Every Champion is Guided by Their Principles
Decreasing the variance in student outcomes across teacher groups doesn't have to be tackled by trying to get every teacher to teach exactly the same way. With Principled Instruction, we show teachers how to design, prepare, implement, and troubleshoot everything they do through a common set of beliefs regarding high-impact instruction. These principles increase efficiency and decrease variance in and across teacher groups.
Academic Skill-Based Ability Grouping
Grouping students by their observed ability to independently apply content-area skills enhances the focus of instruction, strengths peer-to-peer discourse and accelerates learning.
We work directly with teachers to continuously observe student skills and create content-area subgroups. By enhancing the sophistication of their questioning progressions, and by strategically modulating a lesson’s pace and requirements for independence, teachers can better keep all students working at a level that is both challenging and rewarding.
Clear Learning Objectives
Content-area skills are best learned when both the students and the teacher can clearly articulate what the skill will look or sound like as the desired outcome of the instruction.
It is one thing to be able to articulate the current skill set a given student possesses and to have unpacked the state or national standards to fully understand the goal. It is another for both teachers and students to be able to articulate the exact change in student behavior and response sophistication needed to bridge that gap.
Complete Sentences
The complete sentence is the basic unit of human communication and should therefore be used by the students and the teacher at all times both for oral and written tasks.
For most teachers, expecting complete sentences during writing assignments is old hat. For some, expecting the same level of response during class discussions also makes perfect sense. But knowing how to analyze if those written and oral responses are parallel to the complexity and sophistication of state and national expectations can be difficult and time intensive. But not anymore...
Error Correction
Real-time error correction enhances a student's accuracy and accelerates skill development.
Our consultants like to say, "If the students are not making errors, what are they learning?" We teach teachers how to stop waiting and start manufacturing their own teachable moments during every lesson. These anticipated errors can then be immediately corrected by the teacher, peers or other available resources. Sometimes, it isn't about teacher... It is about teaching more often.
Equally Shared Language Production
Students produce their way to higher levels of both language and content area proficiency, and must therefore produce at least half of the language during a lesson.
To teach students to do most of the work during any given lesson sounds like a "no brainer". But what about the students who struggle to answer even the simplest questions? Or the students who only repeat questions they have heard from their peers when it is their turn to lead inquiry? We get educators to teach students to produce more academically-sounding oral language through a systematic heirarchy from repeating simple responses to formulating complex, academically relevant questions with our Productive Progression™.
Push!
Growth in academic skills occurs when students are pushed to work, with support, outside of their current comfort zone to successfully learn and apply new knowledge.
This one is easy! If a student answers a question correctly the first time—no matter how hard, rigorous, or high level it is—then the student already knew the answer. A big part of effective teaching is learning how to PUSH! students to think, learn and work outside of their current “success zone”.