High-Leverage Practices

In a group discussion, the teacher and all of the students work on specific content together, using one another’s ideas as resources. The purposes of a discussion are to build collective knowledge and capability in relation to specific instructional goals and to allow students to practice listening, speaking, interpreting, and agreeing and disagreeing. The teacher and a wide range of students contribute orally, listen actively, and respond to and learn from others’ contributions. Teachers work to ensure students are positioned as competent among their peers, that patterns of interaction are respectful, and that the collective work of the group uses the strengths of and benefits each student.

Explaining and modeling are practices for making a wide variety of topics, academic practices, and strategies explicit to students. Teachers determine when explaining or modeling can help to make explicit content and practices that often remain tacit or invisible. Teachers might use simple explanations when working with straightforward content. They might choose modeling, which includes verbal explanation as well as thinking aloud and demonstrating when sharing the metacognitive process, to provide greater access to students about strategies and practices.

Eliciting and responding productively to student thinking is the core work of teaching. Children’s ideas are fundamental resources for instruction, and teachers deliberately unpack each student’s thinking and use what they learn to design instruction for that student and for the whole class. They seek to understand students’ ideas, questions, and ways of thinking, including possible misconceptions, and work continuously to identify students’ strengths and areas for growth. Teachers draw out student thinking and skills through carefully chosen questions and tasks, and attend closely to what students do and say. They consider and check alternative interpretations of student ideas and methods. Teachers are attentive to how students might hear their questions and to how students communicate their own thinking. Teachers use what they learn about student thinking for formative assessment, to guide instructional decisions, and to surface ideas that will benefit other students.

Teachers deliberately broaden and label both (1) what counts as competence in a given domain and (2) who is seen as competent in that domain. A “domain” includes academic subject matters and disciplines, but also other areas of learning and practice. To broaden what counts as competence, teachers explicitly name and highlight students’ contributions of specific knowledge, skills, and practices, both individual and collective, that are central to engaging and learning in the domain.

To achieve this core goal of acknowledging competence, teachers attend carefully to who is seen and acknowledged as contributing and who is seen as “struggling” or “not smart.” They explicitly consider social identities. They intentionally call attention to specific competences in what those students say or do. These moves must be done in timely and authentic ways with sensitivity to how students and their peers are likely to interpret and respond to the attention. Teachers can acknowledge competence publicly in whole or small groups, or in one-on-one situations, at various points across a lesson or school day. When done well, acknowledging competence disrupts narrow, reductive conceptions of content, inequitable patterns in who is seen as “smart” or “good,” and negative and deficit views that students carry of themselves.

Every content area has norms and practices for how people construct and share knowledge. These vary across subjects but often include establishing hypotheses, providing evidence for claims, and explaining one’s reasoning to others. Teachers name these norms and practices, provide scaffolds, model, and offer opportunities for students to use the norms and practices. These norms and practices support students to engage productively in content-area learning.

We use the term “norms” to refer to a widely shared and accepted standard for work in a discipline. Subject-specific norms exist outside of individual classrooms and are often the standards of a discipline. This is not determined by a single teacher in a classroom, but by the broad community of disciplinary experts. It is through routines or practices that a norm is regularly carried out in a particular context and content area.

Teachers organize time, space, and materials to support students to engage in the regular tasks of classroom life. Through the selection and use of organizational routines, teachers establish learning environments in which students have equitable access to resources, time, space, and voice in the classroom. Teachers introduce students to routines and provide opportunities to practice, analyze, and modify the routines. In some cases, they develop and enact routines collaboratively with students.

Teachers set and maintain collective expectations and establish classroom environments that ensure a safe and productive classroom community. They distinguish between the helpful use of boundaries to provide structure and the use of power to control. They develop specific approaches and routines to establish, maintain, and respond to these expectations and behaviors in ways that build a classroom community that supports students’ learning and flourishing. Choosing and using expectations and agreements requires explicit care to avoid reinforcing values and patterns of control and behavior that privilege dominant ways of being related to race, class, and gender.

Teachers use small group work when the learning goals benefit from interaction and collaboration among students. To do this, 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. Teachers work to ensure students are positioned as competent among their peers, that patterns of interaction are respectful, and that the collective work of the group uses the strengths of and benefits each student.

Teachers intentionally build and sustain respectful relationships with students in the classroom. Teachers who form respectful relationships with students are able to work collaboratively with children and manage power dynamics in ways that increase student participation, engagement, and achievement. Respectful teacher-student relationships are characterized by trust, care, and appreciation of students’ cultures and communities. Teachers develop these relationships in all aspects of their teaching, including through small conversations with individual students, notes to students, nonverbal signals, and in how they respond to and acknowledge students during lessons.

