SIM FAQs Learning Strategies
15 Questions
3. How can strategy instruction support students’ success in general education curriculum?
The purpose of strategy instruction is to teach students how to learn content and become independent learners of that content. Students will be more successful in the general education curriculum when they have strategies they can use to support their learning, that they can apply by themselves. Since strategies teach students how to learn and/or express themselves, they provide a way to enhance students’ acquisition of content knowledge.
4. How can I teach strategies to my students who are included full time in general education classes?
Research supports that strategy instruction can benefit all students. While a small group setting would support the delivery of SIM strategy instruction to a group of at-risk learners, there may be times when the students are included in the general education classroom for all of their instruction. In that situation, especially if there is a co-teaching model in place, a teacher can teach strategies to small group(s) of students in a station teaching model. Ideally the group size for strategy instruction would be smaller than the typical total in a general education classroom to enable the teacher to provide immediate feedback and actively engage students in instruction at a high level.
5. Will learning strategies work for all low achievers? Should I teach all of my students learning strategies?
Research shows that learning strategies are beneficial for students who may struggle with the general curriculum as strategies empower students to be more independent and active in their learning, reduce cognitive load during learning, and improve long term retention of taught skills. In the fall 2021 SIM Newsletter, “Excelerating Student Growth through the Strategic Instruction Model” is the following, “Acceleration prepares students to achieve grade level expectations through strategic planning and instruction. The process readies students for new learning and remediates select gaps that are purposeful to current or future learning. Acceleration is not a method to move students more quickly through the curriculum. Instead, acceleration ensures that instruction of critical content is deepened or enhanced. Instructional tools and interventions within the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM™) support remedial and accelerated approaches to close learning gaps.” The learning strategies that SIM developed support both remedial and accelerated approaches to closing learning gaps. Not all students will require the same learning strategies, so data, like pre-tests, should inform both selection and instruction. SIM brochures explain that the Learning Strategies were first designed for students with disabilities, but research has shown that all students can benefit, depending on their needs.
7. Why do strategies take so long to teach?SIM learning strategies take about 3 to 4 weeks of daily instruction, with lesson duration of 30 or more minutes. Students need to reach mastery as they progress through the strategy, which will lead to some variability in how long the strategy will take overall. The SIM strategies brochure contains the following information: “Typically, a SIM Learning Strategy can be taught to mastery in three or four weeks (about 30 to 60 minutes of instruction per day). Teachers follow a research-based eight-stage instructional process to promote mastery and generalization. The time required to complete the process varies, depending on the strategy, teacher skill, and learner characteristics. “
8. I know about teaching strategies, but what’s different about the Strategic Instruction Model?
SIM (Strategic Instruction Model) is a comprehensive approach to adolescent literacy, while learning strategies can cover a variety of learning processes across content areas. UKCRL has partnered with teachers to design SIM instructional materials. High leverage practices for both general and special education are interwoven into SIM, making ready to employ materials for teachers to implement with a solid research base.
9. How can I ensure that students generalize the learned strategies? What kind of hurdles can I expect?
The goal of learning strategy instruction is for students to become independent and able to apply their strategies to any academic or post-secondary situation. To help ensure generalization, the learning strategies are explicitly taught, students work to mastery at each new elementary (ex. SWS, students progress through labeling provided example sentences to creating their own, and building from SV, to SSV, and on showing mastery level independent work at each progression) and each stage, and then need to practice using the strategy across settings. It is essential that teachers monitor progress to move students through the stages of learning in the strategy at the mastery level. There are 8 stages of acquisition and generalization in each learning strategy. They include: Pretest & Commitment, Model, Verbal Practice, Controlled Practice, Advanced Practice, Posttest, and Generalization. Some barriers that may be seen to generalization may include student’s reliance on the verbiage, reinforcement, and visuals provided during explicit strategy instruction. This can be overcome by collaborating across teachers and providing visual supports across settings. Some students may struggle with generalizing across settings more than others, and may need prompts to apply their strategy outside of the setting they are used to working on it. For example, this is seen in resource pull-out group instruction and generalization to the general education classroom. Since the ultimate goal is generalization, a long term commitment across adults to providing consistent feedback and accommodations may help students overcome obstacles they may face in generalization.
