The Teach for Success elements and principles draw from many sources, including the research of Benjamin Bloom, Robert Marzano, Thomas Guskey, and many others. Read more about the research base for Teach for Success. Your WestEd team has the know-how to put these principles into practice to achieve the measurable results you need. The Teach for Success model is organized into the following six sections: Instructional Practices to Support All Learners, Student Engagement, Assessment Practices, Cognitive Level of Questions and Activities, Instructional Approaches, and Learning Environment.

1. Instructional Practices to Support All Learners

This section highlights specific practices a teacher can use to best facilitate the transfer of knowledge and skills to all students. You will learn to:

• Effectively communicate selected standards or objectives to all students
• Make learning relevant to students
• Emphasize key vocabulary
• Provide instructional scaffolding to assist and support student understanding
• Provide verbal scaffolding to assist and support student use of academic language
• Encourage and facilitate student interactions or discussions related to the learning
• Provide specific, immediate, and helpful feedback to students
• Relate teacher actions to standards or objectives

2. Student Engagement

This section focuses on specific techniques a teacher can use to actively engage all students in learning. You will learn to involve students by engaging them in the following activities:

• Responding orally through discussing, summarizing, sharing similarities and differences, and or responding chorally as a whole group
• Producing something on paper or a white board through note taking, completing an advance organizer, completing or drawing a nonlinguistic representation, writing a summary, or explaining in writing the similarities or differences of a topic
• Signaling through a common gesture or displaying the white board or response card
• Demonstrating a response through movement
• Mentally processing information and sharing that processing through a choral or written response or conversing with another student

3. Assessment Practices

This section focuses on the different types of classroom assessments and on a teacher’s actions while assessing students day to day. You will learn how to:

• Use summative assessment
• Use formative assessment to determine instructional needs of all students
• Monitor and make individual or collective adjustments as needed

4. Cognitive Level of Questions and Activities

This section focuses on evaluating the cognitive level of questions and activities using the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. You will learn to view questions and activities based on:

• Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory
• Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining
• Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing
• Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
• Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing
• Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing

5. Instructional Approaches

This section encompasses the different types of instructional approaches a teacher can take in the classroom. You will how to:

• Facilitate student-led learning
• Provide teacher-led instruction in whole group and small group settings
• Provide student seatwork or centers with teacher interaction
• Encourage student seatwork or centers without teacher interaction
• Stimulate non-academic interaction

6. Learning Environment

This section focuses on the importance of creating a positive classroom climate, including the resources available within the classroom and the nature of a teacher’s interactions with students. You will learn to:

• Foster a climate of fairness, caring, and respect
• Maintain acceptable standards for behavior, routines, and transitions
• Reinforce the efforts of students or provide recognition
• Establish a literacy-rich environment