What is the most important thing to consider when choosing teaching strategies?

Gather a room of teachers together and they will give you as many teaching strategies as there are topics in the primary curriculum.

This article introduces the 13 most important teaching strategies you should be using – the ones that have been proven to work in schools like yours and the ones that we use every week with the 7000 pupils we teach in our one-to-one interventions.  

We also include the 6 learning strategies that your pupils should also know about to enable them to move their own learning forwards.

The most effective teaching and learning strategies

Teaching and learning strategies taken from the best of UK education research

One of the great advances that has been made in the last 5 years in the education sector in the UK is the increasing influence of large scale research and evidence informing what we know about how children learn, and consequently how we can better teach them.

Whether that’s a greater awareness of the EEF Toolkit and their randomised controlled trials, the growing ResearchEd movement, or even just the vibrant #edutwitter community, many more teachers now are taking their professional development into their own hands.

More teachers than ever are aware of John Hattie’s ‘Index of Teaching and Learning Strategies’, and wary of implementing new instructional strategies unthinkingly; no-one wants to be stung by another ‘learning styles’ waste of effort.

But even when you know there may be better and more efficient ways to develop your students’ understanding, choosing which of these teaching strategies to start with can be a challenge. This article aims to guide you through this.

What are teaching strategies? 

Teaching strategies are methods and techniques that a teacher will use to support their pupils or students through the learning process; a teacher will chose the teaching strategy most suitable to the topic being studied, the level of expertise of the learner, and the stage in their learning journey.

In one lesson a teacher may use many different teaching strategies with different end goals. The most effective teaching strategies are those proven to work over large scale trials. There is no requirement for a teaching strategy to be innovative although of course some of them are.

Free CPD Powerpoint: How To Teach Problem Solving and Reasoning

A resource to use with teachers explaining the principles behind how to teach problem solving and reasoning as well as practical strategies to deploy in supporting maths learners

Download Free Now!

List of teaching strategies for primary school

These are the 13 most important teaching strategies that you and all the teachers in your school should at least have in your teaching toolkit.

No-one is suggesting you will use them in every lesson, but an awareness of what they are and the results you can expect is essential to move your practice on.

And of course if you’re a school leader, or responsible for CPD in your school, knowing what’s current and evidence-backed is key so that you can make an informed choice the next time somebody suggests implementing a new or innovative teaching technique.

1. Know Your Pupils and Develop Their Respect

This may sound basic, but the basis of all good teaching is an understanding of your pupils and their learning needs. Allied to this is the respect you are held in by your pupils. The relationship between teacher and student is a vital element of the learning experience. Take time to get to know a new class from the first day, understand what motivates them their barriers to learning. This is an often overlooked teaching strategy.

All our one-to-one tutors are made aware before working with a pupil if they have any special educational needs, and take the time to get to know each pupil throughout the 1-to-1 lessons by asking about their hobbies and interests or the kinds of things they’ve been learning in school.

Read more: How to Support a Child with Autism in the Classroom

In this way, whenever possible a tutor can personalise a lesson or a teaching technique as appropriate to the child with a real world example.

2. Appropriate use of Summative and Formative Assessments

The first stage here is making sure you know the difference between formative and summative assessment. It may sound obvious but you’d be surprised how many teachers don’t use each appropriately.

To cover them quickly:

Summative assessment refers to an assessment that takes place after a block of work has been completed, whether this is a term or a year. They are best thought of as assessments of learning.

Formative assessments are those that take place day-to-day and are used to gauge pupils’ understanding of a topic – they are assessments for learning. Formative assessment is often used in a diagnostic capacity, to help us identify whether pupils are struggling with a topic in the moment. This then guides and adapts our instruction during the lesson, to better meet children’s needs.

Diagnosis of children’s gaps using formative assessments

We advocate the use of these kinds of diagnostic assessment to identifies a child’s misconceptions. Usually this is best achieved through a set of multiple choice questions.

As well as the correct answer, we can include multiple distractors – answers that are incorrect based on a misconception a child may have e.g. around multiplying. If a child chooses an incorrect answer therefore, we can easily identify exactly where their thinking has gone wrong.

You can download our sample diagnostic quizzes (all including distractors and explanations of them) for free.

