Marzano's Instructional Strategies #1

The first of Marzano’s Instructional Strategies is Identifying Similarities and Differences. This instructional strategy is thought to be essential to human thought and at the heart of all the learning a person does throughout their life. A student’s ability to use knowledge and understand things they learn is broken into four general categories: direct instruction and presentation of similarities and differences, students independently identifying similarities and differences, representing these identified similarities and differences in different graphic organizers, and using different means of similarities and differences including comparing, classifying, creating metaphors, and using analogies. These categories follow a gradual release model, (I do, we do, you do) which is a best practice for any classroom instruction.  

I have done a lot of Identifying Similarities and Differences with my students. When we study Native American tribes, we use Venn Diagrams to compare the different tribes to one another and analyze how the tribes are alike and different. We also study vertebrate animals and we spend a great deal of time and use many different matrices classifying these animals into different categories. I have not done a lot of work with my students in using metaphors. We do discuss idioms and figurative language quite a bit though. I like Marzano’s example in his book of using the idea of making a sandwich related to writing a paragraph. We think about what kind of sandwich we are hungry for first, then that relates to what kind of writing we want to do and what the purpose of that writing is. I never would have thought to use analogies with my eight-year-old students, but analogies would be very beneficial to them. I can create the analogies to be very applicable to what we are learning in class. For example, in math we can make connections to previous content learned by implementing the analogy: circumference is to circle as perimeter is to polygon.  

Identifying Similarities and Differences is a great way for students to make connections and activate their background knowledge to make their learning more meaningful.