High-Leverage Practice 16: 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!

HLP16 Use explicit instruction.

Explicit instruction is highly interactive. This does not mean lecturing and telling students what to do.

It might involve a lot of questioning which helps the students stay engaged because they might be called upon to answer the question. This also helps the teacher check for understanding.

This type of instruction follows the model of “I do, we do, you do.” First the teacher models exactly what the students would do. Then some students can model or the whole class can model together. Next becomes the independent work where the student does it on his own.

I also feel that explicit instruction breaks down the goal into every single task that is necessary to achieve this goal. I don’t take anything for granted.

Once I was teaching students how to write a check and record it into the checkbook. I took it for granted that the students knew what a check and a checkbook was. This was a major flaw on my part! Many had no idea what a check register was, so I had to start from the very beginning. The way I did this was to  write down every step that a person needed to do in order to write a check. Sometimes it is easier for me to pretend that the person has a limited English vocabulary so that I don’t assume anything when I’m listing the steps. I practiced with my husband and told him not to do anything unless I specifically gave him an instruction to do it. I was very surprised at how many steps I still missed because of my assumptions!

What are some suggestions you have for using explicit instruction? Please share.

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