An example page from one of our Diagnostic Quizzes

For pupils on our one-to-one maths interventions, we use a diagnostic quiz a the start of the intervention which is responsive based on answers to an earlier question. This helps us more clearly identify not just misconceptions and weaknesses, but also where a child’s strengths lie and what therefore needs less time spent on.

3. Teach the Vocabulary 

With the new focus in the curriculum on knowledge organisers, there’s no excuse for children being without the relevant topic vocabulary. They need the words to be able to create the thoughts and the sentences to confidently speak about a given topic.

This is why our tutors will always talk through any specialist maths words at the start of a lesson with their pupils, explaining any new terms and checking for understanding of previously covered ones.

A slide from the intervention lessons, showing the vocabulary that tutors
may highlight to pupils.

We recommended co-creating your maths vocabulary lists with your pupils. This Maths Vocabulary List is a great start.

4. Explicit Instruction

Also known as direct instruction, this teaching strategy is highly teacher-led, and focuses on frequent questioning and guided practice to help pupils learn a topic.

The backbone of explicit instruction is the use of the worked example in an Example-Problem Pair. This involves demonstrating a worked example in its entirety in silence alongside a problem that pupils will then attempt.

A worked example from How I Wish I’d Taught Maths by Craig Barton

Silence is important in order to ensure pupils’ attention is not split between the example and the spoken explanation, making it more likely that both will be more fully absorbed and retained.

A pupil on a Third Space Learning’s online maths intervention programme will necessarily have all other distractions eliminated so they can focus entirely on the information on their screen and what the tutor is asking them to do; tutors can present a worked example in real time in a learning environment without any visual or auditory disruptions.

5. Effective Questioning Techniques 

While we are all aware of the importance of questioning as a tool to gauge pupils’ understanding of a topic, there are definite techniques to improve the efficacy of your questioning in the classroom.

Questions such as “Are you sure?” and “How do you know?” encourage pupils to engage in some basic critical thinking to establish how confident they are in an answer and why, while others such as “Is there another way?” help to highlight where multiple methods to derive a solution may exist.

Our tutors encourage pupils to verbalise their reasoning and ask questions to ensure pupils have really got to grips with the topic at-hand: “How do you know that answer is right?”, “Can you tell me how else you could work it out?” or “What do you need to do first to answer this question?” are all questions that come up frequently during our lessons!

Goal free problems are another questioning strategy worth considering using in your classes.

6. Deliberate Practice 

One of the most effective ways of introducing new concepts to a class, Deliberate Practice involves breaking learning down into a series of sub skills, each of which is deliberately practiced in turn.

The 5 steps involved in deliberate practice are:

1. Isolate the skill
2. Develop the skill
3. Assess the skill
4. Final performance
5. Retrieval practice later

You can find a full explanation of each of these stages in our blog post on deliberate practice in education.

But as an example, when teaching long multiplication method at KS2 we might use deliberate practice thus:

• Identify (isolate) each specific sub skill involved in the long multiplication method;
• Practise (develop) each of these one by one; 
• assess pupils’ use of these skills before moving on;
• have pupils put them all together for a final performance – in this case a full long multiplication problem;
• return to this topic in later weeks and months to check pupils still retain those skills.

At the beginning of every Third Space Learning intervention session pupils are given a warm-up question related to a previously covered topic; this enables tutors to check that they have retained the relevant skills (and where they have not, to return to the topic).

Warm up as part of Third Space Learning’s retrieval practice

7. Differentiation  

Far more than simply “splitting the whole class into small groups based on attainment”, positive and effective differentiation at the primary school level can be difficult to achieve – poor differentiation strategies risk actually widening the attainment gap we’re attempting to close.

But there are plenty of impactful differentiation strategies; techniques such as interleaving and phased learning, as well as the use of maths manipulatives and formative assessment, are among those proven to have a beneficial impact on pupils when properly employed.

As we’ve already discussed, formative assessment is a significant aspect of how Third Space’s tutors gauge pupil progress. But we also make use of several other differentiation strategies during lessons, such as spaced practice, interleaving and a mixture of direct instruction and inquiry-based learning.

8. Reinforcing Effort/Providing Recognition

Helping pupils make a link between putting effort into a task and receiving recognition is an important step in developing a classroom environment that fosters active learning.

