The Strategy: SLANT
SLANT strengthens the classroom culture and students ability to pay attention during class. It focuses on guiding and teaching the behaviors that students need in order to pay attention and concentrate and thus learn. This acronym serves as shorthand in order to clue students in to what they should be doing rather than yelling at or berating students for inappropriate behavior or not listening. This is an efficient classroom management tool if the word is deeply embedded in the classroom vocabulary and all students understand what it means and are able to follow it. SLANT should also involve nonverbal skills which allow you to reinforce those desired behaviors without interrupting teaching, such as a hand signal or pictures.
Slant is an acronym that stands for:
Research Support:
This strategy employs scaffolding as you are cueing your students and giving them verbal or visual hints in order to help students achieve the behavior you expect in the classroom. Scaffolding, which is also used in the “break it down” strategy, is an aspect of Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development. The visual cues on the wall act as elaboration for the student in relation to the concept and thus aids in their remembering to SLANT. Visuals help students to make the instructions to SLANT meaningful to them. Video modeling is another method, used especially in special education, where students see themselves acting out the correct behavior or instructions and thus connects the student personally to the concept. Any personal connection and visual aid will help students’ memory and result in positive classroom behaviors.
In the classroom:
Visual cues are important to special education as many students find them easier to understand than a verbal prompt. I would employ SLANT as a verbal reminder but also have picture cues on the wall with one picture representing each letter just as one letter represents each behavior in the acronym. That would also act as a nonverbal cue that would be less distracting for the class as I could point to the letter a student was not following or I could direct the class’ attention to the pictures to remind them visually what they should be doing. This set of pictures would also act as a visual model for students to re-create if they forgot what their behavior should look like. Teachers should have a video model that each student created themselves to remind them what SLANT stands for and exactly what that should look like. The teacher could videotape the student sitting upright, listening, asking and answering questions, nodding their head, and tracking the speaker. The students could review their video model each morning as a reminder of what behaviors are expected in the classroom and what the teacher means when they say “SLANT” as a cue. I recorded my own video that you’re free to watch as an example below: