Teaching Multiple Strands at Once

A different way to structure lessons and units

Strands

One change I've made in my teaching this year is teaching multiple "strands" of content in a single lesson. I want to write a bit about what it looks like, why I find it helpful, and how someone might get started with this model.

The idea of multiple strands comes from the Direct Instruction program. DI calls them "tracks" but that word has another meaning¹ so I call them strands. I read a book about Direct Instruction in May. You can read my review of it here. Direct Instruction inspires strong feelings in a lot of people. I'm not interested in arguing about it here; this approach isn't dependent on Direct Instruction.

Here's a simple model of what strands look like in one level of a Direct Instruction program:

Each row is a topic, and the columns span 120 lessons. A typical strand stretches for a number of lessons — for some strands, they keep coming up for almost this entire level of 120 lessons. In any individual lesson there are chunks of time working on a few different strands, not necessarily connected to each other. Lessons don’t have a single objective. Instead, each chunk of the lesson has a clear objective working along each strand, and strands often tie together over time.

The version above is more ambitious than what I’ve been doing. I still teach “units” where we focus on one large idea for a few weeks. But my units blend together — for the last two-ish weeks of a unit I start teaching some skills from the next unit, and I continue practicing key skills from a unit into the next one. You can see something along those lines in the diagram above — there is a focus on addition/subtraction at the beginning, and on multiplication/division towards the end, though with lots of other skills mixed in. Having “units” helps me as a novice with this type of teaching. I’m also much less strict about units than I have been in the past, sometimes mixing in an extra strand working on a key skill students need down the road or doing some review of an important concept from a few units ago.

Some Benefits

Here are a few benefits I’ve seen with the "strands" approach:

• I have more time to gradually increase the difficulty of a skill. Rather than increasing the difficulty within a single lesson I am often gradually increasing the difficulty over multiple days, with lots of chances to adjust and support students.

• I have a "slow start" to each unit, where we start working on some of the ideas at the end of the previous unit. This gives me a preview of students skills with the concept and an idea of any areas I should focus on, or maybe just the knowledge that students already have a strong foundation and are ready to dive in.

• Teaching multiple strands at once creates natural opportunities for interleaving between skills, which improve understanding and retention. Similarly, teaching a strand for an extended period of time creates opportunities for spaced practice.

• I don't put all my eggs in one basket for a lesson. I've taught lots of lessons in my career where I realize early on it's not going to go well, but I don’t have anything else planned and I plow on. With a strands model that still happens but it's rarely an entire lesson, it's only one strand. It's much easier to adjust, maybe by taking more time for other strands and punting that tough strand to the next day once I've had a chance to adjust.

• Practice is important, but practice that’s too repetitive usually leads students to stop thinking. Lots of small chunks of focused practice work better, and teaching with strands means I often have multiple chunks of practice on several different skills in one lesson.

• I have space to weave in more practice for priority skills throughout the year. There are some skills that students should practice in small chunks, all the time. You can see in the diagram above that the multiplication facts strand runs for almost the entire sequence. Using the strands approach I start to weave in more and more small chunks of practice for key skills, spaced over time, for the rest of the year.

Getting Started

Maybe you're reading this and thinking, "wow, sounds interesting, but that's not for me." Totally fine. I like this approach but I don't think it's some groundbreaking pedagogy that every teacher has to start using tomorrow.

But maybe you're reading and thinking, "wow, sounds interesting, I'm curious but I have no idea how I would get started." Here are a few steps I took when I dipped my toes into this approach earlier in the year.

• Start class with a check for understanding from the previous class. I do this with mini whiteboards so I don't need to prep any handouts. If the class does well we move on. If there are a few small misconceptions I address them then move on. If there are larger issues I do a quick reteach and then a bit of practice. This doesn't have to be the entire previous lesson, it can be a simple version of yesterday's skill to avoid going down too big of a rabbit hole. Ideally it's focused on what students need to know for the current class. Over time, this has morphed into more flexible followup and extra practice with yesterday’s skill, with a focus on whatever is most relevant to today’s work.

• Preview an upcoming micro-skill. For instance, if I'm going teach finding percents the next day I might preview finding 50% and 25%. If I'm teaching integer addition I might preview reading negative numbers off a number line. If I'm teaching complementary angles I might preview solving equations like x + 34 = 90. This is quick and focused, something that will help the next day's lesson or next week's lesson to go smoothly. The goal is to solidify small prerequisite skills before they're needed. If I have to do a big reteach of addition equations in the middle of my lesson on complementary angles, that learning won’t stick very well.

• Stretch out practice, especially mixed practice. Practice is important, but with too much repetition students often stop thinking about what they're doing. The best practice is stretched into a series of small chunks, spaced over time, going from blocked practice focused on one skill to mixed practice including several skills.

• Teach two topics in parallel. I try to be careful with this one. I don’t want to teach two skills that are easy to confuse. For instance, I wouldn’t teach px+q=r and p(x+q)=r equations side by side because it’s so easy for students to get mixed up when they first start working with those types of equations. But in my upcoming unit on expressions, I’m going to teach combining terms (like x+5+x-2+4x) and distributing (like 4(2x+3) at the same time. Students aren’t as likely to confuse those two skills, and teaching them in parallel helps me space out and interleave practice, teach slowly, and adjust as needed.

• Add in an extra strand for a skill from prior years that needs review. For instance, if a lot of students forget how to round numbers, I can build in a parallel sequence for that skill even though it’s not in my curriculum. It might just be a few minutes a day, a few days a week. That sequence starts with representing decimals, naming the different places, ordering decimals, rounding to tens, whole numbers, tenths, and so on. It doesn’t take tons of time, and lets me refresh students on valuable math they might forget otherwise.

I started this year gradually trying out this strands approach. And the cool part was, as I used more of these small chunks in lessons, I saw more and more opportunities. It was like seeing inside the matrix. More micro-skills I can preview, more skills to teach in parallel, more ways to stretch out practice. As I incorporated more strands it felt more and more natural. The best part is, I've gotten into the habit of thinking a week or two ahead and considering how what I'm teaching today connects to what I'll be teaching next week or next month. Or thinking of something that's not connected with what I'm doing right now at all, but I'll be grateful if I preteach today. Thinking about all those little connections has helped me better understand my content, break tough concepts down into manageable pieces, and help students feel successful by building up the difficulty gradually.

I’m still doing a novice version of this strands approach. I still generally teach units. The units blend together at the beginning and end, and I’m often teaching an extra strand or two on foundational skills, but most of the strands happen within a unit. The more I teach like this, the more I want to take some of the toughest skills to teach in 7th grade and stretch them out over more time, giving me more chances to break them into small pieces, increase the difficulty gradually, and give lots of practice with one skill before getting to another that builds on it.

1. The word “tracks” often refers to different levels of the same class sorted by achievement. “Teaching multiple tracks at once” sounds easy to confuse with teaching multiple tracked sections of a class.