Encouraging pupils to put more effort into activities only goes so far without something to provide them with the motivation to do so. Praise and recognition are motivators that pupils are already familiar with; shifting them from being correct to giving full effort can be highly effective.

Third Space Learning’s tutors establish an effort-focused environment right from the first session, encouraging pupils to talk through their answers and celebrate their mistakes as learning opportunities, ensuring they approach each intervention as another chance to try.

Since we began our intervention programmes, our tutors have celebrated and rewarded pupil effort by awarding over 32 MILLION Effort Points!

9. Metacognition

Literally ‘thinking about thinking’, metacognition has been recognised by the EEF as one of the most effective, lowest cost teaching strategies there is, with pupil making an average of seven months’ additional progress.

Metacognition in primary schools often incorporates some of the other effective teaching strategies, such as questioning in the classroom – “How do you know?” not only asks pupils to justify their solutions, but has them thinking about their own thought processes for deriving that solution.

Teaching pupils how to learn maths, plan, monitor and self-evaluate their learning also improves pupil motivation and encourages them to work harder in lessons, tying into another teaching strategy.

All our tutors are trained to use a variety of metacognitive strategies as standard during sessions, and we provide pupils with numerous moments for self-reflection both during and after sessions.

10. Personalised Learning

It might sound obvious, but pupils are more likely to engage with learning when is more targeted to them and appeals to their interests! This may be difficult to achieve early on – especially with a full class of 30 pupils – but as familiarity and rapport builds throughout the year it should become easier to make activities and even questions more personalised to individual children.

At Third Space, we’ve built our online interventions on personalisation; all our pupils undertake an Initial Diagnostic Assessment when they begin their programmes, which identifies their strengths and weaknesses in maths and allows us to design a lesson plan that helps them make progress where they need it.

An example question from Third Space’s diagnostic assessment

Our tutors then build on this by adding a personal touch to those lessons, incorporating pupils’ interests into lessons with ease thanks to our online platform.

11. Collaborative Learning

Also referred to as ‘cooperative learning’, the idea of having pupils work in groups for certain classroom activities won’t be new to most teachers.

But the EEF notes that the impact of group work can vary widely, and that to make it most effective teachers should focus on well-structured tasks that promote talk and interaction between pupils.

The concept of ‘competitive’ collaborative learning (where groups of students compete against one another) has been shown to have some impact, but caution is advised in case pupils focus more on the competition rather than the learning.

12. Explicitly Teach Thinking Skills & Problem Solving Techniques

Mathenatical problem solving techniques don’t always come naturally to pupils; while metacognitive strategies such as those mentioned above make it more likely that pupils will be able to apply critical thinking to a problem, there is no set way to ensure that this will happen.

Research into the topic suggests that context-agnostic deployment of problem solving techniques only occurs once pupils have secure domain knowledge, and the opportunity to practise.

Without these, pupils often fall into the trap of attributing importance to the so-called ‘surface features’ of a problem, which we naturally discount as irrelevant to the actual maths involved.

That said, explicit teaching of thinking skills is still of considerable importance; once domain knowledge has been (relatively) secured, teaching pupils how to recognise and focus on the ‘deep structure’ of problems enables them to apply their knowledge more effectively.

Try using several ‘Same Surface Different Deep’ (SSDD) problems in lessons – where the surface features of the questions are the same, but the deep structure varies (e.g. division, multiplication, addition etc.).

These questions eliminate any confusion regarding surface features and thus allow pupils to focus on differentiating the deep structures.

An example SSDD question, taken from ssddproblems.com

In the run-up to the SATs, your Year 6 pupils may unintentionally revert to focusing on the ‘surface features’ of questions when encountering the reasoning papers.

To help combat this, make sure you and they are aware of the different types of maths reasoning questions in year 6 to help them identify not just the maths problem solving techniques they need to know, but the types of questions that are likely to require certain techniques.

13. Modelling and Scaffolding

You may already be familiar with the “I do, We do, You do” method of scaffolding, but it’s worth taking some time to dive into why it’s as effective as it is.

Modelling is one of the most important factors in ensuring student learning of a particular topic, but it is most impactful when it can introduce new concepts without increasing pupils’ cognitive load – hence the ‘I, We You’ approach.

By building from teacher-led, to joint construction, to independent working, we create a structure that presents learning as less of a step-change and more of an actual process. It also allows us greater flexibility; more time can be spent on one stage e.g. joint construction is it becomes necessary.

