What Works in the Classroom:
The McREL Report in a Nutshell

For years, the U.S. Department of Education has been investing heavily in educational research designed to investigate everything from equity to violence prevention. Usually their work results in encyclopedic tomes about the state of education and the implementation of lofty educational goals. This is important research, to be sure, but you may wonder, how does it help the teachers in the trenches?

Fortunately for teachers and students alike, the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) has recently published a practical guide to teaching strategies that work called What Works in Classroom Instruction.

As you probably guessed, this manual is no thin pamphlet you'll tuck into your back pocket. It weighs in at nearly two hundred pages. Thankfully, McREL has wisely posted it online in portable-document format (PDF) so that busy teachers and administrators can access it easily and often.

The McREL guide stands out because it is not only based on hard scientific research, but just as importantly, it actually shows teachers how to use effective teaching strategies in the classroom.

McREL Follows-Up on Reagan-Era Challenge

In an unprecedented effort, McREL followed-up on a challenge made in 1986 from then-Secretary of Education William J. Bennett to synthesize the research in education so that it can be made useful to the American public.

In response, authors Robert J. Marzano, Barbara B. Gaddy, and Ceri Dean set out to "Provide educators with instructional strategies that research shows have the greatest likelihood of positively affecting student learning."

Strategies as Tools
Amid their efforts to distill hundreds of research studies into what is, essentially, a short list of teaching strategies, one persistent point emerged: strategies are merely tools. The authors found that no one strategy works under all conditions, with all levels of student achievement or teaching expertise. The teacher must always consider the context of the educational situation when applying any one of the teaching strategies McREL recommends.

Nine Instructional Strategies Identified

What Works in Classroom Instruction outlines nine basic classroom strategies that have been shown to work. If you have done any professional development in the past five years, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that the strategies reflect current models of best practices. The strategies are usable to educators who subscribe to a wide variety of divergent theories and frameworks on human learning and cognition. In other words, regardless of whether you believe in multiple intelligences or some other theory, you should be able to use these in your classroom.

The Strategies in a Nutshell

1. Identifying Similarities and Differences
2. Summarizing and Note Taking
3. Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
4. Homework and Practice
5. Nonlinguistic Representations
6. Cooperative Learning
7. Setting Goals and Providing Feedback
8. Generating and Testing Hypotheses
9. Activating Prior Knowledge

The manual provides detailed discussions of each strategy in a straightforward manner. At the onset of each chapter, the guide describes an example of the strategy in use. It then goes on to discuss the theory and research behind it and concludes with more illustrations and ideas for using the strategy. Following each strategy description is a discussion of the how it can be used to develop five types of knowledge: vocabulary, details, organizing ideas, skills, and processes. The last chapter demonstrates how a teacher might incorporate them all into a cohesive unit of instruction. Regardless of the subject you teach or where you are in your teaching career, What Works in Classroom Instruction will give you plenty of ideas to incorporate effective teaching strategies into your practice.

Finding the Report
To read What Works in Classroom Instruction by Robert J. Marzano, Barbara B. Gaddy, and Ceri Dean en toto, go to the McREL web site. There you can either read it online, print the report out on your own printer (it's 173 pages), or order a copy from their Web site for $25.00