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What are High Impact Instructional Strategies (HIIS)?
The HIIS are nine instructional practices that reliably increase student learning wherever they are applied. They emerge from the findings of tens of thousands of studies of what has worked in classrooms across the United States and the world. International experts such as John Hattie and Robert Marzano have synthesised these studies and ranked hundreds of teaching strategies by the contribution they make to student learning [see ‘What is effect size?’ box]. The HIIS sit at the top of these rankings.
Some teachers will ask, “But will they work in my classroom, with my students?” Only the professional judgement of teachers, both individual and collective, can answer that question. For any concept or skill that students need to learn, using a HIIS to teach it increases the chances that students will learn it, compared to using other strategies. But they are reliable, not infallible. Knowing their students and how they learn, teachers are well-placed to judge whether a HIIS or another strategy is the best choice to teach that concept or skill.
The HIIS will not be new to most teachers. The purpose of this resource is to bring them together in one place, along with practical examples of how other teachers are using them successfully.
The HIIS alone do not constitute a complete framework for professional practice. They are part of the full set of instructional practices that contribute to a comprehensive pedagogical model.
A Message From Vickie Hoffman, Superintendent:
Message for Morgan (2021-06-28 at 07:43 GMT-7)What is Effect Size?
Effect size is a measure of the contribution an education intervention makes to student learning. It allows us to move beyond questions about whether an intervention worked or not, to questions about how well an intervention worked in varying contexts. This evidence supports a more scientific and rigorous approach to building professional knowledge. Effect size is an important tool for reporting and interpreting the effectiveness of specific teaching practices and interventions.
Who are HIIS For?
The HIIS will support teachers at every career stage. Each strategy is accompanied by two examples. The examples show teachers how to adapt the HIIS to different learning goals and needs, and to respond to different school contexts.
For school leaders, understanding the interdependencies and developing a whole of practice approach is complex work for teachers which requires classroom embedded professional learning and a supportive high performance learning culture in a school. A sustained focus on HIIS can be supported by coaching, modeling, observation and feedback to ensure widespread use of successful teaching practices
This Resource Offers:
This resource offers teachers and school leaders an opportunity to embed and share the use of successful instructional practices by providing:
a common language to use in planning, monitoring and reflecting on classroom practice
a developmental continuum to measure proficiency across ten high-impact teaching strategies, and
initial resources to guide a practice improvement journey.
The HIIS will have the strongest impact on student learning when used as part of an ongoing improvement cycle embedded in professional learning communities. Effective teams use the improvement cycle to:
diagnose a classroom need
investigate a problem of practice
identify one or more of the HIIS as a possible intervention
unpack, discuss and model the strategies
collectively review them as part of observation rounds.
The review and evaluation phase of the improvement cycle is critical to using the HIIS for maximum impact on student learning. While the strategies are reliable, their effectiveness in any particular school context can only be determined by applying a HIIS to an individual or group of students and measuring its impact on student learning.
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