Giving Compass' Take:

• To close student learning gaps, educators in Southern California are utilizing Strategic Inquiry, which is a method of instruction that focusses on personalizing student achievement.

• What is successful about a learning model that centralizes on the individual student or small group?

• Read more about how to improve educator instructional practice. 

Andy Lee thought he was helping some of his struggling students learn how to write an argumentative essay by breaking the task into smaller pieces, such as focusing first on the skill of paraphrasing.

After all, Strategic Inquiry — the method the English department chair and lesson design coach at Savanna High School in Anaheim, California, is implementing as part of an education leadership program at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) — urges teachers to “get small” in order to close gaps in students’ learning.

But then, Nell Scharff Panero, the education faculty member at Hunter College in New York City who helped to develop the model, asked Lee and his colleagues at Savanna an important question — could their students, many of whom are “long-term English learners,” even write sentences? While some students could, Lee acknowledged that many had not mastered proper sentence structure. So, since January, his students have been becoming stronger sentence writers, learning how to identify fragments and practicing skills that previous teachers probably assumed they knew.

“It’s given them confidence,” Lee said in an interview. “Coming to school or class for them is meaningful now.”

Teachers take a narrow approach “in order to experience the school through the lens of those students,” she said. Differentiation, she added, is sometimes discussed as an abstract idea. But Strategic Inquiry focuses at the individual and small group level. “It’s powerful because it’s concrete.”

Teachers then determine which strategies will address those skills and track students’ progress closely. For a school that was running out of time to make improvements before being taken over by the state, Strategic Inquiry has led to significant academic growth, and the school is now rated “in good standing,” Scanlon said. The graduation rate, while still low, has grown from 52% to 72%.

Read the full article about strategic approach to teaching skills by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.