STRATEGIC INSTRUCTION MODEL (SIM)
Strategic Instruction Model
Center for Research on Learning (CRL)
The University of Kansas
TARGET STUDENTS
Grades 4-12. Originally focused on students with disabilities, particularly those with learning disabilities, the program now aims more broadly at assisting at-risk individuals to improve their chances of academic success. The model is developed for students who already have basic decoding and word recognition skills.
PROGRAM PURPOSE
The Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) was developed by Donald Deshler, Jeanne Schumaker, and their colleagues at the Center for Research on Learning (CRL). It is a collection of teaching routines and student learning strategies developed originally to help students with disabilities build essential skills and learn complex subject matter. In the program’s words, “SIM strives to help teachers make decisions about what is of greatest importance, what we can teach students to help them to learn, and how to teach them well.”
CRL has been conducting school-based research on instructional support for students with learning disabilities for almost 25 years. Their emphasis is on assisting students with learning disabilities and other high-risk groups to become more active learners and improve their mastery of important content in the major content areas. CRL trains teachers to understand the strategies, directly teach them to their students, and embed them in their own curriculum materials and lessons. Teachers learn routines for enhancing the way they teach information and concepts in academically diverse classrooms. Recently, CRL has been investigating how whole schools can bring a strategic approach across the content areas. A number of specific strategies focus on reading and writing skills; these constitute two strands of the seven strands of their larger SIMS curriculum, and are the focus of this description. They can be used in conjunction with unit and lesson design strategies for teachers and content enhancement strategies for students.
APPROACH
Philosophy. SIM is guided by the philosophy that:
- Most low-achieving adolescents can learn to function independently in mainstream settings.
- The role of the support-class teacher is to teach low-achieving adolescents strategies that will enable them to be independent learners and performers.
- 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 low-achieving adolescents.
- Adolescents should have a major voice in decisions about what strategies they are to learn and how fast they are to learn these strategies.
Instructional focus. Comprehension, particularly of expository, content area text, such as text books, and vocabulary. The program assumes that students have essential word identification, phonemic, and decoding skills.
Instructional components. The program has developed two kinds of interventions, those that are teacher focused and those that are student focused, to address “the performance gap between what students are expected to do and what students are able to do.” Teachers learn to use content enhancement routines, research-based practices for teaching complex content to academically diverse groups of students. For example, the Anchoring Routine connects new information to previously learned information. Students paraphrase the information into an integrated summary. Students acquire student learning strategies to increase their content learning. A strategy is how a student thinks and acts when planning, executing, and evaluating performance on a task and its outcomes. Students who do not know or use good learning strategies often approach learning passively.
Teachers learn both content enhancement routines and student learning strategies and practice integrating them into their own curricula and lessons to meet their own students’ needs. SIMS includes comprehension strategies for paraphrasing, self-questioning, and visual imagery. Vocabulary strategies include a Word Identification Strategy that helps students guess the meaning of unfamiliar words by using context and word analysis. Another vocabulary strategy (LINCS) teaches students to use key-word mnemonics to create associations to a word. Strategies related to expressing information in writing include a Sentence Writing Strategy and a Paragraph Writing Strategy.
Setting. Content enhancement routines and learning strategies are designed to be used in both special education classrooms and content area classrooms that include an academically diverse group of students.
Materials. SIM includes an array of supporting programs and materials designed to improve communication and teaming both within the classroom and within the larger community. Materials in the form of books, CD-ROMs, and videotapes provide guidance for building learning communities, enhancing social skills, and improving a variety of skills for use in the classroom and other group settings. The use of these programs and materials supports an important goal: to avoid a fragmented educational experience for students. Teaming can help provide a sustained, well-coordinated, and well-orchestrated balance of curriculum content, skills, and strategies.
Alignment with standards: The comprehension and vocabulary strategies align with those standards in most states.
ASSESSMENT
SIM includes assessments that teachers can use for diagnosis and progress monitoring. Progress toward mastery of each strategy is monitored during controlled and advanced practices and clearly documented on progress charts.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) workshops focus on the essential characteristics of learning strategies curricula, the critical attributes related to successfully teaching learning strategies to all students in a class, and how the teacher can prompt good strategy use. Workshops are conducted by certified SIM instructors and available in a network of regional centers across the country. According to SIM materials, 175,000 teachers have been trained in more then 3500 districts.
EFFECTIVENESS
CRL research staff have conducted studies of their approach for over 20 years and documented promising results in many classrooms and schools. Studies can be obtained from the website below. A study of the efficacy of the program is currently being conducted by an outside research group, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) with funds from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U. S. Department of Education.
COST
Teachers pay a fee for attending SIMS workshops; there is no adoption fee.
Contacting SIM. The program website is www.ku-crl.org/iei/sim/components.html. Information can also be obtained from the SEDL website.
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