No Child Left Behind—No, Really!

by Patricia Ward

The Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) helps some Michigan schools meet the mandates of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

Classroom teachers and administrators today have been given an enormous task by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). They need more than a “quick fix” to reach NCLB achievement standards. NCLB is really about helping ALL students achieve academic success and equal opportunity to succeed in life, despite the challenges presented by poverty, homelessness, disability, and other factors.

This FOCUS on Results document will show how the Strategic Instruc-tional Model (SIM) can provide a vehicle to help school districts meet the mandates of NCLB. The document will show how SIM can transform the way educators teach content so that ALL learners access the general education curriculum more effectively. It will introduce readers to the concepts of SIM and make them aware of how SIM has helped Michigan teachers improve student learning. Finally, it will challenge teachers and administrators reading this article to learn more about SIM and investigate the possibi-lity of using SIM in their schools.

SIM Principles

SIM is a research-based instructional model that achieves measurable results by reversing the downward spiral through which so many at-risk and special education students fall. Developed as a result of 25 years of research by the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning (CRL), SIM is designed to address the needs of diverse learners and help them meet life’s demands, not only in school but after they leave school as well (see Figure 1).

Four philosophical principles form the basis for SIM research and components:

1. Most adolescents who achieve below average can learn to function independently in inclusive settings.
2. The role of the support-class teacher (1) is to teach adolescents who are low-achieving strategies that will enable them to be independent learners and performers.
3. The role of the content teacher is to promote strategic behavior and deliver subject-matter information in a manner that can be understood and remembered by adolescents who are low-achieving.
4. . Adolescents should have a major voice in decisions about what strategies they learn and how fast they learn these strategies.

SIM Interventions

Building on these principles, researchers at the CRL developed two kinds of interventions to address students’ performance gap. Content Enhancement Routines are teacher-focused interventions that help teachers think about, adapt, and present critical content in "learner-friendly" ways. The Learning Strategies Curriculum teaches student-focused interventions that teach students the skills and strategies they need to learn the content presented.

Content Enhancement Routines (Teacher-Focused Interventions)

Content Enhancement Routines help teachers meet one of four objectives:

• Planning and learning.
• Explaining text, topics, and details.
• Teaching complex concepts.
• Helping students complete work in the classroom.

All Content Enhancement Routines promote direct, explicit instruction, which helps students who are struggling succeed and builds problem-solving and critical thinking skills for students who are doing well, according to SIM proponents.

Research on the SIM teacher-focused interventions shows these routines can improve student achievement. For example, students at risk who were taught using the Vocabulary LINCing Routine raised their social studies vocabulary test scores from 53 percent to 77 percent correct. Average students’ scores increased from 84 percent to 92 percent (2) .

The Content Enhancement Routines comprise13 sets of inclusive teaching practices that help teachers carefully organize and present critical information in such a way that students identify, organize, comprehend, and recall it (see Figure 2 for examples).

1. Course Organizer Routine—used to plan courses around essential learning and critical concepts.
2. Unit Organizer Routine—used to plan courses around essential learning and critical concepts.
3. Lesson Organizer Routine—used to plan lessons and then introduce and connect ideas to the unit and the course.
4. Clarifying Routine—used to focus on a topic and then explore related details and their importance to the critical ideas and concepts.
5. Framing Routine—used to transform abstract main ideas and key topics into a concrete representation that helps students think and talk about the key topic and essential related information.
6. Survey Routine—provides an overview of a reading assignment when students are having difficulty reading and sorting out information from inconsiderate text.
7. Vocabulary LINCing Routine—designed to help students use two powerful tools—an auditory memory device and a visual memory device—that will help them learn and remember the meaning of complex terms.
8. Concept Mastery Routine—used to define, summarize, and explain a major concept and where it fits within a larger body of knowledge.
9. Concept Anchoring Routine—used to introduce and anchor a new concept to a concept that is already familiar to students.
10. Concept Comparison Routine—used to help students compare and contrast key concepts.
11. Recall Enhancement Routine—focuses on procedures teachers can use to help students remember information.
12. Question Exploration Routine—used to help a diverse student population understand a body of content information by carefully answering a "critical question" to arrive at a main idea answer.
13. Quality Assignment Routine—used to plan, present, and engage students in quality assignments and then evaluate assignments with students.

Learning Strategies Curriculum (Student-Focused Interventions)

SIM’s Learning Strategies Curriculum covers a variety of skill areas, including reading, writing, studying and remembering information, improving assignment and test performance, strategies related to social interaction, cooperative thinking strategies, and mathematics.

The Learning Strategies Curriculum covers the skills and strategies students need to learn the content teachers present (see Figure 2 for examples). The curriculum includes strategies for learning a number of skills (3) :

• Word Identification
• Self-Questioning
• Visual Imagery
• Paraphrasing
• FIRST-Letter Mnemonic
• Paired Associates
• LINCS Vocabulary
• Sentence Writing
• Paragraph Writing
• Theme Writing
• Error Monitoring
• InSPECT (for word-processing spellcheckers)
• Assignment Completion
• Strategic Tutoring
• Test-Taking
• Class Participation
• Cooperative Thinking
• Community Building
• Self-Advocacy
• Mathematics

SIM Provides Quality Professional Development

NCLB requires the use of research-based practices to prepare, train, and recruit high-quality teachers, and SIM shows promise to help fulfill this requirement. However, the professional development SIM provides is neither quick nor easy to implement. It takes more than one-day in-service sessions and purchased products to create the “strategically enhanced environments” possible through the tools SIM provides.

The SIM approach takes time—months or even years—and a strong, forward-thinking commitment by administrators and teachers. However, many educators are coming to believe that SIM offers one answer for those looking to raise student achievement and fulfill the NCLB mandate to “leave no child behind” in Michigan’s classrooms.