Across the country, educators are working toward the same goal: ensuring that every student has access to the kind of learning that allows them to thrive.

If we want all students to be successful, then all students need genuine opportunity to learn. Opportunity to learn is not an abstraction, nor is it simply a matter of students arriving at school ready to learn. It is created through the experiences that students have every day in classrooms. In Maximizing Opportunity to Learn, we argue that those experiences are shaped by three essential elements: the amount of time students spend engaged in important content, the quality and cognitive demand of the tasks they are asked to do, and the teaching that supports or undermines that work. Together, these three elements—time, task, and teaching—determine how much opportunity to learn accumulates for students over time. In the book, we operationalize these dimensions through a framework we call The HEAT (Heuristic for Equitable & Adaptive Teaching).

Many books about instruction describe good teaching as though it is equity-neutral. They discuss effective instructional practices without grappling with the reality that students are often offered very different opportunities based on race, gender, disability status, prior achievement, language background, or family circumstance. Other books focus explicitly on equity, but often imply that equitable teaching is something intended only for certain kinds of schools or certain groups of students. We take a different approach.

The central argument of this book is that equitable and excellent instruction cannot be separated. Equity is not merely about ensuring that some students receive additional support. It is about ensuring that all students have access to the kinds of intellectually demanding learning experiences that have too often been reserved for students who are already privileged. If there is substantial variation in opportunity and achievement within a district, then it is difficult to claim that the system is truly delivering excellence.

Upstream of those differences in opportunity are the beliefs that adults hold about what students are capable of. Educators often make instructional decisions based, consciously or unconsciously, on assumptions about which students can handle challenging work and which cannot. Those assumptions influence the amount of time students spend on important content, the level of cognitive demand in the tasks they receive, and the degree to which teachers step in to help. The result is that some students are routinely given access to rich, challenging work, while others are given work that has been simplified, reduced, or stripped of the very thinking that would help them grow.

Yet telling educators simply to “have higher expectations” is unlikely to solve the problem. Beliefs are stubborn. They rarely change because someone has been persuaded by an argument or reminded of what they ought to think. More often, beliefs change downstream of practice and experience. When educators see students successfully engage in work they previously thought was beyond them, their assumptions begin to shift.

For that reason, this book does more than advocate for equitable and ambitious instruction; it also describes the teaching practices that make such instruction more likely, particularly practices that reduce the opportunity for bias to shape students’ experience. One of the most important shifts involves replacing the deeply ingrained idea that the teacher’s job is to be maximally helpful. When students struggle, teachers understandably want to explain, scaffold, simplify, rescue, and tell. But too often those moves unintentionally reduce the cognitive demand of the work. The teacher’s job is not to remove difficulty. It is to maintain cognitive demand while providing students with the support they need to engage with it.

As teachers change their practice, students begin to experience greater success with challenging work. Those successes, in turn, change what teachers believe students are capable of. Changed beliefs make it more likely that teachers continue to provide ambitious instruction. In this way, practice and belief reinforce one another. The process becomes a flywheel: changes in practice create different outcomes, and different outcomes create different beliefs.