Nine Strategies for

Marzano’s
Effective Instruction
What is Marzano’s Nine Strategies for Effective Instruction?
Who might Marzano be, you might ask? In the education field he is known as a leading educational researcher who has written
over forty books and hundreds of articles. Robert Marzano created a model for effective teaching that is referred by many
educators today. His model helps teachers and other education roles measure the success of highly effective teachers.

Marzano believes that teachers that are more engaging and take on more ownership of learning have students that retain more of
the information taught.

Below I am going to break down all nine of his strategies that are also broken into three categories; creating an environment for
learning, helping students develop understanding, and extending and applying knowledge.

Creating an Environment for Learning.

Who might Marzano be, you might ask? In the education field he is known as a leading educational researcher who has written
over forty books and hundreds of articles. Robert Marzano created a model for effective teaching that is referred by many
educators today. His model helps teachers and other education roles measure the success of highly effective teachers.

Marzano believes that teachers that are more engaging and take on more ownership of learning have students that retain more of
the information taught.

Below I am going to break down all nine of his strategies that are also broken into three categories; creating an environment for
learning, helping students develop understanding, and extending and applying knowledge.

Strategy One – Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback

Coming to our first strategy, setting objectives as a teacher is extremely important, it is what we base our lessons on and
make sure students understand. If we did not have objectives, then we have no framework for the information that is
needed to be taught and no goals that we want the students to achieve.

Objectives tell the students what they will be able to do by the time the lesson is complete and should be easily adaptable
to the students not the students to the objectives. Communicating with your students on why they are learning
something and how it will benefit them will help them make real world connections instead of thinking they have to do
something because you are the teacher and you said so.

When creating objectives, you need to make sure that you make a clear connection between what students will learn
and what they are supposed to do in the lesson. The clearer you can be on the instructions the easier it will be for
students to understand the information. One thing to keep in mind when setting objectives is that they need to be
specific and not restrictive for the students.

When going through a lesson make sure you give your students feedback; it needs to be explicit guidance to help
students adjust their learning and should be given throughout the lesson. A few things to remember when giving
feedback:
1. Good feedback should be specific
2. Good feedback is provided in time for student needs
3. Good feedback should be criteria referenced
Along with giving good feedback, there are also some pitfalls you want to avoid when giving it.

1. Do not give feedback that is too general like “good job”, this generic feedback does not tell the student what
they did good on or what needs to be improved.
2. Make sure you have a clear vision on how students are supposed to master a lesson, know the information and
the expectations
3. Do not give feedback too late, feedback should be given before an assessment or it becomes pointless and does
not give the student the opportunity to make revisions

Strategy Two – Recognizing Effort & Providing Recognition

When students are working you want to make sure that the effort they are giving is recognized. Students need to stay
motivated through assignments, that means that you need to highlight the connection between what students do in and
out of the class and what that helps them achieve. A few practices you can implement to reinforce effort are:

1. Teach your students the relationship between achievement and effort

2. Provide guidance about expending effort in different academic areas

Something you need to remember when we want to provide a student with recognition is that it needs to sincere. If we
do not give sincere recognition, then it can be ineffective because it is not being used properly for the benefit of the
student receiving it. Here are a few thoughts on what should be included when planning on giving recognition to a
student:

1. Make sure that you give recognition that promotes a mastery goal orientation
2. Recognition or praise that is given should be specific and should align with the expected performance from the
student
3. When giving praise make sure that it is simple and direct

Strategy Three – Cooperative Learning

Cooperative learning is where students learn through social interactions, not just with their instructor but with the other
peers in the classroom. When wanting to add cooperative learning into a lesson, as a teacher you need to plan carefully
to make sure it flows and facilitate it in a way that adds to the lesson instead of creating an awkward transition. Educators
have found that there are two important factors when implementing cooperative learning:

1. As an educator you want a positive interdependence within the student factor which is seen as the
teacher designing group roles and tasks that each student should be responsible for in the workload
2. Create a way that there is individual accountability, each member should get clear feedback about their own effort
contributed to the end goal

Within cooperative learning a teacher has three different group models they can choose from: informal, formal, or base
groups.

