Instructional Approaches

Instructional approaches scaffold the development of the targeted concepts and skills and gradually release responsibility, leading to learner agency and ownership. 

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Optimize Individual Choice & Autonomy

In an instructional setting, it is often inappropriate to provide choice of the learning objective itself, but it is often appropriate to offer choices in how that objective can be reached, in the context for achieving the objective, in the tools or supports available, and so forth. Offering learners choices can develop self-determination, pride in accomplishment, and increase the degree to which they feel connected to their learning. However, it is important to note that individuals differ in how much and what kind of choices they prefer to have. It is therefore not enough to simply provide choice. The right kind of choice and level of independence must be optimized to ensure engagement.

Provide learners with as much discretion and autonomy as possible by providing choices in such things as:

• The level of perceived challenge
• The type of rewards or recognition available
• The context or content used for practicing and assessing skills
• The tools used for information gathering or production
• The color, design, or graphics of layouts, etc.
• The sequence or timing for completion of subcomponents of tasks
• Allow learners to participate in the design of classroom activities and academic tasks
• Involve learners, where and whenever possible, in setting their own personal academic and behavioral goals
• The ability to fluently decode words, numbers or symbols that have been presented in an encoded format (e.g., visual symbols for text, haptic symbols for Braille, algebraic expressions for relationships) takes practice for any learner, but some learners will reach automaticity more quickly than others. Learners need consistent and meaningful exposure to symbols so that they can comprehend and use them effectively. Lack of fluency or automaticity greatly increases the cognitive load of decoding, thereby reducing the capacity for information processing and comprehension. To ensure that all learners have equal access to knowledge, at least when the ability to decode is not the focus of instruction, it is important to provide options that reduce the barriers that decoding raises for learners who are unfamiliar or dysfluent with the symbols.
• Allow the use of Text-to-Speech
• Use automatic voicing with digital mathematical notation (Math ML)
• Use digital text with an accompanying human voice recording (e.g., Daisy Talking Books)
• Allow for flexibility and easy access to multiple representations of notation where appropriate (e.g., formulas, word problems, graphs)
• Offer clarification of notation through lists of key terms

Vary Demands & Resources to Optimize Challenge

• Learners vary not only in their skills and abilities, but also in the kinds of challenges that motivate them to do their best work. All learners need to be challenged, but not always in the same way. In addition to providing appropriately varied levels and types of demands, learners also need to be provided with the right kinds of resources necessary for successful completion of the task. Learners cannot meet a demand without appropriate, and flexible, resources. Providing a range of demands, and a range of possible resources, allows all learners to find challenges that are optimally motivating. Balancing the resources available to meet the challenge is vital.
• Differentiate the degree of difficulty or complexity within which core activities can be completed
• Provide alternatives in the permissible tools and scaffolds
• Vary the degrees of freedom for acceptable performance
• Emphasize process, effort, improvement in meeting standards as alternatives to external evaluation and competition

Targeted Small Group Instruction

Instructional delivery models are used that maximize small group or one-on-one time with students to deliver personalized and differentiated instruction.

• Frequently use targeted small group instruction to individualize for student learning
• Purposefully differentiate instruction for small groups
• Group students dynamically for purposeful differentiation

High Yield Pedagogical Practices (HYPPS)

HIGH YIELD PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES (HYPPS) are high-level pedagogical practices that integrate deep content learning with language and literacy development. They address the four language domains: reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Collaborative Summarizing - Students collaborate to read and discuss complex text by finding the main ideas and details to summarize the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster academic conversations about text-dependent questions and serves as a scaffold from academic conversations to writing. 

Expert Group Jigsaw - Students become experts on a topic through focused reading and collaborative discussions with peers. Students read and take notes on text, meet with peers in expert groups, teach important findings about the text in jigsaw groups. The purpose of this HYPP is to foster student engagement and individual accountability for learning, scaffolds student understanding, maximizes peer interaction, establishes cooperation and respect through teamwork. 

Collaborative Text Reconstruction - Students recreate/reconstruct a text that they have listened to several times, taken notes on and discussed with partners without ever looking at the text. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ understanding of the topic, deepen content knowledge, draw attention to the meanings and language features in the text, and apprentice students into writing the text type. 

Sentence Unpacking - Students deconstruct text to find the meanings of long, complex sentences. Teachers guide students through sentences to find the meaning of sentence “chunks”. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students to understand the complex sentences and text they encounter by raising the awareness of language and connecting the language awareness to meeting. 

Cohesion Analysis - Supports student’s reading comprehension and scaffolds writing abilities by focusing on cohesion created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level structure/organization. Helps students understand the predictability of text types using analysis of text types. The purpose of this HYPP is to support students’ reading comprehension and scaffolds their writing ability by focusing on how cohesion is created through the whole text, paragraph, and sentence level organization and structure. More information coming soon.

Joint Construction of Texts - Teachers act as a facilitation scribe, prompting students to offer ideas for what to write in a collective piece. Teachers model how writers think about writing and encouraging students to create more academic and genre-appropriate text. The purpose of this HYPP is to scaffold students’ abilities to write a particular genre. Supports students to compose independent texts through a teacher-facilitated process that allows rehearsal of writing. 

Collaborative Problem Solving - Students engage in answering a prompt by first finding the story and understanding what is being asked. They solve independently, and with a partner and a group of four. Students agree on an answer and create a collaborative poster using visuals, words, and numbers (If applicable) representing all members’ thinking and work. The purpose of this HYPP is through discussion and problem-based tasks, students learn to think for themselves, provide feedback to their peers, and are encouraged to take risks and make “mistakes.” 

Stronger and Clearer - Students think and individually write how they would solve a problem. Students then share their thinking with another partner and have the opportunity to clarify and ask questions. Have students switch several more times before returning to their seat to individually write their response. The purpose of this HYPP is to provide a structured and interactive opportunity for students to revise and refine both their ideas and their verbal and written output.

Text Analysis - Teachers explicitly teach students the purpose, text structure & organization, and linguistic features through the use of the Genre Cheat Sheets. The purpose of this HYPP is fundamentally written genres are distinguished by their social purposes — that is, what the text is intended to accomplish within a particular context and content area and the desired effect on the people who will be reading it. These social purposes shape the genre, guide how it is structured and organized, and determine which language resources are most powerful to use in the text. More information coming soon.