• One of the most important things a teacher can do is to create a safe space for learners. To do this, teachers need to reduce potential threats and distractions in the learning environment. When learners have to focus their attention on having basic needs met or avoiding a negative experience they cannot concentrate on the learning process. While the physical safety of a learning environment is of course necessary, subtler types of threats and distractions must be attended to as well; what is threatening or potentially distracting depends on learners’ individual needs and background. An English Language Learner might find language experimentation threatening, while some learners might find too much sensory stimulation distracting. The optimal instructional environment offers options that reduce threats and negative distractions for everyone to create a safe space in which learning can occur.

• Create an accepting and supportive classroom climate
• Vary the level of novelty or risk
• Charts, calendars, schedules, visible timers, cues, etc. that can increase the predictability of daily activities and transitions
• Creation of class routines
• Alerts and previews that can help learners anticipate and prepare for changes in activities, schedules, and novel events
• Options that can, in contrast to the above, maximize the unexpected, surprising, or novel in highly routinized activities
• Vary the level of sensory stimulation
• Variation in the presence of background noise or visual stimulation, noise buffers, number of features or items presented at a time
• Variation in pace of work, length of work sessions, availability of breaks or time-outs, or timing or sequence of activities
• Vary the social demands required for learning or performance, the perceived level of support and protection and the requirements for public display and evaluation
• Involve all participants in whole class discussions

• High Yield Pedagogical Practices (HYPPs) are high-level pedagogical practices that integrate deep content learning with language and literacy development. They address the four language domains: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Collaborative Summarizing - Students collaborate to read and discuss complex text by finding the main ideas and details to summarize the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster academic conversations about text-dependent questions and serves as a scaffold from academic conversations to writing. Click to read more.

Expert Group Jigsaw - Students become experts on a topic through focused reading and collaborative discussions with peers. Students read and take notes on text, meet with peers in expert groups, teach important findings about the text in jigsaw groups. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster student engagement and individual accountability for learning, scaffolds student understanding, maximizes peer interaction, establishes cooperation and respect through teamwork. Click to read more.

Collaborative Text Reconstruction - Students recreate/reconstruct a text that they have listened to several times, taken notes on and discussed with partners without ever looking at the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ understanding of the topic, deepen content knowledge, draw attention to the meanings and language features in the text, and apprentice students into writing the text type. Click to read more.

Sentence Unpacking - Students deconstruct text to find the meanings of long, complex sentences. Teachers guide students through sentences to find the meaning of sentence “chunks”. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students to understand the complex sentences and text they encounter by raising the awareness of language and connecting the language awareness to meeting. Click to read more.

Cohesion Analysis - Supports student’s reading comprehension and scaffolds writing abilities by focusing on cohesion created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level structure/organization. Helps students understand the predictability of text types using analysis of text types. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ reading comprehension and scaffolds their writing ability by focusing on how cohesion is created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level organization and structure. More information coming soon.

Joint Construction of Texts - Teachers act as a facilitation scribe, prompting students to offer ideas for what to write in a collective piece. Teachers model how writers think about writing and encouraging students to create more academic and genre-appropriate text. The purpose of this HYPP is to scaffold students’ abilities to write a particular genre. Supports students to compose independent texts through a teacher-facilitated process that allows rehearsal of writing. Click to read more.

Collaborative Problem Solving - Students engage in answering a prompt by first finding the story and understanding what is being asked. They solve independently, and with a partner and a group of four. Students agree on an answer and create a collaborative poster using visuals, words, and numbers (If applicable) representing all members’ thinking and work. The purpose of this HYPP is through discussion and problem-based tasks, students learn to think for themselves, provide feedback to their peers, and are encouraged to take risks and make “mistakes.” Click to read more.

Stronger and Clearer - Students think and individually write how they would solve a problem. Students then share their thinking with another partner and have the opportunity to clarify and ask questions. Have students switch several more times before returning to their seat to individually write their response. The purpose of this HYPP is to provide a structured and interactive opportunity for students to revise and refine both their ideas and their verbal and written output. Click to read more.

Text Analysis - Teachers explicitly teach students the purpose, text structure & organization, and linguistic features through the use of the Genre Cheat Sheets. The purpose of this HYPP is fundamentally written genres are distinguished by their social purposes — that is, what the text is intended to accomplish within a particular context and content area and the desired effect on the people who will be reading it. These social purposes shape the genre, guide how it is structured and organized, and determine which language resources are most powerful to use in the text. More information coming soon.