consistent with
negative behavior.
d) Accept and model divergent ways of arriving at an answer. Support students in their
mistakes and lead them to discover what they need to correct and why.
e) Use the problem-solving model for both academic and social difficulties. The steps of the
problem solving process are 1) what is the problem? 2) brainstorm solutions 3) for each
solution ask if it is fair, will it work, how will everyone feel, and whether it is safe, 4)
choose a solution, 5) try it, and 6) evaluate it. The problem solving process teaches
students that they are capable of solving their own problems and that there are multiple
ways to solve a problem. (Second Step)
f) Use creative dramatics like role-playing to re-enact a story and experience how
characters felt, how they mediated conflict, etc.
g) Use cooperative learning activities by allowing students to work in pairs or small groups
on assignments or projects. You may need to take an active role in matching groups so
that the students can learn from each other and practice positive social skills. Science
experiments, art projects, group research projects, etc. all fit well with cooperative
learning experiences.
h) Teach feeling words in spelling and vocabulary. Challenge students to use certain feeling
words in their writing. Have students write about how they solved a conflict with their
friend or how a character felt and why in a story.
i) Provide books that model characters with good social skills or characters that have
overcome adversity in a positive way.