Thursday, July 18, 2019

High-Leverage Practice 12: Instruction


I am going to discuss High-Leverage Practices as mentioned on the CEC website organized around four aspects of practice. I hope you will join in the conversation!

HLP12 Systematically design instruction toward a specific learning goal.

It is important that instruction is sequential, and each skill builds on the foundation of already mastered skills.

It doesn’t do the student any good if he has to jump around from skill to skill without learning the basics or the skills needed as perquisites for the new skill. This will only cause frustration for both the student and the teacher.

If I see that a student needs to work on a specific goal, I like to list the skills that he will need to successfully achieve this goal.

Once I have a list of skills, I prioritize them in the sequential order that the student needs to learn them. Each skill will build on the previous skill learned.

After I list the skills, I need to look at what it will take for the student to show me that he has mastered the skill. How many times do I want him to successfully complete the skill? How many trials will I give him for the assessment? What does he have to do exactly to show the skill has been mastered.

It is important to keep data on each skill and the percentage of mastery. Using graphs or charts will help the student self-monitor his progress along with the teacher.

Each of these steps is a way to systematically design instruction towards a specific learning goal.

How do you design your instruction? Please share.

Photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash




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