In many cases, explicit skills instruction is most effective when it responds to specific problems individual students reveal in their own work. For example, a teacher may wish to explain particular writing conventions to the whole class, monitor each student's progress, and then provide direct individualized instruction when needed. In other cases, explicit skills instruction is most effective when it precedes what students need to learn. A teacher should, for instance, provide systematic phonics lessons in particular decoding skills to students who do not have these skills before they try to use them in their subsequent reading. Students need to develop a repertoire of learning strategies which they consciously practice and apply in increasingly diverse and demanding contexts.
Skills become strategies for learning when they are internalized.
For example, a reading skill has become a strategy when a student uses decoding for recognizing known words he has not previously seen in print, or looks up the meaning of an unfamiliar word in a dictionary. At the point that students are able to articulate their own learning strategies, evaluate their effectiveness, and use those that work best for them, they have become independent learners. Teachers recognize the importance of finding strategies that enable them to respond to the challenges of linguistic and cultural differences in their classrooms. They recognize that sometimes students have learned ways of talking, thinking, and interacting that are effective at home and in the neighborhood but which may not have the same meaning or usefulness in school. Teachers try to draw on these different ways of talking and thinking as potential bridges to speaking and writing in standard English.