George Lucas Educational Foundation
Edutopia

Teaching Strategies

Discover and share best practices for improving your teaching craft -- delivering instruction, engaging students, reaching struggling students, and more.

  • What Productive Talk Looks Like in the Elementary Grades

    Using sentence stems to scaffold classroom discussions guides students to speak, actively listen, and build on each others’ ideas.
    Susan O’Brien

  • 6 Ways to Make the Most of Classroom Movies

    A Twitter thread on how to elicit real learning from movies draws over 150 teachers—and produces some fantastic ideas.
    Stephen Merrill

  • 3 Simple Ways to Improve ELA Instruction

    Knowing who students are is a starting point for sparking their creativity and tailoring instruction to meet their needs.
    Sarah Yost

  • 3 Ways to Ask Questions That Engage the Whole Class

    These techniques guide all students to process course content and then actively demonstrate their learning.
    Pérsida and Bill Himmele

  • What Doesn’t Work: Literacy Practices We Should Abandon

    The number one concern that I hear from educators is lack of time, particularly lack of instructional time with students. Although we can't entirely solve the time problem, we can mitigate it by carefully analyzing our use of class time.
    Nell K. Duke

  • Inviting Participation With Thumbs-Up Responses

    A quick assessment strategy replaces raised hands, encouraging more students to contribute by accommodating their different processing needs.

  • 30 Techniques to Quiet a Noisy Class

    Most teachers have a method of calling for quiet, and we’ve collected a variety of good ideas for elementary, middle, and high school.
    Todd Finley

  • 60-Second Strategy: Respond, Reflect, and Review

    This simple activity helps students practice giving and receiving peer feedback—and gets them out of their desks.

  • Accommodating Students With Dyslexia

    These five easy-to-implement accommodations can make class less stressful and more manageable for students with dyslexia.
    Jessica Hamman

  • Demonstrating Self-Regulation With Tone of Voice

    When teachers model self-regulation by using a voice that is calm, neutral, and assertive, they help students feel cared for—and ready to learn.

  • How Learning Happens

    In this video series, we explore how educators can guide all students, regardless of their developmental starting points, to become productive and engaged learners.
    1. 1. Bringing the Science of Learning Into Classrooms
    2. 2. The Science of Learning and Development
    3. 3. Getting Started With Trauma-Informed Practices
    SEE ALL

  • 19 Big and Small Classroom Management Strategies

    Successful classroom management relies on a handful of fundamental strategies and a larger number of quick interventions.
    Todd Finley

  • Optimizing Station Rotations in Blended Learning

    Using three stations effectively—teacher-led, online, and offline—should provide your students with plenty of ways to collaborate.
    Laura Lee

  • Fantastic, Fast Formative Assessment Tools

    Checking for understanding is good for both students and teachers. We’ve rounded up a variety of digital tools to help you do it.
    Vicki Davis

  • 5 Research-Backed Studying Techniques

    Teachers can guide students to avoid ineffective studying habits in favor of ones that will increase their learning outcomes.
    Edward Kang