High Leverage Practices

Eliciting and Interpreting Student Thinking

Teachers pose questions that create space for students to share their thinking about specific academic content. These questions seek to understand student thinking, novel points of view, new ideas, ways of thinking, or alternative concepts. When questions are carefully choose questions and tasks and then pay attention to what students do and say. In return, this helps guide instructional decisions and surfaces ideas that will benefit other students. The chart below will give more information on electing and interpreting student thinking

Leading a Group Discussion

In a group discussion, the teacher and all of the students work on specific content together. With this, they can use on another's ideas as resources. A discussion builds collective knowledge and capability in relation to specific instructional goals. It also allows students to practice listening, speaking, and interpreting, agreeing, and disagreeing. The teacher and students contribute orally, listen actively, and respond to each other.

Setting Up and Managing Small Group Work

Teachers use small group work when the learning goals profit from interaction and collaboration among students. They choose tasks that require and foster collaborative work, provide clear directions that enable groups to work independently, and hold students accountable for collective and individual learning. Teachers use their own time strategically, deliberately choosing which groups to work with, when, and on what.

Explaining and Modeling Content

Modeling prepares students to think critically and develop their own voice as they work with complex texts and communicate their thinking. It involves the teacher apprenticing students into the important thinking of a given subject by making the teacher's thinking visible and coaching students as they go. Modeling provides tools for students to develop their own ideas, highlights communication and argumentation practices, and gives students access to ways of thinking.

Implementing Norms and Routines for Discourse

Each content area has norms and routines that reflect the ways people construct and share knowledge. Norms can include ways of thinking and working. They are disciplinary practices and concepts that are central to the understanding of a specific subject.

Designing Lessons

Choosing and adapting curriculum materials involves finding, selecting, assessing, and revising curriculum materials so that they work for the students and the goals of a lesson. This process can occur at multiple levels. Materials must be appropriate for the grade level, relevant to the learning goals and questions, and diverse in perspective. This is essential to providing students with access to higher order thinking and learning experiences that provoke curiosity.