Common Teaching Practices
These evidence-based teaching practices feature in classrooms across the school. Their consistent
implementation will support student learning, and help students know what to expect in class.
Practice
Share Learning Targets: Tell,
write, discuss learning objectives
with students and have them
interact with them.
Provide Thinking Time: Allow
students time to process ideas
and develop responses to
questions. This can be done in
many ways, including through
giving thinking time after asking a
question, using the Stop and Jot
or Think-Pair-Share strategies.
Have students articulate their
ideas: Whether in writing or
verbally, students need to
articulate their ideas, and to
discuss what they are learning.
This can be through
Think-Pair-Share, class
questioning, Turn and Talk, and
other forms of collaboration.
Daily Review: Spend 5-10
minutes at the beginning of class
reviewing a recent or past
concept.
Do not rely on self-report and
self-nomination: Don’t ask “do
you understand?” and don’t
always select students to answer
by having them raise their hands.
Seek alternatives (cold call,
popsicle sticks, etc) to having
students self-report on how they
are doing during the class.
Rationale Further reading
When students are clear about where they ASCD Advancing
are going, they can often figure out how to Formative Assessment in
get there. When they can compare their every Classroom
current level of understanding to the
expected level, they can regulate their work
to get there. Helps them to understand the
point of learning activities.
We all require time to understand a ASCD Wait time, what's in
question and formulate a response to it. it for me?
Learners, working with new pieces of
information and flexing new skills, require Stop and Jot
even more time, and should be given it.
This allows them to stay on pace with the AdLit: Think-Pair-Share
teacher and forces the teacher to regulate
their pace to that of the students.
Talk facilitates learning. When students Faculty Focus: Five
articulate their ideas, it helps to understand reasons getting kids to talk
their thinking. When they explain what they is worth the effort.
are learning, they have to work hard to use
ASCD Why Talk is
technical words and recall concepts, which
Important in Classrooms
helps strengthen vocabulary and
conceptual frameworks.
When students spend time on daily review, Rosenshine/UNESCO
whether of the previous day’s lessons, or Principles of Instruction
work from a few months ago, they have to
retrieve information from their memory,
which strengthens their memory and
understanding.
Self-report often yields inaccurate Doug Lemov’s Field
information. One reason for this is that, as Notes: When (especially)
novices, students cannot evaluate their to reject self-report.
understanding. They might also tell us they
understand to please us or avoid Why “everybody got it” is
embarrassment. A problem with having functionally rhetorical.
students raise their hands to answer is that
the teacher’s information about the class is
limited only to those students who
consistently raise their hands.