Guide to Tripod’s 7Cs™ Framework
Consolidate
Teachers who consolidate help students integrate and synthesize key ideas. They summarize and make connections in ways that help students see relationships within and across lessons, remember ideas, and build understanding over time.
Message to Students:
“We review and summarize lessons to help make learning coherent and memorable.”
Sample Student Survey Items
(for different grade levels)
- To help us remember, my teacher talks about things we already learned.
- My teacher takes time to help us remember what we learn.
- My teacher takes the time to summarize what we learn each day.
Indicators of an Exemplary Classroom
Teachers effectively consolidate through practices like these:
Reviewing and summarizing
The teacher consistently reviews and summarizes content with students.
- The teacher reviews and summarizes what has been taught at the end of each lesson, highlighting relationships among ideas.
- The teacher facilitates activities in which students summarize what they have learned or apply it in new contexts.
Connecting ideas
The teacher effectively organizes and integrates content to make it easier for students to remember and understand.
- The teacher explains connections between current lessons and previously learned facts, ideas, concepts, and skills.
- The teacher invites students to make their own connections across the curriculum.
Reflection Questions
Consider these questions as you reflect on your classroom practice:
- Do you summarize big ideas at the end of lessons and review them periodically?
- Do you ask students to summarize and synthesize what they are learning?
- Do you make explicit connections between lessons?
- Do you help students make connections within and across the curriculum?
- Do you refer to relevant current events or other meaningful applications of what students are learning to facilitate transfer of knowledge and skills?
- Do your assignments require students to build on prior learning?
- Do your assessments incorporate topics and skills from earlier lessons?
Sample Strategies
Try implementing teaching strategies like these in your classroom:
- Use KWL charts to track what students know about a topic, what they want to know, and what they learn.
- Explain to students how to underline, highlight, and/or annotate texts and then summarize the main ideas in their own words.
- Begin and/or end lessons with references to previously taught topics and how they are connected.
- Ask students to reflect on what they have learned and how it relates to other ideas or experiences.
TEACHING RESOURCES
We’ve curated a set of teaching resources for Consolidate. As you set goals and pursue professional learning opportunities, use these resource collections to access additional strategies, tools, and examples of effective practices in action.
Consolidate: Connecting Ideas
Teachers who consolidate help students integrate and synthesize key ideas. They summarize and make connections in ways that help students see relationships within and across lessons, remember ideas, and build understanding over time. Find resources offering classroom strategies that support the practice of effectively organizing and integrating content to make it easier for students to remember and understand.
How to Increase Higher Order Thinking
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UDL Guideline 3: Provide options for comprehension
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What Makes a Question Essential?
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Exit Slips
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Expect Students to Activate, Connect and Summarize Daily
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First Five Minutes/Last Five Minutes
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5 Ways to Give Your Students More Voice and Choice
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3-2-1 Bridge
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Keeping It Relevant and “Authentic”
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The Big Ideas of Understanding by Design
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Thinking Big About Engagement
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ICT Literacy Maps – P21
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Instruction | Teaching Tolerance – Diversity, Equity and Justice
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Think Pair Share
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Chalk Talk
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Consolidate: Reviewing and Summarizing
Teachers who consolidate help students integrate and synthesize key ideas. They summarize and make connections in ways that help students see relationships within and across lessons, remember ideas, and build understanding over time. Find resources offering classroom strategies that support the practice of consistently reviewing and summarizing content with students.
Get the GIST: A Summarizing Strategy for Any Content Area
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Summarizing
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Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding
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UDL Guideline 3: Provide options for comprehension
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I Do, We Do, You Do: Scaffolding Reading Comprehension in Social Studies
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Tricks of the Trade: Classroom Management Tips for Teachers (Video Playlist)
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Exit Slips
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Expect Students to Activate, Connect and Summarize Daily
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First Five Minutes/Last Five Minutes
Read More
3-2-1 Bridge
Read More
The Big Ideas of Understanding by Design
Read More
Reciprocal Teaching | Reading Rockets
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Instruction | Teaching Tolerance – Diversity, Equity and Justice
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Analyzing Perspectives through Primary Sources, Part 1 in Core Practices in Action: Laying the Foundation for Deeper Learning with Literacy
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Think Pair Share
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Jigsaw
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