Bottom Up & Top Down Teaching Strategies
Nora has a Master's degree in teaching, and has taught a variety of elementary grades.
View bioSasha Blakeley has a Bachelor's in English Literature from McGill University and a TEFL certification. She has been teaching English in Canada and Taiwan for seven years.
View bioBottom Up Vs. Top Down
As you plan your curriculum, it will be helpful to think of the way you organize your lessons. Are you starting with the small building blocks and then expanding? Or are you starting with the big picture and filling in the details along the way? These two approaches actually have names.
Bottom up teaching starts with the small details, like vocabulary words or the step-by-step process of solving an algorithm. As students master these skills, the teacher broadens the scope of the lesson to include a reading passage that uses the vocabulary words, or to math worksheets requiring the student to apply the algorithm.
Alternatively, the strategy of top down teaching involve starting with the big, abstract concept and working down to the specific details. For instance, you might demonstrate a chemical reaction to your students, and then have them learn about the different molecules in each substance that resulted in the reaction.
The same lesson objectives can be met through both methods. The two strategies simply offer different ways of organizing and presenting material to your students. Below, you'll learn specific strategies that you can incorporate in your classroom using both of these teaching methods.
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Bottom Up Teaching Strategies
If you are deciding to teach your students using a bottom up approach, you should think about the smallest component of what your students need to know before they move on to the bigger picture. The following strategies can be used for a bottom up lesson structure:
- As you begin a unit on the water cycle, choose pertinent vocabulary words like 'condensation', 'evaporate', and 'run off'. Teach the definition of these words before teaching your students how the water cycle works.
- Write sight words, like 'you', 'and', 'them', or 'run', on flash cards and have your students practice these sight words with a partner.
- Teach your students phonemes and then have them use those to sound out words.
- As your students learn about animals that live in the rainforest, give your students diagrams of sloths, cheetahs, and toucans, and discuss their different body parts.
- Teach your students the algorithm for finding the area of a circle. Then, give them several different circles and ask students to use the formula on them.
Top Down Teaching Strategies
When you teach using a top down approach, you will begin with the abstract concept and help your students fill in the details after. The following strategies can be used for a top down lesson structure:
- For a lesson on The Cold War, introduce the topic to your students by showing them photos of the Berlin Wall being taken down. They can discuss things they notice, and talk about any connections they have to the photos.
- In a science lesson, provide your students with a variety of seeds, leaves, or photographs of animals. Have your students sort the objects into categories they choose.
- Demonstrate an electrical circuit and have your students talk about what they think is happening and how the circuit works.
- Bring in a 'mystery object', like a compass, and have your students guess what the object is. Then, use the compass to teach your students about reading a map.
- Give your students the following math puzzle: If your parents give you 1 cent tomorrow, but then double it the next day and so forth, how much money will you have after a week? A month? A year? After students have worked on this puzzle, teach your students about exponential growth.
Lesson Summary
When you plan your lessons, you might consider using bottom up strategies, which teach the smallest details of a topic before having students learn the bigger picture. Or you might consider using top down strategies, which teach the concept before the details of a topic. There are many different strategies you can use to structure your lessons in these two ways.
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Teaching Strategies: Explore Further
This lesson introduced you to bottom up and top down teaching strategies, both of which can be useful for teaching students at any level. Take a look at the following prompts to explore this concept in more detail and to apply it to your own classroom.
Lesson Plans
Create two lesson plans for a level and subject that you feel comfortable teaching. Your lesson plans can cover the same or different material. Write one lesson plan as a bottom up lesson, while creating a top down setup for the other. What do you notice about your lessons? Did you find that some subject matter lends itself to one of the two teaching styles more than the other? If you are currently teaching, try out both of these teaching styles with your students. Which one do they seem to enjoy more? Make notes and allow this to impact your teaching practice in the future.
Your Style
Do you feel more comfortable teaching one way over the other? Does one feel more intuitive to you? Of course, both ways of teaching are effective, but you may want to consider ways of making yourself more familiar with both approaches. Write a list of the pros and cons of each teaching style and consider when you would be more comfortable incorporating each one into your lessons. Write a paragraph explaining your opinion of the two styles as well as strategies you can think of that you might incorporate into future lessons.
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