11. How important is it to follow the teaching procedures in the manual? I know my students; I know how to teach them.
SIM Learning Strategies have a research based backing that is tied to teaching them with fidelity. The teaching procedures in the Learning Strategies are intended to provide explicit, step by step instructions to support the students through the learning progression to master and then generalize the skill(s) taught. While there may be times to add student specific scaffolds to the lessons, those should be on top of the explicitly structured procedures. Some examples include, adding visual supports, like color coding, to the student learning pages and providing audio support or text to speech using assistive technology. Providing accommodations or scaffolds for students does not impact the teaching procedures. In “Components of SIM” it is stated that, “Our research confirms that appropriate and supportive teaching materials greatly enhance teachers’ ability to provide quality instruction in their classrooms.”
12. Under what conditions can I make adaptations in the teaching procedures and maybe even in the strategies?
When considering adapting teaching procedures or strategy instruction as it is detailed in the teacher manuals, mindfulness that the LS have been researched and the results students showed in research are connected to the explicitly outlined procedures and strategy as a whole. If adaptations are made, first consider accommodations or enhancements that may provide students with what they need to engage in the lesson to the highest possible level. Adaptations can be made to address student learning styles, approaches, and interests without deviating from the explicit, step by step, foundation the LS relies on for fidelity to the research bases results.
If adaptations to the teaching procedures are being considered, take care to see that one change may have an impact on the future progression students will take as they build on skills and work through the learning stages in the strategy instruction. SIM’s website says, “Every instructional procedure we develop must be palatable for teachers. If it’s not, they won’t adopt it for classroom use. Procedures must be powerful enough to make a difference for low-achieving students and must be perceived as valuable by high-achieving and average-achieving students.” Before adapting procedures or the strategy as a whole, try teaching it as it is designed. SIM used feedback from teachers to ensure that classroom practitioners’ perspectives are taken into account and real classroom student data was collected to develop the strategies so they can meet the reality that teachers face.
15. What do you do with all those students who don’t have enough basic skills for learning strategies? About ¼ of my students read at the third grade level or below.
Selecting which SIM Learning Strategy to teach should be based on student data and needs. In consideration of the Learning Strategies for Sentence Writing and Paraphrasing, students may benefit from the strategy instruction while requiring accommodations or adaptations to the learning sheets to access the instructional tasks in the SIM LS. For example, students who have handwriting impacts and/or spelling deficits may require accommodations like speech to text, enlarged lines or spaces on the learning sheets, and audio support to read the learning sheets. The Fall 2021 SIM Newsletter, “Excelerating Student Growth through the Strategic Instruction Model” shares the following:“Remediation of prior critical content and skills, coupled with strategies that support mastery of current curriculum, will maximize student learning.”Remediation may look like providing a phonics based instructional program to target foundational reading skills deficits, and coupling that with Fundamentals in Sentence Writing to address students’ needs to independently be able to express themselves in writing in the general education classroom. The newsletter also says, “Acceleration prepares students to achieve grade level expectations through strategic planning and instruction. The process readies students for new learning and remediates select gaps that are purposeful to current or future learning. Acceleration is not a method to move students more quickly through the curriculum. Instead, acceleration ensures that instruction of critical content is deepened or enhanced. Instructional tools and interventions within the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM™) support remedial and accelerated approaches to close learning gaps.’
16. How do I get administrative support to implement these learning strategies curriculum within my department, school and/or district?
Since SIM is a comprehensive approach, with Learning Strategies addressing a wide range of literacy, self-regulation/social skills, and numeracy skills, along with Content Enhancement routines, administrative support often comes from reviewing the district and/or school specific data to make decisions about which strategies to implement and formulating a training through implementation and coaching plan for the teachers involved. To get administrative support, data analysis and review of existing tiered interventions can provide rationale for bringing learning strategies curriculum into departments, schools, and across a school district. In the Fall 2018 SIM Newsletter, 10 reasons to install SIM strategic curricula in your building are given. They are: empirical validation, outside validation, clear overall goal for students’ to meet demands of regular coursework, instructor’s manuals provide teachers step-by-step directions and administrators with fidelity look fors, student materials, quantifiable measures of student performance, gains in student performance, clear data for decision making, and a focus on literacy that can be used across all tiers. SIM has worked over the years to provide cross walks to show the alignment found between SIM and High Leverage Practices for Students with Disabilities and SIOP for Multilingual Learners. These can help administrators obtain teacher and district level buy-in, and provide confidence that by implementing SIM LS and/or CE, they are supporting other best practices they already have established. In our school district, Charleston County, SIM is complementary to literacy initiatives like LETRS training and implementation for both WIlson Reading SYstem and SRA Reading Mastery/Corrective Reading. This helps ensure we are not asking our teachers to use several different interventions that counteract each other in any way.
