Domain 3: Effective Instruction

Effective: Class starts on-time and routines, transitions, and procedures support students knowing what they are supposed to be doing and with minimal prompting from the teacher. Lesson is well paced and structured allowing for effective delivery of the intended material.

What does this look like?

• Pacing is the rate at which instructional activities occur or at which specific learning activities are presented to the student. Perception is part of pacing and requires the skill of creating a perception that a class is moving at just the right speed for the students. A good pace helps students feel like they are moving along. Why should we think about using techniques such as change to facilitate good pacing? Effective pacing helps a teacher hold the students’ attention. Students who are paying attention learn. Students who are not paying attention cannot be learning.

• Routines and procedures are well established in the classroom (or are being established and refined) allowing for smooth transitions, materials to be passed out quickly, and the simple flow in the classroom to be such that little or no instructional time is lost.

• Provides adequate time based on knowledge of students’ development to complete learning activities.

Strategies for Obtaining an Effective rating:

• Have well organized lesson plans.

• Ensure materials are prepared and ready in advance.

• Monitor students throughout the lesson and know when to “step on the gas” and when to “tap the breaks”.

• Know how to change formats and tasks throughout your lesson keeping the lesson moving with a perception of speed.

• Check out this article: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/instructional-pacing-tips-rebecca-alber

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At Level 4, a teacher fulfills the criteria for Level 3 and additionally: lesson structure and pacing follows a sequence of best practices supporting the critical mass of students showing proficiency on the intended outcomes for this lesson.

What does this look like?

• Routines and procedures are “automatic” meaning they are owned by the students. Little teacher direction is needed for the basic functions of the classroom (material distribution, movement from independent work to group work, flow from seatwork to carpet activities…)

• The lesson is designed in such a way that its structure includes multiple reference points (changes in activity, task, conversation, or other structure). This allows for the flow of the lesson to progress in such a way that students are fully engaged throughout.

• The various structures and the pace of the lesson are appropriate for prerequisite skills of the students and the range of student abilities. It allows for the critical mass of students to gain proficiency on the intended outcomes of the lesson as measured by informal or formal assessments.

Strategies for Obtaining a Highly Effective rating:

• Know what prerequisite knowledge your students need to ensure success.

• Ensure you are connecting the students to prior knowledge within the lesson.

• Ensure activities, tasks, conversations, and other structures are used in such a way that the students progress forward and the objectives are kept central to each change.

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Questions to Consider:

• How do you set up lessons so they flow?

• What pacing strategies will work well with your students?

• What routines do you need to ensure are “automatic” in your classroom.

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Suggested Reading and Other Resources:

• https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/pacing-lessons-for-optimal-learning

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b_ADKuxUJQ

• https://www.edutopia.org/blog/instructional-pacing-tips-rebecca-alber

Effective: The lesson builds on students’ prior knowledge of key concepts and skills and makes this connection evident to students.

What does this look like?

• The teacher makes a habit of connecting the objective to prior learning. Activating prior knowledge is like preparing the soil before sowing the seeds of knowledge. By tapping into what students already know, teachers help with the learning process. This is because learning is relating the new information, or concepts, to what we already know.

• The only way to build new interests and capacities is by activating and building on students’ prior interests and background knowledge before or as a part of new instruction. This process honors what students bring to the lesson and provides them with necessary context and connection to the purpose and payoff of what is to be learned. Learning amounts to connecting new data or concepts to what we currently perceive. So, to best facilitate the learning process in the classroom, teachers should aim to draw out what learners already know. Activating prior knowledge fast tracks the learning process.

• To find out what prior knowledge students bring to your class you may consider giving a low-stake assignment or a quiz early in the semester. Student’s performance on this kind of assessment will be a good indicator of the skills and knowledge they already possess. Such assessments may include having students write an essay, take a multiple choice quiz, or complete a short answer quiz that examines students understanding of concepts and definition of terminologies that students are expected know.

Strategies for Obtaining an Effective rating:

• Know what your students know. Engage in activities that help you understand what your students know about a topic or objective.

• Ensure that you are using prior assessment data to guide your lesson/unit preparation.

• Some commonly used strategies to identify and activate prior knowledge are: Graphic organizers; Concept maps; KWL Charts; Anticipatory sets; Learning grids; and Brainstorming

• Some prior knowledge will come from the students personal background. This should be considered when planning your lesson to ensure it can be tapped into. Connecting to this prior knowledge will make lessons personally meaningful and relevant to the students.

• https://www.edutopia.org/blog/prior-knowledge-tapping-into-often-classroom-rebecca-alber

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Highly Effective: The teacher effectively engages prior knowledge of students in connecting to the lesson. Students demonstrate through work or comments that they understand this connection.

What does this look like?

• Students are able to construct and/or articulate connections between old and new knowledge. Conversations, answers, writings, and other student activity reflects their having made connections to what they already know about the new learning concept or objective.

