Techniques for Teaching

• Reject Self Report: Replace functionally rhetorical questions with more objective forms of impromptu assessment.
• Targeted Questioning: Ask a quick series of carefully chosen, open-ended questions directed at a strategic sample of the class and executed in a short time period.
• Standardize the Format: Streamline observations by designing materials and space so that you're looking in the same consistent place every time for the data you need.
• Tracking, Not Watching: Be intentional about how you scan your classroom. Decide specifically what you're looking for and remain disciplined about it in the face of distractions.
• Show Me: Flip the classroom dynamic in which the teacher gleans data from a passive group of students. Have students actively show evidence of their understanding.
• Affirmative Checking: Insert specific points into your lesson when students must get confirmation that their work is correct, productive, or sufficiently rigorous before moving on to the next stage.
• Plan for Error: Increase the likelihood that you'll recognize and respond to errors by planning for common mistakes in advance.
• Culture of Error: Create an environment where your students feel safe making and discussing mistakes, so you can spend less time hunting for errors and more time fixing them.
• Excavate Error: Dig into errors, studying them efficiently and effectively, to better understand where students struggle and how you can best address those points.
• Own and Track: Have students correct or revise their own work, fostering an environment of accountability for the correct answer.
• No Opt Out: Turn "I don't know" into a success by helping students who won't try or can't succeed practice getting it right (and being accountable for trying).
• Right is Right: When you respond to answers in class, hold out for answers that are "all-the-way-right" or all the way to your standards of rigour.
• Stretch It: Reward "right" answers with harder questions.
• Format Matters: Help students practice responding in a format that communicates the worthiness of their ideas.
• Without Apology: Embrace - rather than apologize for - rigorous content, academic challenge, and the hard work necessary to scholarship.
• Being With The End: Progress from unit planning to lesson planning. Define the objective, decide how you'll assess it, and then choose appropriate lesson activities.
• 4 Ms: There are four criteria for an effective lesson plan objective: Manageable, Measureable, Made first, and Most imporant.
• Post It: Display your lesson objectives where everyone can see it and identify your purpose.
• Double Plan: As you plan a lesson, plan what your students will be doing at each point in class.
• Do Now: Use a short warm-up activity that students can complete without instruction or direction from you to start class every day. This lets the learning start even before you begin teaching.
• Name the Steps: Break down complex tasks into simple steps that form a path for student mastery.
• Board = Paper: Model and shape how students should take notes in order to capture the information you present.
• Control the Game: Ask students to read aloud frequently, but manage the process to ensure expressiveness, accountability, and engagement.
• Circulate: Move strategically around the room during all parts of the lesson.
• At Bats: Because succeeding once or twice at a skill won't bring mastery, give your students lots of practice mastering knowledge and skills.
• Exit Ticket: End each class with an explicit assessment of your objective that you can use to evaluate your (and your students') success.
• Change the Pace: Establish a productive pace in your classroom. Create 'fast' or 'slow' moments in a lesson by shifting activity types or formats.
• Brighten Lines: Ensure that change in activities and other mileposts are perceived clearly by making beginnings and endings of activities visible and crisp.
• All Hands: Leverage hand rasiing to positively impact pacing. Manage and vary the ways that students raise their hands, as well as the methods you use to call on them.
• Work the Clock: Measure time-your greatest resource as a teacher-intentionally, strategically, and often visibly to shape both your and your students' experience in the classroom.
• Every Minute Matters: Respect students' time by spending every minute productively.
• Wait Time: Allow students time to think before answering. If they aren't productive with that time, narrate them toward being more productive.
• Cold Call: Call on students regardless of whether they've raised their hands.
• Call and Response: Ask your class to answer questions in unison from time to time to build energetic, positive engagement.
• Break it Down: When a student makes an error, provide just enough help to allow her to 'solve' as much of the original problem as she can.
• Pepper: Use Pepper as a fast-paced, vocal review to build energy and actively engage your class.
