Some students acquire the necessary organisational skills to become independent learners quickly and easily. Others need explicit teaching and more opportunities for practice.
General Strategies
- Model Strategies, then promote and support independence through guided practice and cueing.
- Provide explicit instruction on strategies
- Have students compile strategies using ‘strategy notebooks'. This provides them with concrete resources which can be used during tasks. Teachers can cue students to refer to their notebooks when needed.
- Provide sufficient time for organisation. Spend time establishing routines and modelling organisational behaviours.
- Apply thoughtful cueing through appropriate questioning. Examples include: "What are you trying to accomplish?"; "What steps are involved"; "What materials are you going to need?"
Teach students to organise space and materials through:
- Describing the structure. Discuss the organisation of the classroom space. Explain why things are set up in a particular way.
- Use the structure consistently. Students can become aware of where to find particular materials.
- Provide concrete prompts. Place visuals to indicate where materials should be stored. Some students may benefit from having visual prompts on their desks to tell them where to put various materials on their desk.
Teach students to organise ideas through:
- Assisting students to identify the main idea. Provide structured and frequent opportunities in identifying main ideas within sentences and paragraphs. Cue students by asking questions such as, "Do you notice any words or phrases that are repeated again and again?"; "How do the sentences relate?"; "If you had to give a category name for these details, how would you label them?"; "Does your main idea tell about all of the details, or only some of them?".
- The PLEASE strategy (Pick a topic, List your ideas about the topic, Evaluate your list, Activate the paragraph with a topic sentence, Supply supporting sentence, and Evaluate your list; Welch, 1992).
- Teaching Note Taking. Teach students to first skim text, looking at chapter headings, bold/italicised words, visuals, margin notes and summary sections. Then teach students to read all parts of each section and paraphrase.