Strategies for Obtaining a Highly Effective rating:

• Reach beyond basic subject area concepts to connect students to new learning. Use current events, popular culture, shared student experiences, digital media, etc. as a springboard for new learning.

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Questions to Consider:

• What specific activities, questions, or strategies will I use to activate prior knowledge either before or during instruction of new content or objectives? How is this outlined in the lesson plan?

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Suggested Reading and Other Resources:

https://strategiesforspecialinterventions.weebly.com/activating-prior-knowledge1.html

Planning Powerful Instruction (Corwin)

https://sites.hampshire.edu/ctl/2017/09/14/the-importance-of-engaging-prior-knowledge/

Effective: The teacher uses effective engagement strategies. As a result 3/4 or more of students are actively engaged in content at all times and not off-task. There are few periods of time when students are left without meaningful work to keep them engaged

What does this look like?

• Engagement goes beyond compliant behavior and can be observed by the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught.

• A more comprehensive definition encompasses three different types of student engagement: emotional, behavioral, and cognitive.

• Emotional engagement refers to students’ feelings about their teacher, classroom, and general school experience, as well as their sense of belonging and how valuable they view their work to be.

• Behavioral engagement includes how attentive and active students are in the classroom.

• Cognitive engagement refers to how intrinsically motivated and invested students are in the learning process and how much they regulate and take ownership of it.

• This article helps clarify what student engagement looks like in the classroom: https://www.classcraft.com/blog/evidence-of-student-engagement/

Strategies for Obtaining an Effective rating:

• There are many strategies for engaging students. The key is to ensure your lesson enables all students to actively participate/engage in learning. Examples: Question and answer flow should ensure a broad base of students are being called upon. Groupings should be structured so that all students participate and are expected to do so.

• Check out this article on six factors to consider in designing lessons to help increase student engagement behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/golden-rules-for-engaging-students-nicolas-pino-james

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Highly Effective: The teacher uses effective engagement strategies. As a result the critical mass of students are consistently engaged in lesson content and meaningful work and support the pace of the lesson through their engagement in the learning process.

What does this look like?

• Same as Effective, but the critical mass of students remain engaged throughout the lesson.

Strategies for Obtaining a Highly Effective rating:

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Questions to Consider:

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Suggested Reading and Other Resources:

• https://www.dyknow.com/blog/10-student-engagement-strategies-that-work/

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Effective: Teacher checks for understanding throughout the lesson using a variety of methods that are successful in capturing an accurate “pulse” of the class’s understanding at key moments to inform and keep instruction going forward.

What does this look like?

• Checking for understanding allows teachers to know where students are so they can adjust lessons to meet the needs of all students.

• A check for understanding is any method used to inform the teacher about the student's current level of knowledge and understanding.

• An effective teacher does not just check for understanding at the conclusion of a lesson or unit of instruction, but checks for understanding throughout the lesson.

Strategies for Obtaining an Effective rating:

• Become familiar with various forms of formative assessment, such as retelling and summarizing, response cards and hand signals, read-write-pair-share, and concept maps.

• Determine or design formative and informal assessments that measure progress toward mastery and inform instruction for each lesson.

• Before the lesson begins, consider which moments in the instructional process will require checking for understanding and pair formative assessments with these.

• Check for understanding at key moments. Adjust instruction in response to student understanding.

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Highly Effective: Teacher checks for understanding at higher levels by asking pertinent, scaffolding questions that push thinking; accepts only high quality student responses (those that reveal understanding or lack thereof).

What does this look like?

• Rigor is a fundamental piece of any learning experience. To check for understanding at higher levels, rigor will need to be increased in the types of activities allowing for formative and summative assessments.

Strategies for Obtaining a Highly Effective rating:

• It is important to refine your questioning techniques to draw out higher order thinking and answers. Fine-tune questioning techniques. Practice by writing questions that employ higher-order thinking, scaffold learning, and/or provide open-ended responses before teaching a lesson. Use written questions to cue classroom discussion. Continue practicing with written questions until it becomes second nature.

• Add rigor: Examples:

  • Necessitate a transfer of understanding - By definition, transfer requires a student to apply knowledge in new and unfamiliar situations, an inherently rigorous process. If you can encourage self-initiated transfer (unprompted or coached), all the better.

  • Require students to synthesize multiple sources - In rigorous tasks, learners will often need to synthesize data, positions, or theories from multiple sources or perspectives. Whether these are literary perspectives, scientific viewpoints, religious ideas, mathematical theories, or any other fundamentally subjective content, when learners have to analyze, internalize, and reconcile multiple perspectives to create a new position or perspective, rigor is a safe bet.

  • Design tasks with multiple steps that build cognitively - Not all tasks that require multiple steps are inherently rigorous (fill out the worksheet, turn it in, read the book, answer the questions, talk to your partner about your answers and turn them in is neither a unique or rigorous approach to learning).

