To be considered a competent educator, there are almost 2000 strategies, concepts, and terms that you must know. However, since teachers wear so many hats, who has the time to learn them all? Don’t worry; we have you covered. In this series, we will discuss all the teaching and learning strategies, concepts, and terms that you need to know to be considered an effective educator. There are over 70 articles in this series, so pace yourself. We recommend reading one piece per weekday, which will allow you to complete the series in three to four months. We hope you enjoy it.
Click here to read all the articles in this series.
Race Usually refers to the categorization of humans into populations or ancestral groups by various sets of heritable characteristics.
Racism The belief that one race is superior to others and can act according to that belief.
Range The highest score minus the lowest score in a group. The spread of scores.
Rapid-Mapping The phenomenon that occurs when a child increases their vocabulary exponentially after uttering the first word. In most cases, children will begin to use approximately fifty words by the ages of sixteen and eighteen months.
Rapping for Review A teaching idea in which students write rap songs to express their knowledge and thoughts about the content they have learned.
Rating Scales A numerical or qualitative scale used to record whether students exhibit specific skills or behaviors.
Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test A nonverbal intelligence test.
Raw Score The number of questions correctly answered by a student on an assessment.
R-Controlled Vowels Vowels that are trailed by an r that “control” them. The five most common r-controlled vowel combinations are ar, er, ir, or, and ur.
Reaction An action taken or emotion arising after a triggering event without thought to the consequences of the actions or expressed emotions.
Reactivity The degree to which an individual is responsive to sensory input.
Read-Alouds A way to promote language development and vocabulary acquisition through reading aloud. This can engage any age group, deepen content knowledge, and encourage higher order thinking. The material may be read aloud by the teacher or by students in the classroom.
Reader’s Theater An activity or setting which involves the oral presentation or dramatization of a text.
Readiness A student’s degree of preparedness to learn a specific skill or concept.
Readiness Training Instruction that equips students with foundational skills and background knowledge to prepare them for subsequent formal teaching.
Reading Level The level at which a student can read, decipher, and understand the text.
Reading Rate (words per minute) The speed at which a child read a section of text. You can calculate this by taking the number of words in the passage and multiplying them times 60. Then divide that number by the time in seconds it took for them to read that passage. For instance, if the section of text was 200 words, and Matthew read it in 2 minutes flat, his words per minute would be 100 words per minute.
Reading Specialist A professional who works at any level (early childhood, elementary, middle, secondary, or adult) to help students with reading difficulties and serve as a literacy or reading coach. They might also act as a supervisor or coordinator for reading and literacy.
Realism Is a major school of thought in Educational Philosophy that is the notion that the world exists “because it does.”
Realism Is the notion that the world exists regarding matter, separate from the world of ideas and independent of it. Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC), the father of realism, was a student of Plato and adapted his philosophies from that of his teacher. Considering that both men were from the same small community, it is astonishing that both Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies of education have endured for thousands of years. Much like idealism, there are three branches of realism: classical, religious, and modern. The ideas proposed by Aristotle can be classified as classical realism.
Reality Therapy Developed by psychiatrist William Glasser in the 1960s, reality therapy is used to guide students in becoming responsible individuals who can satisfy their own needs for the benefit of themselves and others. Despite its maturity, this approach has stood the test of time and is still in use today. This approach was developed with the idea that students know their own needs and wants and will make changes to get closer to where they want to be.
Recency Effect The tendency for the easier recollection of items at the end of a list than of other items.
Receptive Communication The means by which a message from another person is received and comprehended, involving perceiving, accepting and decoding.
Receptive Language Is the ability to understand being said to you. In childhood development, understanding usually happens before expressive language. People with receptive language disorder have difficulty understanding what other people are saying.
Reciprocal Determinism A theory of personality development used by Bandura to explain the way in which an individual’s cognitive and emotional factors (person component), environmental reinforcers and behaviors come together to create their personality.
Reciprocal Question-Answer Relationships (ReQARs) A reading technique that combines elements from the ReQuest and QAR strategies to help middle- and upper-grade students recognize words, anticipate the nature of teachers’ questions, focus on informative parts of a text, and answer questions effectively.
Reciprocal Teaching An interactive learning strategy aimed at teaching students to summarize portions of text, predict potential questions, clarify the complex text. At first, students observe the teacher as he or she models ideal behaviors; then, they gradually take on the teacher’s instructional role.
Recognition and Response System The idea that parents and teachers can learn to spot warning signs that a child is not learning appropriately and respond in a way that positively impacts school success.
Recognitive Assimilation A skill that appears in early development as a child can select objects where a schema applies and those where one does not. For example, a child may choose a nipple over a different object when he or she is hungry.
Recreational Literacy Independent activities that cultivate positive attitudes, interests, and literacy habits.
Recursive Nature of Writing The back-and-forth quality of writing. Writing is necessarily a recursive process: as the writer modifies his/her work, they often go back in their writing to rephrase or add new elements to the previously written material.
Recursive Writing Process Within the multiple stages in the writing process, students do not simply move from one step to the next; rather, they revisit each step to complete their writing.