1. Informal – an informal group is formed to process new learning or engage in practice / shoulder partners
2. Formal – a formal group is organized around a large assignment / last for days or weeks
3. Base groups – base groups are designed to provide students with support for an extended period of time (semester
or yearly)
We now know what cooperative learning is and how that might look in the classroom but what are the best kind of
practices can be used to implement this?

1. Make sure to keep group sizes small, no more than 5 students so everyone has an equal role and participation
2. Groups should be used consistently and systematically; students respond better to well organized and on a regular
basis rather than sporadically
3. As an educator you want to give clear directions on how students should act during group work
Helping Students Develop Understanding.
The subcategory is the biggest chunk out of the three, it covers four different strategies that Marzano created. This section is for a
teacher to be aware of different options a student has on understanding the given information and ways to study that material.

Strategy Four – Cues, Questions, and Advanced Organizers

When you want students to access prior knowledge you want to use cues, questions, and advanced organizers to do this.
Cues can be used to give students hints about the lesson without giving the whole answer away. At the beginning of a
lesson, you want to use advanced organizers to identify relationships within the material and relate material to students'
prior knowledge.

Cues, questions, and advanced organizers help focus learning on important points within the lesson. These three things
are important because it creates curiosity in students and create interest where there was none to begin with.
Using higher-order questions can help students deepen their knowledge by requiring the use of critical thinking skills.

Strategy Five – Nonlinguistic Representations

All around us there are nonlinguistic representations that trigger our knowledge. A common nonlinguistic representation
is when we see a 3D model of a cell, without going through the lesson we already know what this is with just looking at
it. Being able to connect images to information helps student increase their knowledge and create stronger connections
to their long term memory. Nonlinguistic representations are known to help elaborate or add to existing knowledge and
should be used in combination with other ways, like written information. There are five common tools to implement
nonlinguistic representation, such as:

1. Graphic organizers - Shapes and drawings to help students organize information conceptually.
2. Physical models & manipulatives – physical objects students can use to practice with a concept
3. Visualizing – creating mental images to associate with a concept or idea
4. Pictures and illustrations – using or creating them can help represent learning in ways that are useful for the
students
5. Kinesthetic activity – engages in physical movements while learning and helps solidify things in the brain

As educators we see that there are many ways to implement nonlinguistic representations but what are the best practices
for these. A summary of the best practices is:

1. Before using one make sure you model through demonstrations and think alouds
2. Provide different opportunities to use a nonlinguistic representation (model how to use more than one as they
learn a new concept or term)
3. Teach how to use nonlinguistic representations as a tool for other strategies

Strategy Six – Summarizing and Notetaking

Note taking or summarizing is a common strategy that has been used for years in the classroom environment throughout
lessons, but do we know when the best time to use it is or how to implement it in a way that helps our students instead
of hinder them. When introducing new content we want to implement note taking because it is the most effective so
students can reference back to the information provided. Most effective in lessons that focus on new academic content.

Most of the time students do not know how to take effective notes or write down whites important for them to know.
As teachers we should provide that guidance by modeling what good note taking is and how to do so properly.
Remember that when you take notes or create a note taking worksheet, there are more than one way to do this. Some
note taking strategies include:

1. Help create notes while information is being presented

2. Providing a template while taking notes and model how to use it
3. Teach a variety of note taking formats that are best for them
4. Cornell notes or thinking maps
 Summarizing is another activity educators use when they want their students to regurgitate what they learned from the
lesson they just went over. This is also used when students are asked to explain what a passage said or what their
takeaway was from that piece of information. One thing that not many people know is that there are steps to
summarize. As a teacher you want to be able to summarize the information you are explaining in that makes it easy for
the students to understand, which can look like:

1. Take out the stuff that is not important to understanding

2. Take out words that repeat information
3. Replace a list of things with one word that describes them
4. Find or create a topic sentence

Strategy Seven – Assigning Homework and Providing Practice

As an educator, assigning homework can be a tricky because you want the students to benefit from the material instead
of it becoming cumbersome. The goal of assigning homework is to give the students extra practice on the information
they learned that day and also to reinforce that information from their short term memory to their long term memory.

Two kinds of practice include standard practice and overt practice, standard practice is the most common in classrooms
and can be implemented as reading passages. Standard practice is seen as not being as effective as we hope but when you
implement overt practice, like using flash cards for vocabulary or key facts, it can be even more effective.

Extending and Applying Knowledge.

