High Impact Teaching Strategies

Examples tHAT illustrate the Strategy

Example 1: Primary – English

An inner city primary school has endorsed a whole school approach that encourages teachers to target writing mechanics. This emphasis encouraged a group of teachers in an English Professional Learning Community to interrogate their student achievement data on writing. Developing explicit teaching lesson segments quickly became the focus of PLC meetings. They decided to use an explicit teaching framework for a collaboratively designed model lesson plan – an approach that assisted all PLC members to learn more about explicit teaching techniques. The broad learning intention they adopted was that students will know how, and be able to, write an introduction. Their planning first focused on how to clearly demonstrate to students what they need to know and how to do it. They collaborated on designing a persuasive writing lesson plan that explicitly taught and modelled how to write an introduction. The model lesson plan opened with explanations of the learning goals and success criteria. It moved on to explicitly teach the structure of an introduction, clearly naming and explaining all the components. The next step was for the teacher to present varied exemplars demonstrating what a good introduction looks like. The model plan’s next step was to check students’ understanding, and clarify misunderstandings before students embarked on guided practice. The plan built in time to closely monitor individual student performance in guided practice activities, and to provide feedback. The plan noted possible support strategies that may assist students. The model plan then progressed to whole group practice and individual practice, again with close performance monitoring. Drawing on their learning from working together to fashion a model lesson plan, PLC members constructed lesson plans appropriate to the year levels they teach. Teachers collected student feedback about the lessons based on explicit teaching practice. At PLC meetings they discussed the feedback, which was very positive. Students said they were able to focus on a specific goal for the lesson, they felt assured they had the knowledge and skills required to achieve the goal, and they felt confident about independently completing the task.