Teaching Skills Through Strategies

Tonight in the writing class I teach, we are covering how writing skills can be taught through strategies. Skills are the what - they are the actions that students carry out, which are often automatic, to allow them to complete a project, procedure, or activity. Skills help students accomplish goals and they help students develop their understanding about content or a concept. We want skills to be automatically carried out, but often kids need some help learning the various skills. This is where strategies come in!

Strategies are the how or the ways of teaching. Strategies are deliberate, step-by-step approaches to skill-building and concept-development. We teach students strategies or different approaches so that they can master a skill or a concept.

Here’s an example for you! I’ll stick with writing skills and strategies because I'm teaching this in my writing class tonight! Editing a writing piece is a skill. Students will not learn how to edit just by telling them to go and edit their writing. They need strategies so that they can do the editing work. One strategy (and one that I really like) is teaching kids to Search for Words that End in “s”. They can go through and highlight or circle the words that end in “s” and then they reread each sentence to find out if the “s” is to create a plural or show possession or neither. If you mean to show possession and it’s a noun, make sure there is an apostrophe. If the word is a possessive pronoun, make sure there is no apostrophe. This is one strategy that kids can implement when they are editing their writing. Over time, as they continue to apply it, it will become automatic.

In order to teach the skill of inferring when reading, one of my students taught a lesson on understanding the characters. She showed the student to pay attention to what the characters are saying and doing. Then, she had them consider why the characters are saying or doing that. In order to make an inference, she asked the students how they would feel in that same situation.

Skills are big! In order to teach kids to understand and apply the skill, strategies can help us get them there! And, there are so many different ways to teach the skills - some strategies will work well for some students while others will work better for other students - it’s great to have options!

An anchor chart of the strategy Understanding the Characters in order to teach the skill of inferring.