Virtual School Dispatches

  Instructional Strategy: Paired Verbal Fluency Paired Verbal Fluency is a dialogue strategy that is used to engage students in conversation through social interaction. It can be used to review or summarize information, expand student thinking, check comprehension, all while building social emotional learning and providing students with peer feedback. How it works Teacher develops and shares a question with the students. The type of question will vary but should be an open-ended question. Students are assigned pairs (randomly or pre-determined). Explain to students Students will determine who will be Partner A and who will be Partner B. There will be 3 rounds of different lengths (see tips). For example, Round 1: 60 seconds each; Round 2: 45 seconds each, Round 3: 15 seconds each. Students will talk and listen to each other. Students cannot repeat anything that has been said by their partner when it’s their turn. Explain that students will have to time themselves and when time is u...

A Picture-and a caption--Are Worth a Thousand Words For a couple years I taught yearbook (ugh!). In teaching yearbook, we spent a lot of time on photography and caption writing and I found that captioning could be a very effective instructional strategy in my other classes engaging students with the content and a simple way of writing across the curriculum. Captioning tips: Avoid stating the obvious. Use a variety of ways to start captions. Prepositional phrases and -ing words are great starters. Use 2-3 sentences. ABCD Method A: Attention grabber, write a lead-in that grabs the readers attention. B: Basic information, use the first sentence to tell who and what is happening C: Complementary Information, use the next sentences to add information that is not obvious to the reader and provide additional details. D: Direct quote, include a quote from someone in the photo or another person providing information about the photo. This sometimes may be contradictory to the other information. ...