High Impact Teaching Strategies

Examples tHAT illustrate the Strategy

Example 1: Year 6 – Mathematics

At the beginning of a unit of work on Financial Literacy, a Year 6 Mathematics teacher planned to use worked examples as a foundation for building her students’ skills. She applied this high impact teaching strategy to demonstrate a method of calculating percentage discounts of 10%. After presenting a video of discount sales and linking the learning intentions and success criteria to real-life problems, the teacher demonstrated the method on the board. She emphasised each step of the process, clearly articulating the method and the links between the steps. With this strategy the teacher was able to demonstrate the complete process and provide a worked example that would assist students to find solutions to like problems. She built upon this knowledge by tasking students to use the worked example to apply the process learnt. In small groups, students worked through the steps using the processes that were clearly articulated at the start of the lesson and annotated on the board. Once they had mastered using the method for calculating 10% discounts, the teacher provided additional worked examples demonstrating how to apply the knowledge to percentage discounts of 25% and 50%. Students used the new worked examples as a guide for their independent practice. Working in groups and using the worked examples opened up opportunities for students to discuss any step they needed further clarification on, prior to a period of independent practice. Using worked examples enabled the teacher to scaffold the learning which reduced the cognitive load for the learners and supported their skill acquisition.