Module - High Leverage Practices
1.5 hours
Background - How were high leverage practices developed?
Teaching Works - University of Michigan
Faculty members at the University of Michigan School of Education have been working together for several years to identify high-leverage practices and content for beginning and early career teachers.
The goal has been to identify a small set of instructional practices that are crucial for beginning and early career teachers to be able to do well, and a small number of topics and ideas that they should understand and know how to teach.
The work to identify high-leverage practices began with a thorough analysis of what teachers do and yielded a large “map” of nearly 100 tasks of teaching. Practicing classroom teachers from around the United States reviewed the map and made numerous additions and changes. U-M faculty members then identified those items on the list that were the most high-leverage, using a set of pre-identified considerations. The current list of practices will continue to be modified as TeachingWorks collaborates with U-M faculty members and other partners around the country who are striving to isolate those aspects of the work of teaching that matter most for the quality of students’ educational opportunities.
We also seek to identify the highest-leverage content knowledge needed for teaching. High-leverage content is particular topics, practices, and texts that are both foundational to the K-12 curriculum in this country and important for beginning teachers to be able to teach. Examples of high-leverage content in mathematics include place value, number concepts and operations, fractions, and representing and explaining mathematical ideas and relationships. In English language arts, they include identifying literary themes, writing persuasively, and explaining fundamental grammatical conventions.
Deborah Ball's Definition of High Leverage Practice
"A “high-leverage practice” is an action or task central to teaching. Carried out skillfully, these practices increase the likelihood that teaching will be effective for students’ learning. They are useful across a broad range of subject areas, grade levels, and teaching contexts, and are helpful in using and managing differences among pupils. The list here is a set of “best bets,” warranted by research evidence, wisdom of practice, and logic. Over time, and in collaboration with our partners, TeachingWorks will improve the set of high-leverage practices by studying their effects on students’ learning of basic and complex academic content and skills.
The set of high-leverage practices is intended as a common framework for the practice of teaching that will provide the basis for a core curriculum for the professional training of teachers. Such a core curriculum would make possible collective development of materials and tools for training teachers, common assessments of performance, and agreement about standards for independent practice."
19 High Leverage Teaching Practices
Deborah Ball_High Leverage Practices.docxHigh Leverage Practice Template
High-Leverage Practices template_New.docx