Sabina Austin's Blog: Instructional Strategies

For both my Technology Based Lesson and my Non-Technology based lesson, I chose to use the instructional strategies of Identifying similarities and differences and Nonlinguistic representation. My lesson is to look at bullying throughout history and relate it to what is currently happening, not only in society, but specifically in our school. The use of nonlinguistic representation was easy because the students will be doing their presentations on PowerPoint. I felt the use of Identifying similarities and differences was a wonderful tool in trying to get the subject matter to ‘stick’. This entire concept is a repeat of the discussions in Made To Stick in that new ideas are more likely to be internalized and truly learned if they have reference to thoughts and ideas already in the students’ minds. As you can tell, this concept really made an impression on me. I cannot think of a better way to teach than to latch on to what has already been learned. It sure makes our jobs a lot easier, don’t you think?

At the website, Focus on Effectiveness, Researched-Based Strategies, there is an article addressing the use of identifying similarities and differences. “Each approach helps the brain process new information, recall it, and learn by overlaying a known pattern onto an unknown one to find similarities and differences.” As I have discussed with other ideas, sometimes these are tools we have used in our teaching over and over again without knowing exactly what we were doing. We instinctually know to start with the familiar and expand. But now we know that this is truly a good method and a way of avoiding the ‘curse of knowledge’ as described in Made To Stick.