Contextual Teaching and Learning

Instructional Strategies

CTL is described as including at least seven strategies or instructional approaches that help students make meaning out of their school subjects. The methods of teaching that are used are based on the professional judgment of the teacher, the age and developmental level of the students, and the subject being taught. Among the approaches typically cited include:

• Problem-based learning— An instructional approach that uses real-world problems as a context for students to learn critical thinking and problemsolving skills and to acquire knowledge of essential concepts of a course. Learners draw on prior knowledge to understand and structure the problem, encode specificity (the context) into problem solving to make transfer of learning more likely, and elaborate on solutions through discussion, answering questions, peer teaching, and critiquing.
• Project-based learning—A comprehensive approach to classroom learning designed to engage student investigation of authentic problems, including an in-depth study of a topic worth learning. Typically, students are engaged in a relatively extensive project that involves considerable time and effort, is grounded in complex, real-world contexts, and is developed to require students to apply academic skills and knowledge. Learning further requires students to draw from many subjects and information sources to complete the project and manage and allocate resources such as time, materials, and technology appropriately.
• Inquiry-based learning— This approach is used concomitantly with reflective teaching and engages students in “what if” scenarios and investigations to construct mental frameworks that adequately explain their research and experiences. This instructional strategy is based on the theory of the inquiring mind, which seeks an answer, solution, explanation, or decision to some sort of query. Teachers and students read about, share, observe, critically analyze, and reflect upon that which is being studied to improve it, change, it, and or predict results.
• Work-based learning—An educational approach that uses work places to structure learning experiences that contribute to the intellectual, social, academic, and career development of students and supplements these with school activities that apply, reinforce, refine, or extend the learning that occurs at a work site. By so doing, students develop attitudes, knowledge, skills, insights, habits, and associations from both work and school experiences and are able to connect learning with real-life work activities.
• Service learning— An instructional method that combines community service with a structured school-based opportunity for reflection about that service, emphasizing the connection between service [Page 204]experiences and academic learning. Service learning is integrated into students' academic curriculum and provides structured time for students to think, talk, and write about the learning taking place. Service learning enhances what is learned in school by extending students' learning beyond the classroom and into the community and helps to foster a sense of caring for others.
• Collaborative/Cooperative learning— Sometimes defined separately, but both are instructional strategies that emphasize small groups in which students work together to maximize their own and each other's learning, accomplish a specific goal, or develop an end product. Ideally, learners engaging in cooperative or collaborative learning highlight individual group members'abilities and contributions. They share authority and acceptance of responsibility among group members for the group's actions. In general, collaborative learning focuses more on the process or working together, and cooperative learning (to complete or get the work done) stresses the product of such work but often includes some assessment of the process as well.
• Authentic assessment—Assessment is authentic when student performance is measured on achievement that represents accomplishments that are significant, worthwhile, and meaningful. Authentic assessments attend to whether the student can craft polished, thorough, and justifiable answers, performances, or products. It requires use of higher-order thinking skills, mastery of disciplinary context, elaborated communications, consideration of alternative solutions, and performance for authentic audiences. Authentic assessments typically include demonstrations of accomplishment, oral and written project reports, detail and descriptions of problems solved, evidence of work-based activities completed, critiques of literary and technical work, criteria-referenced assessment (often aided with the use of rubrics) by teachers and others, case study analyses, and so forth. Typically, assessments are put forth in a portfolio of accomplishments that represents a history over time of learning, organized progress of accomplishments, direct and valid outgrowths of standards and objectives set for the curriculum or learning event, and input from multiple human resources.

Other terms, related descriptions, and strategies often used to illustrate contextual teaching and learning include hands-on learning, real-world learning, casebased learning, simulation, active learning, role-playing, applied learning, interdependent learning groups, and internships and externships.

...