• Everybody Writes: Prepare your students to engage rigorously by giving them the chance to reflect in writing before you ask them to discuss.
• The Art of the Sentence: Ask students to synthesize a complex idea in a single, well-crafted sentence. The discipline of having to make one sentence do all the work pushes students to use new syntactical forms.
• Show Call: Create a strong incentive to complete writing with quality and thoughtfulness by publicly showcasing and revising student wrting-regardless of who volunteers to share.
• Build Stamina: Gradually increase writing time to develop in your students the habit of writing productively, and the ability to do it for sustained periods of time.
• Front the Writing: Arrange lessons so that writing comes earlier in the process to ensure that sudents think rigorously in writing.
• Habits of Discussion: Make your discussions more productive and enjoyable by normalizing a set of ground rules or 'habits' that allow discussion to be more efficiently cohesive and connected.
• Turn and Talk: Encourage students to better formulate their thoughts by including short, contained pair discussion-but make sure to design them for maximum efficiency and accountability.
• Batch Process: Give more ownerships and autonomy to students-by allowing for students discussion without teacher mediation, for short periods of time or for longer, more formal sequences.
• Threshold: Meet your students at the door, setting expectations before they enter the classroom.
• Strong Start: Design and establish an efficient routine for students to enter the classroom and begin class.
• STAR/SLANT: Teach students key baseline behaviours for learning, such as sitting up in class and tracking the speaker, by using a memorable acroynm such as STAR or SLANT.
• Engineer Efficiency: Teach students the simplest and fastest procedure for executing key classroom tasks, then practice so that executing the procedure becomes a routine.
• Strategic Investment - From Procedure to Routine: Turn procedures into routines by rehearsing and reinforcing until excellence becomes habitual. Routinizing a key procedure requires clear expectations, consistency, and most important, patience. Even so, it's almost worth it.
• Do It Again: Give students more practice when they're not up to speed-not just doing something again, but doing it better, striving to do their best.
• Radar/Be Seen Looking: Prevent non-productive behaviour by developing your ability to see it when it happens and by subtly reminding students that you are looking.
• Make Compliance Visible: Ensure that students follow through on a request in an immediate and visible way by setting a standard that's more demanding than marginal compliance. Be judicious in what you ask for, specifically because it will uphold the standard of compliance.
• Least Invasive Intervention: Maximize teaching time and minimize 'drama' by using the subtlest and least invasive tactic possible to correct off-task students.
• Firm Calm Finesse: Take steps to get compliance without conflict by establishing an environment of purpose and respect and by maintaining your own poise.
• Art of the Consequence: Ensure that consequences, when needed, are more effective by making them quick, incremental, consistent and dispersonalized. It also helps to make a bounce-back statement, showing students that they can quickly get back in the game.
• Strong Voice: Affirm your authority through intentional verbal and non-verbal habits, especially at moments when you need control.
• What to Do: Use specific, concrete, sequential, and observable directions to tell students what to do, as opposed to what not to do.
• Positive Framing: Guide students to do better work while motivating and inspiring them by using positive tone to deliver constructive feedback.
• Precise Praise: Make your positive reinforcement strategic. Differentiate between acknowledgement and praise.
• Warm/Strict: Be both warm and strict at the same time to send a message of high expectations, caring, and respect.
• Emotional Constancy: Manage your emotions to consistently promote student learning and achievement.
• Joy Factor: Celebrate the work of learning as you go.

Lemov, Doug, 2014 — Teach Like a Champion 2.0

The Differentiated Classroom

The Teacher modifies Content, Process, and Products Based on Student Readiness, Interest, and Learning Profile

• Content: What teachers want students to learn from a particular segment of study, or the materials or mechanisms through which students gain access to that important information
• Process: Describes activities designed to ensure that students use key skills to make sense of, apply, and transfer essential knowledge and understandings
• Products: Vehicles through which students deomonstrate and extend what they have learned
• Readiness: A student's entry point relative to particular knowledge, understanding, or skills
• Interest: A Learner's affinitiy, curiousity, or passion for a particular topic or skill

Tomlinson, Carol A., 2014 — The Differentiated Classroom - Responding to the Needs of All Learner