Opportunities

Students are provided opportunities to develop deep understandings of the content and topic in order to discuss it and write about it. 

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Build Fluencies with Graduated Levels of Support for Practice & Performance

Learners must develop a variety of fluencies (e.g., visual, audio, mathematical, reading, etc.). This means that they often need multiple scaffolds to assist them as they practice and develop independence. Curricula should offer alternatives in the degrees of freedom available, with highly scaffolded and supported opportunities provided for some and wide degrees of freedom for others who are ready for independence. Fluency is also built through many opportunities for performance, be it in the form of an essay or a dramatic production. Performance helps learners because it allows them to synthesize their learning in personally relevant ways. Overall, it is important to provide options that build learners’ fluencies.

• Provide differentiated models to emulate (i.e. models that demonstrate the same outcomes but use differing approaches, strategies, skills, etc.)
• Provide differentiated mentors (i.e., teachers/tutors who use different approaches to motivate, guide, feedback or inform)
• Provide scaffolds that can be gradually released with increasing independence and skills (e.g., embedded into digital reading and writing software)
• Provide differentiated feedback (e.g., feedback that is accessible because it can be customized to individual learners)

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.