The last two strategies are combined in third category of Marzano's; extend and apply knowledge. When a teacher helps student
extend and apply knowledge, they are empowering those students to apply and create with their new understandings. Students
are able to use the new information and secure it into their long-term memory by putting that information to practice and
creating connections to their previous knowledge and experiences.

Strategy Eight – Identifying Similarities and Differences

Identifying similarities and differences is a powerful set of strategies to help students think at higher level and understand
conceptually. Identifying the differences and similarities helps individuals make sense of the world around us and in turn
leads us to important questions.

Within this category there are four different sub-categories for identifying similarities and differences; comparing and
contrasting (analyzing how things are alike and different), classifying (organizing things into groups), creating metaphors
(identifying the same general pattern in two different topics), and creating analogies (identifying relationships between
pairs of concepts).

Comparing and contrasting (analyzing how things are alike and different) - One way to look at this is to create a process
that students can follow like:

1. Select the items to compare

2. Identify which characteristics of the two items to base the comparisons on
3. Ask students to explain how the two things are similar or different base on those characteristics

Classifying (organizing things into groups) - A process to help organize things into groups is by teaching students are to
do that in the first place:

1. Identify the items to classify

2. Select an item, identify its key attributes, then identify other items with those same attributes
3. Create a category based on the attribute that times must have for membership
4. Combine categories or split into smaller categories

Creating metaphors (identifying the same general pattern in two different topics) - To explain metaphors there is a four
step process that teachers can teach to achieve this:

1. Identify the most basic or important elements

2. Write the basic information as a pattern, but replace specific words with general words
3. Find a different situation (or thing) to which this same pattern applies
 Creating analogies (identifying relationships between pairs of concepts) - To make analogies an effective tool for students
to use, you need to make sure that at least one pair of relationships in the analogy are familiar. To do this you can show
the steps:
1. Identify how the items in the first pair of things is related
2. State the relationship
3. Identify another pair of things that has a similar relationship

To create the best practice for identifying similarities and differences is by implementing the practice correctly. As
educators we can do this by:

1. Select the strategy that fits the experience

2. Model the strategy prior to students practicing
3. Strategies should be used to teach academic objectives, not as objectives

Strategy Nine – Generating and Testing Hypotheses

As a whole, generating and testing hypotheses is teaching the student to ask "what if...?", help students make an educated
guess about the answer to a question that they then will be tested on. When you want students to generate and test
hypotheses you want students to analyze, evaluate and to think deeply behind relationships behind different
phenomena.

Something to remember when bringing this topic up to students you want to address that hypotheses are not just for the
science subject. This ability can be implemented in all different content areas. One way to engage your students is by a
problem-solving process. The problem-solving process commonly looks like:

1. Identify a goal
2. Describe barriers or constrains
3. Identify different solutions and hypothesize which one will work
4. Try out the solution
5. Explain whether the hypothesis was correct

Another way to address this category is by involving students in investigations, this implements the same way of doing
things but does not bog down the student by having them think this is science class. When you involve students in
investigating it involves identifying or resolving issues regarding past events for which there are confusions or
contradictions. Including students in conducting investigations includes a couple of steps, like:

1. Identify the situation

2. Identify what is known or agreed upon about the situation
3. Offer a hypothetical scenario, based on what you understand and know
4. Analyze evidence to determine if that hypothetical scenario is plausible.

The goal as an educator is this area is to move students away from "right-answer learning", which is very common and
what students are most used to. To best do this, as a teacher you need to:

1. Model a strategy before having students do it

2. Provide resources
3. Ask questions, provide cues, and give timely feedback

Concluding Thoughts.
Do you feel content overloaded? I would understand if you do because everything that was discussed above explains a lot of
information. One thing you can do with all this information is take it one section at a time and digest it. You do not have to
implement it all at once, you can slowly integrate it if you are not already.

Good luck and enjoy!

References -
http://csrmedia.education.asu.edu/Sanford_Inspire_Program/Phase_1/Nine_Strategies_for_Effective_Instruction/story_html5.ht
ml?_ga=2.166437246.1927683792.1601390666-572335588.1594243649

https://resilienteducator.com/classroom-resources/overview-of-robert-marzanos-model-of-teaching-effectiveness/

https://www.marzanoresources.com/resources/tips/atl_tips_archive/