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The TCI Approach
The TCI Approach consists of a series of instructional practices that allows
students of all abilities to experience key social studies concepts.
The TCI Approach is characterized by eight features:
Theory-Based Active Instruction
Lessons and activities are based on five well-established theories:
- • Understanding by Design – Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe believe
that teaching for deep understanding requires planning backward—first determining
the big ideas students are to learn and then working backward to identify methods to reach
those goals and ways to assess the effectiveness of teaching.
- • Nonlinguistic Representation – Many psychologists believe that we think and remember better
when we store information in both linguistic and nonlinguistic forms.
Research by Robert Marzano and colleagues demonstrates that teaching
with nonlinguistic activities such as graphic organizers, mental images,
and movement helps to improve students’ understanding of content.
- • Multiple Intelligences – According to Howard Gardner’s revolutionary theory,
every student is intelligent – just not in the same way. Because everyone learns in a different way,
the best activities tap more than one kind of intelligence. Gardner has described these seven intelligences:
verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, body-kinesthetic, musical-rhythmic, interpersonal,
and intrapersonal.
- • Cooperative Interaction – Elizabeth Cohen’s research has led her to conclude that cooperative
groupwork leads to learning gains and to higher student achievement. Cohen has found that if students
are trained in cooperative behaviors, placed in mixed-ability groups, and assigned roles to complete
during a multiple-ability task, they tend to interact more equally. This increased student interaction
leads to more learning and great content retention.
- • Spiral Curriculum – Educational theorist Jerome Bruner championed the idea of
the spiral curriculum, in which students learn progressively more difficult concepts through
a process of step-by-step discovery. With this approach, all students can learn once a teacher
has shown them how to think and discover knowledge for themselves.
Dynamic lessons build mastery of state and national social studies standards.
Integrates hands-on active learning, achieving a consistent pattern of high-quality
social studies instruction while being mindful of standards.
Preview Assignment
A short, engaging assignment at the start of each lesson helps you preview key concepts and tap students’
prior knowledge and personal experience.
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Multiple Intelligence Teaching Strategies
Multiple Intelligence Teaching Strategies incorporate six types of activities:
- • Visual Discovery - Students view, touch, interpret, and bring to life compelling images, turning what is a passive, teacher-centered activity – lecturing – into a dynamic, participative experience.
- • Social Studies Skill Builder - This strategy turns the traditional, rote tasks usually associated with skill-based worksheets into more dynamic, interactive activities.
- • Experiential Exercises - These short, memorable activities make abstract ideas or remote events accessible and meaningful by tapping into intrapersonal and body-kinesthetic intelligences.
- • Writing for Understanding - Writing for Understanding activities give all learners, even those with lesser linguistic skills, something memorable to write about.
- • Response Groups - This strategy helps students grapple with the ambiguities of issues in social sciences, recognize the complexity of historical events, and discuss the consequences of public policies.
- • Problem Solving Groupwork - This strategy teaches students the skills necessary to work together successfully in small groups, both in the classroom and later in life.
Carefully structured reading materials enable students at all levels to understand what they read.
Recognizes that a successful reading of expository text involves four stages: previewing the content,
reading, taking notes, and processing the content or reviewing and applying what has been learned.
Graphically Organized Reading Notes
Comprehensive graphic organizers, used to record key ideas, further help students
obtain meaning from what they read. Graphic organizers help students see the underlying logic
and interconnections among concepts by improving their comprehension and retention
in the subject area.
Processing Assignment
An end-of-lesson Processing assignment, involving multiple intelligences and higher-order thinking skills,
challenges students to apply what they learned. Helps students synthesize and apply the information
they have learned in a variety of creative ways.
Multiple Intelligence Assessments
Carefully designed tests encourage students to use their various intelligences to demonstrate
their understanding of key concepts while preparing them for standardized tests.
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