Careful and sensitive communication between teachers and families supports student learning. Teachers communicate with families to learn more about children from the people who know them best. Teachers share information about children’s activities, learning, and development, and seek ways to partner with families. Communication may take place in person, in writing, or in phone calls. Every conversation with a family is a chance for the teacher to communicate a respectful, open attitude and create a space for a two-way conversation. Teachers must be attentive to considerations of language and culture, respectful and valuing of families, and oriented to working with families to support children.

A teacher’s outward communication style, markers of identity, and views about children and their families can play a major role in their capacity to connect with and instruct others—and also influence others’ connections to them. When interacting with students and families, teachers attend to the ways their identities, habitual patterns of talk and behavior, and expressive communication styles (e.g., tone of voice, body language, etc.) show up. They think critically about how they and their communication styles are “read” by students or their families. Teachers then make adjustments so that the impact they have on others is positive and strategic, and conveys appropriate feelings of respect, welcome, and engagement.

Teachers learn about their particular students in order to design instruction that will support their learning and flourishing. They create opportunities within the classroom for students to show who they are and share parts of their identities if they wish. Teachers regularly check in with students outside of the classroom, including through one-on-one conversations and attendance at school events, and with families and community members. Teachers make use of their learning to tailor instruction for students.

Identifying goals for students’ learning is fundamental for skillful teaching that supports students’ growth. This is because the design of lessons, whether from instructional materials or independently, depends on articulating what students are to learn. For some subject areas, such as mathematics, reading, writing, science, and social studies, standards are articulated by professional organizations and by states. These provide guidance for the process of setting learning goals. In other areas, such as physical education, schools or districts may specify learning targets. And in still other areas, such as developing organizational skills or communicating across difference, teachers may identify them on their own.

School- or district-provided instructional materials are key resources as teachers work to support learning and ensure that what students learn is aligned with local, state, and national goals. To use them effectively, teachers analyze materials carefully, becoming deeply familiar with the scope and sequence of a unit and with the core academic content, tasks, and activities of individual lessons. They then adapt them to meet the needs of specific learners and contexts.

Teachers use a variety of methods to assess what students are learning during and at the end of lessons. These include simple questions, short performance tasks, journal or notebook entries, surveys, or end-of-class “exit tickets.” These frequent checks provide information about students’ current understandings and their sense of themselves as knowers and doers of the content and help the teacher adjust instruction in the moment or from one lesson to the next. Teachers design formative assessments that account for procedural and conceptual understandings, disciplinary practices, metacognitive processes, and development of productive identities, and should value multiple, diverse expressions of what counts as “knowing.”

Teachers regularly analyze student work, including classwork, homework, and assessments, to inform instruction. They identify individual students’ strengths and areas for growth and look for patterns in student thinking and capability across groups. To do this, they determine and apply criteria to student work, making sure to maintain broad conceptions of competence; analyze work against those criteria, guarding against bias and deficit-based interpretations; and then make inferences about what students know and can do. Teachers plan instructional responses to what they learn from analyzing student work, making decisions about where and what kind of additional or differentiated instruction is required.

Feedback supports learning by focusing students’ attention on specific aspects of their work and supporting their ongoing learning. Good feedback is specific, focused, and not overwhelming in scope, and supports students’ positive perceptions of their own capability. Giving skillful feedback requires the teacher to make strategic choices about the frequency, method, and content of feedback and to communicate in ways that are understandable by students. Feedback can be provided in many forms, including written and oral, and these each require consideration of how the mode of communication might shape students’ experience of the feedback.

Learning to teach and continuing to improve require regular analysis of instruction and its effectiveness. Teachers study their own teaching and that of their colleagues in order to improve their practice. Analyzing instruction may take place individually or with colleagues and involves identifying patterns, opportunities, and specific moves, and making hypotheses for how to improve. Teachers pay close attention to and study their students’ contributions, work, and engagement, and challenge themselves to see and understand more, and to consider how their own actions are supporting or impeding their students to flourish. They systematically interrogate their underlying assumptions and seek to develop new instructional habits and strategies that support students to thrive.

Carefully sequenced lessons help students develop deep understanding of content and capability with skills and practices. Teachers design lessons to provide opportunities for student inquiry and discovery as well as for practice with foundational concepts and skills. Effectively designed lessons maintain a coherent focus while keeping students engaged. They also help students connect how what they are learning contributes to their long-term learning goals.