20. How does SIM professional development relate to my department, school, and/or district initiatives?
SIM professional development is aligned with adult learning theory, as well as being grounded in the foundation of research-based direct, explicit instructional routines and alignment to best practices like HLPs and SIOP. When teachers participate in SIM professional development, they are engaged in the key components of Praxis. Those components are: self-directed learning, experience, relevance, problem solving, and reflection. The leaders of the development facilitate and/or coach, rather than train by sharing knowledge. Time is spent in discourse and cooperative learning, and allows space for participants to engage in reflection and goal setting to connect to how they would like to apply their learning. The SIM professional development of Learning Strategies and/or Content Enhancements aligns to best practices that most departments, schools and/or districts are already engaged in like HLPs, SIOP, Marzano, and AVID. These are all relevant to Charleston County School District, as well as the need to provide interventions in the MTSS and Special Education tiers.
22. How do I progress monitor when teaching Learning Strategies?
Progress monitoring is embedded in the Learning Strategies. Students progress through the stages of the Learning Strategy based reaching mastery level. As students are working through the Controlled Practice, Advanced Practice, Post-Test, and Generalization stages to reach mastery levels indicated in the Learning Strategy. Students receive immediate feedback on their independent practice at each stage and chart their progress. Those data logs can be used, when appropriate, for IEP goal progress monitoring as well as guiding instruction and progression through the Learning Strategy being taught. If you follow the guidance in the teacher manual, you will find that you are monitoring the progress of each student.
23. How are Learning Strategies and Content Enhancement Routines related?
The SIM Learning Strategies and Content Enhancement Routines emphasize explicit instruction and active learning. They are both in the Strategic Instruction Model, with the Learning Strategies focusing on equipping students with specific skills and the Content Enhancement Routines help teachers organize and teach the content to best support student mastery. Teachers often use Content Enhancement to plan for the needs of the whole group, and can provide small group instruction to target deficit skills using Learning Strategies.
26. How can I embed learning strategy instruction into the general education curriculum? What adjustments can be made.
Learning strategy instruction can be embedded in the general curriculum with 1 teacher or in a co-teaching classroom. Ideally, learning strategy instruction would be delivered to small group(s) to support student opportunities to respond at a high frequency, immediate corrective and positive feedback to students by the teacher, and ease the individualization of instruction so each student can reach mastery of essential skills and/or content. This can be done during time in the general education schedule when small group instruction can be added to the ELA block. Some schools have intervention time built into their master schedules, which allows for either the classroom teacher, interventionist, or special education to deliver instruction to homogeneous by need grouped students. In a co-teaching model, one or both teachers could provide learning strategy instruction to target whole class needs or small group needs of students in the class. Depending on the master schedule requirements per district or school, adjustments may need to be made to find the best fit time and determine which teacher, when more than 1 are available, will deliver learning strategy instruction.
30. What components of corrective feedback are necessary for successful strategy instruction?
Corrective feedback is a critical component of SIM Learning Strategy instruction, and is detailed in the teacher manuals and professional development. Teachers need to provide immediate, clear/explicit feedback that details what the student did well or incorrectly. Feedback should be positive or constructive, while also ensuring that students know when they make an error and know how to do that step correctly so that students increase independence and reach mastery. Targeted feedback during guided practice helps students correctly practice and apply skills they are learning, with the goal of increasing student self-monitoring so they can generalize the skills across environments and academic tasks. Feedback on students’ independent work on learning sheets needs to be corrective and explicit related to the skill they are learning in SIM. All feedback should be explicit, immediate, and constructive.
