Pedagogical Content

Instruction reflects and is consistent with pedagogical content knowledge and is culturally responsive, in order to engage students in disciplinary habits of thinking.

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Facilitate Personal Coping Skills & Strategies

Providing a model of self-regulatory skills is not sufficient for most learners. They will need sustained apprenticeships that include scaffolding. Reminders, models, checklists, and so forth can assist learners in choosing and trying an adaptive strategy for managing and directing their emotional responses to external events (e.g., strategies for coping with anxiety-producing social settings or for reducing task-irrelevant distractors) or internal events (e.g., strategies for decreasing rumination on depressive or anxiety-producing ideation). Such scaffolds should provide sufficient alternatives to meet the challenge of individual differences in the kinds of strategies that might be successful and the independence with which they can be applied.

Provide differentiated models, scaffolds and feedback for:

Managing frustration
Seeking external emotional support
Developing internal controls and coping skills
Appropriately handling subject specific phobias and judgments of “natural” aptitude (e.g., “how can I improve on the areas I am struggling in?” rather than “I am not good at math”)
Use real life situations or simulations to demonstrate coping skills

Optimize Relevance, Value, and Authenticity

Individuals are engaged by information and activities that are relevant and valuable to their interests and goals. This does not necessarily mean that the situation has to be equivalent to real life, as fiction can be just as engaging to learners as non-fiction, but it does have to be relevant and authentic to learners’ individual goals and the instructional goals. Individuals are rarely interested in information and activities that have no relevance or value. In an educational setting, one of the most important ways that teachers recruit interest is to highlight the utility and relevance, of learning and to demonstrate that relevance through authentic, meaningful activities. It is a mistake, of course, to assume that all learners will find the same activities or information equally relevant or valuable to their goals. To recruit all learners equally, it is critical to provide options that optimize what is relevant, valuable, and meaningful to the learner.
Vary activities and sources of information so that they can be:
Personalized and contextualized to learners’ lives
Culturally relevant and responsive
Socially relevant
Age and ability appropriate
Appropriate for different racial, cultural, ethnic, and gender groups
Design activities so that learning outcomes are authentic, communicate to real audiences, and reflect a purpose that is clear to the participants
Provide tasks that allow for active participation, exploration and experimentation
Invite personal response, evaluation and self-reflection to content and activities
Include activities that foster the use of imagination to solve novel and relevant problems, or make sense of complex ideas in creative ways