Gradual scaffolding with support slides

All Third Space Learning intervention lessons make use of this kind of gradual scaffolding method, and our online platform lends even more flexibility to the scaffolding structure – tutors can pull from a bank of ‘support slides’ if spending more time on a concept or process is necessary.

A sample support slide from TSL’s online platform.

Other Teaching Strategies To Consider

The teaching strategies above form the basis of our one-to-one lessons, but some other teaching practices you’ll need to consider in your own classroom include :Use of education technology
Knowing when and where to bring technology into the classroom is a delicate balancing act. While children tend to react well to technology-based lessons, there’s always the risk that they focus on the tech over the learning.
Read more: How To Do An Education Technology Audit In Your School 

Behaviour management
Effective classroom management is its own topic, but there’s no doubt that a well-behaved class (not necessarily a perfectly-behaved one) is far more likely to engage with lessons.

Inquiry-based learning 
While triggering the curiosity of your pupils for a topic is the necessary first step in inquiry-based learning, presenting them with the opportunity to research and report on the topic is where learning really occurs.

How you manage class discussions e.g. ‘Think, pair, share’
Somewhat related to behaviour management, class or group discussions are most beneficial when they have a clear, well-established structure to them. Students should not only feel they have the opportunity to share their thoughts, but understand that others’ thoughts also have value.

Feedback process and understanding
The single most impactful teaching strategy when used correctly, feedback (whether from the teacher or another source e.g. peer marking) needs to be specific, encouraging and actionable – pupils need to be able to understand where they could improve, and how.
Read more: Why My School Banned Marking

Growth Mindset
Separate from praise and rewarding effort, developing growth mindset can be a very valuable tool in developing pupils’ resilience and fostering a more positive attitude towards both maths specifically and learning in general.
Read more: How To Get Growth Mindset Right In Primary Schools

Read more

• Quality First Teaching Strategies Checklist
• Introduction to Cognitive Load
• Teaching Bottom Set Maths
• EEF Putting Evidence To Work Report Summary
• Primary School Teachers’ Guide To Learning and Memory
• What Is Variation Theory?
• Dyscalculia In Schools: A Guide To Identifying And Supporting Pupils With ‘Maths Dyslexia’
• ADHD In The Classroom

List of Learning Strategies

Last, but not least, central to any good teaching practice is explicitly teaching learners of all ages about learning strategies. These are the 6 learning strategies we think every student should be familiar with by the end of Year 6.

1. Spaced Practice

Ensuring that learned material is revisited at regular intervals instead of all at once much later on, when more of it is likely to be forgotten. For older students, study calendars can be of immense help in the run-up to major milestones such as the KS2 SATs.

2. Retrieval Practice

Retrieval is the process of recalling information purely from memory, without the aid of learning materials. Effective retrieval practice helps embed information more thoroughly in our minds, since we no longer need context to recall it.

3. Elaboration

Tied into questioning in the classroom, elaboration puts the onus on pupils to do more than ‘just’ recalling information. The use of open ended questions such as “How did I get that answer” help pupils to make connections between the things they’ve learnt rather than seeing them as several unrelated facts.

4. Interleaving

A wealth of research is now available that suggests the benefits of interleaving – mixing practice of different skills with one another – in helping pupils better identify the necessary strategies to solve different problems. Interleaving with connected topics (e.g. division and multiplication) amplifies this effect. Our Year 6 maths revision programme is built on this.

5. Concrete Examples

As maths educators the Concrete Pictorial Abstract Approach is embedded into the way we teach. Within our online tuition, we have many different ways of explaining a topic and as an extension we may ask pupils to come up with their own concrete examples for concepts, based on the examples we’ve used in explaining the concept to them.

6. Dual Coding

Combining words and visuals in teaching materials. This isn’t referring to speech (as we established earlier), but having pupils create some kind of visual aid (e.g. a sketch, a diagram) to accompany written text can help them reinforce the concept in their brain in two different ways, making it easier to recall. Anyone who’s created slides for their pupils will be familiar with the challenge of imparting information through words + pictures.

What is the most important thing to consider in teaching?

Why is it important to select teaching strategies?

What is the first factor to consider when selecting a teaching strategy?

What is the most important learning strategy?