Level One—Enhanced COntent Instruction
Levels 1 & 2 are for all students
What is Enhanced Content Instruction?
Enhanced Content Instruction is an approach to planning and teaching that uses research-based tools to help teachers decide what content is so important that everyone in the class must “get it”, even if they struggle with learning. It also helps teachers transform that content so students can understand and remember it.
- What Students Do: Students learn the most important content regardless of learning ability.
- What Teachers Do: Teachers assist students (those who struggle with learning and those who do not) by using Content Enhancement Routines. The devices and teaching procedures included in the teaching routine help students learn the content by transforming curriculum through identification of critical content, use of graphic organizers and the application of engaging teaching strategies.
What is a Content Enhancement Routine?
Content Enhancement Routines are based on a set of teaching devices that organizes information visually—so that students can see it, and also helps students understand the connections between pieces of information. We will use a Concept Anchoring Routine as an example.
Perhaps a teacher wants to help students understand the concept of Federalism—understanding what the Federal Government does as opposed to what the State Government does. For example, the teacher has observed that when he or she has taught this subject in the past, many students struggled to understand this concept. Research shows that if students have information that they already know, and can “Anchor” new information to the known information, they’ll “get it” much better.
- The class works together with the teacher to create a Concept Anchoring Table—we call this “co-constructing”.
- The teacher may say, “We are going to learn about Federalism. To help us understand this, we are going to discuss Decision Making In Your School.”
- The class discusses both concepts - what powers do teachers and principals have that are different, and what are the same? What powers do State Governments and the Federal Government have that are different, and what are the same?
- The class lists the shared characteristics of the two examples that have been presented.
- Students use the shared characteristics to help them write a summary of their understanding of the new concept.
- The teacher uses this table as the heart of a teaching routine to give students sufficient practice in the process of anchoring information, so that students learn the underlying thinking process.
How do Content Enhancement Routines help struggling learners?
Students who struggle with learning often miss much of the “big picture” in a unit or a course. Rather than expect struggling learners to just memorize as much of the content as they can, teachers identify the content they believe is most important for all students to understand. Below is a graphic that represents one unit within a course. For example, the course could be History of the United States, and the unit could be Causes of the Civil War. In order to enhance the content, teachers must identify the critical content, represented by the star in the graphic below. The star, in this case, represents the concept of Sectionalism - the inability of the different regions of the United States to get along.
Planning in Content Enhancement begins with selecting the critical ideas that are central to the course and to the units of a course. Every unit in a course is anchored by critical ideas that define what content will be taught in that unit.
- All students learn the content the teacher has identified as critical, or most important. All students learn to manipulate and generalize that information.
- Most students would also retain the information that Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin in 1793, and be aware of the fact that cotton production in the South doubled each decade after 1800. They would be able to manipulate and generalize this information.
- Some students might also delve into the fact that the invention of the Cotton Gin - and other inventions during the Industrial Revolution such as machines to spin and weave cotton - resulted in the South providing three-fifths of America’s exports—most of it cotton, and how this contributed to the build up to the Civil War. They would be able to manipulate and generalize this information to similar issues in today’s world.
EXAMPLE: The invention of the Cotton Gin. The Cotton Gin was an example of the way people in the South made a living that was different from the other sections of the United States - those differences in the sections led to conflict. All students learn about the invention of the Cotton Gin, and how it impacted cotton farmers in the South. All students learn to manipulate the content, so they might “compare and contrast” agriculture in the North and South, or talk about the “cause and effect” of this invention, and how the North and South differed in their reliance on slave labor, contributing to increasing hostilities that led to the Civil War. Additionally, they would need to generalize this content, so they might discuss how new technology that is being invented today impacts our country, and how that is similar or different from what happened prior to the Civil War.