  • If the tasks build (somewhat parallel to Bloom’s Taxonomy), rigor is more likely. In this approach, a student might define “conflict,” analyze cause-effect of a specific conflict, research the sources of said conflict, then design some kind of short-term solution to one critical cause of said conflict. This approach starts simple, becomes more complex, and is likely to challenge any student no matter how “proficient” their understanding.

  • Prompt divergent perspectives - Use authors, philosophers, artists, content experts, or other thinkers who make authentic cases of their own that offer contrasting perspectives. Not only does this encourage argument analysis, credibility, etc., but also models how elusive and illusory “truth is,” a rigorous idea of its own.

  • Use divergent media forms - Rather than two (or more) texts, require students to analyze a conversation, a poem, and a tweet; a YouTube video, an encyclopedia resource, and an interview with an expert. The more (seemingly) awkward and divergent, the more learners are challenged to develop new strategies to find solutions.

  • Break away from content-area convention - Use literature to frame math. Use science to promote political discussions. Extract the philosophy from cartoons. Find poetry in the stars. Use Google Earth to make sociological observations. These approaches force students to revise schema for new situations, a key characteristics of rigor.

  • Require design thinking (often in project-based learning) - Build design thinking into rubrics or scoring criteria, supply exemplars, or model their use, but whatever you do, be sure that elements of design thinking, creativity, and the “tinker culture” aren’t just “encouraged” but required for the student to find success.

  • Require long-term observation or analysis - Another potential use of project-based learning or learning simulations, when students are required to observe long-term, cognitive actions such as identifying patterns, cause-effect analysis, and problem-solution thinking are natural by-products.

  • Study nuance - Nuance is often overlooked, and offers a world of rigor due to the unique thinking habits it requires.

  • Require students to take and defend positions - This can be done first in small groups, then socialized to larger groups (hopefully outside the classroom). A ‘position’ requires a kind of cognitive ownership that is not only indirectly engaging, but also intellectually stimulating and even emotionally demanding, requiring students to think “Why?” as much as “What?,” “When?,” and “Where?”

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Questions to Consider:

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Suggested Reading and Other Resources:

• https://www.classcraft.com/blog/what-is-the-purpose-of-checking-for-understanding/

• https://files.ascd.org/staticfiles/ascd/pdf/siteASCD/publications/books/checking-for-understanding-2nd-sample-chapters.pdf

• Checking for Understanding Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

• Transformative Assessment W. James Popham

• Assess Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom Susan M. Brookhart

• "Classroom Interactions" Classroom Assessment

• "Questioning Techniques"

Effective: The teacher frequently gives quality feedback to students on their learning and progress towards mastering the learning objectives, often including students in the self-assessment and/or feedback process. As a result, students have a self-awareness about their learning and development towards mastery of the learning objectives, and are able to apply feedback from me to improve.

What does this look like?

• For feedback to be effective it must be Targeted (aligned to learning objectives), Specific (more than just a numerical value), and Timely (provided so that students have the opportunity to correct misconceptions, but not so quickly that students are not persevering and figuring out problems on their own.

Strategies for Obtaining an Effective rating:

• Tasks, activities, and assessments should be aligned to learning objectives allowing for feedback to focus students on their progress towards mastering the objectives.

• Feedback is given throughout the lesson or unit of study, not just at the end of a lesson or unit. This improves the student’s ability to take ownership of his/her progress towards mastery and to learn from his/her mistakes.

• Feedback is given to students via comments both written and verbally that explain the student’s progress, support understanding and growth, and allow the student to make the next step towards mastery. This is not a simple grade or mark, but a more specific comment that supports understanding.

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Highly Effective: Students are able to use assessment data and teacher feedback to identify gaps in their learning or work, monitor their own progress, set goals, take action to move towards or beyond mastery of the learning objectives, and frequently give quality feedback to one another with support from the teacher. As a result, students have a high level of self-awareness and efficacy about their learning, take action to improve their learning, and are able to support the learning of others.

What does this look like?

• Student self-reflection on assessments, tasks, and activities is critical. In order for a student to truly become agents of their own learning they need to be metacognitive and aware of where they are in the learning process, what the goal is, and how they can bridge the gap between the two. Targeted, Specific, and Timely feedback, shifts a chunk of the responsibility from the teacher to the student in identifying progress and needed growth.

Strategies for Obtaining a Highly Effective rating:

• Make students partners in their learning through quality feedback, and help students construct meaning, in part, by self-assessing prior to and during learning.

• Ensure students are able to organize, evaluate, and internalize their learning, and that self-assessment is a part of that process.

• Support students in connecting new knowledge, understandings, and skills with learning they have already stored and used. Self-assessment fosters students’ ability to make these connections themselves; provides a mechanism to enhance learning in a meaningful, rather than rote, manner; and results in greater student motivation and confidence.

• Student self-assessment: The key to stronger student motivation and higher achievement.

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Questions to Consider:

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Suggested Reading and Other Resources: