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This column is concerned with teaching strategies and practices to enhance students' academic performance. But strategic knowledge alone does not always lead to improved student learning. Teachers also need to know why certain strategies are worthwhile to employ and others are not. Sadly, many find it difficult to rationalize their instructional approaches on the basis of foundational principles (Brozo & Simpson, 2007). And yet we know that effective teaching is principled teaching (Smagorinsky, 2001).
Unlike strategies, principles are not a series of steps that must be adhered to or a set routine that must be followed. Instead, tb,ey guide effective strategic teaching that takes different forms depending upon teachers and students in particular learning contexts. Strategic teaching is more likely to be effective when it is applied in ways that are sensitive to the unique circumstances and available resources of different schools and classrooms.
What follows are five principles to guide strategic teaching. Each principle is briefly explained and exemplified so as to develop an appreciation for how the principles can support acts of teaching that are innovative, student-centered, and responsive to the needs of learners.
Five principles to guide strategic teaching
Build new understandings by connecting prior knowledge and experience with academic learning. In honoring students' outside-ofschool interests and competencies, we help them see how schoolbased learning relates to their life worlds beyond the classroom walls. Students make meaning based on the various discourse communities they inhabit, such as homes, peer groups, sports teams, and even the neighborhood hair salon. Viewed as funds of knowledge (Valdé's, 1998), these networks of relationships shape ways of talking, reading, writing, and knowing. Space can be made in classrooms for students to explore how their many different funds of knowledge might inform, connect to, and be integrated with academic knowledge (Hull & Schultz, 2002).
For example, students may encounter a reading in science about the water cycle for which they have little prior knowledge or that would seem to have little connection to their concerns as youths. If students are asked to engage in activities that explore how the water cycle relates to the cost of finding and purifying potable water, how the scarcity of clean water limits their use of community swimming pools and restricts how...