High-leverage Strategies

High-leverage Instructional Strategies

In recent years many schools have played close attention to the rich instructional strategies correlated with high achievement cited by Robert Marzano in What Works in Schools: Translating Research and Action. It is no surprise that the classroom document camera can serve as a friendly co-traveler in our effort to support many of Marzano's strategy suggestions, highlighted in bold below. The document camera enables us, in a richly visual way, to:

• highlight similarities and differences (classifying, comparing, contrasting, using metaphors, and employing analogies)
• model effective note taking (demonstrating, summarizing and distilling)
• display nonlinguistic representations (pictures, physical models, realia, graphic organizers, charts, and graphs)
• promote cooperation (team activities, small group problem solving)
• provide feedback (assessment as learning, assessment for learning)
• generate and test hypotheses (using visualized experiments)
• Launch questions and cues, or display advanced organizers

The classroom document camera is no featherweight in the important sport of full-contact learning—it’s a heavyweight contender.