Featured Speakers:
- Robin Chait, Project Director, School Choice at WestEd
- Beckie Davis, Senior Program Associate, Special Education at WestEd
- Jessica Gray, School Improvement Specialist at WestEd
Host:
- Kelly Wynveen, Senior Project Manager, School Choice at WestEd
Kelly Wynveen:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back. This is Webinar 3 in our STACS Special Education series. This is our first webinar of Year 2. We’re excited you all were able to join today. Today, we’re focused on designing high-impact, inclusive academic instruction. If you were here with us for our content last year, Webinars Number 1 and Number 2, you already know the rhythm here. We are going to ground ourselves in some research, look at what this actually looks like in the classroom, and then give you some time to think about your own setting. So ,today’s anchor is high-leverage practices, or HLPs. And by the end of the hour we have with you today, we hope that you know what they are, why they matter, and how a small number of them can carry a lot of weight in your building. So, before we dive in, just a quick housekeeping note. Drop your name, your school, and your role in the chat, so we know who’s in the room. And we’ll start with a quick reminder of who we are and why STACS exists.
So, a quick word about the program that makes the series possible. So, STACS stands for the Statewide Technical Assistance Center for Charter Schools, and its job is to bring technical assistance to California charter schools in five priority areas. You see them here on the screen. The five priority areas are English Learners, Special Education, Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Students, Career and Technical Education, and Innovative Strategy. Our work through WestEd lives in that special education strand, but you will notice very quickly that the practices we discuss are good instruction for every student in your building, not just students with IEPs. STACS is a subgrant; we’re funded by the California Department of Education’s federal Charter School Programs Grant. And I will drop the link on the slide so that you can take a look at the program page if you want details, because there is plenty more free technical assistance on these other topics that you can take advantage of.
Now a word on who’s facilitating today. So, we are bringing you this webinar from WestEd. WestEd is a nonpartisan research development and service agency. Our mission is to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. So, what that means practically for you today is that everything we put in front of you is grounded in evidence. And when we say a practice is high leverage, we mean researchers have looked at it across many studies and many settings and found that it consistently moves outcomes for students with disabilities. So, let me quickly introduce you to the team who will be bringing you this content today.
Here’s our team from WestEd. I’ll quickly introduce the team that’s supporting this work. My name is Kelly Wynveen. I am a senior project manager here at WestEd. I work on the Charter School and Choice team. I’m joined today by my colleagues, Robin Chait, Beckie Davis, and Jessica Gray. And between us, we bring experience in special education administration, charter school authorizing and compliance, educator professional learning. Several of us have sat in the seats you’re sitting in today as classroom teachers and school leaders, and you’ll see our contact information again at the end. So, if a question comes up during the hour that we can’t get to live, drop it in the chat and we will follow up.
And before we dive into content, let’s just agree on how we’ll work together in the next hour. So four really quick working agreements: Be prepared and be present. We know that you’re busy, but you will get far more out of this if you can close the other tabs and spend the next hour with us. Assume good intentions. We’re going to talk about instruction today and that means talking about practice that is maybe not yet where you want it to be, but no one is being judged here. And this is pretty content heavy, so please keep your mic muted unless you’re speaking. And if you can, keep your camera on. It makes a real difference for the people presenting. And stay actively engaged. We’ve got some reflection points built in, some chat prompts. So, learning happens in those spaces, not just in our slides, so stay engaged. And by all means, use the recording of this webinar with your staff at your school. Here’s what we’re bringing you today. We’re going to dive into some of the content pretty quick here.
So, how this fits into the big picture. So, like I said, STACS Special Education is a free technical assistance [TA] program. We’ll be bringing you TA for the next 3 years through this series. In Webinar 1, we kind of laid the foundations on what special education law requires and what California Specific Compliance looks like in the charter context. In Webinar 2, we focused on IEP development and implementation. And today, in Webinar 3, we’re moving from compliance and paperwork into instruction. So this is the shift from here where we’ll talk about what we are required to do and what actually changes outcomes in the classroom. I also want to flag the Continuous Improvement Networks. So, those are smaller working sessions where you will apply this material with peers and problem-solve real cases from your own school. The next one is a follow-up to today’s webinar on October 20 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time. I’ll drop the registration link in the chat for that, but we really encourage you to attend that. There’ll be much more peer-to-peer connection, and we’d love to have you there.
So today, like I said, we’re going to focus on High-Leverage Practices in special education, what they are, why they matter, and what they can look like in practice. We’ll begin with kind of a broader framework looking at each of the four domains, and then, we’ll spend some additional time on instructional practices and how multiple HLPs can work together in an inclusive classroom. You’ll notice we’ll spend a little extra time on Instruction in Behavior and Academics domain, and that’s deliberate. The session is about designing instruction so that domain is where we will slow down and go the deepest.
So, here’s what that means for you specifically, our objectives for the session. Here’s what we’re committing to for the next hour. Three things. First, describe. You should be able to describe the purpose and the organization of high-leverage practices, or the HLPs, and that means knowing what they are, where they came from, and how the 22 practices are organized. You should also be able to identify, to point the concrete examples of HLPs that support academic instruction for students with disabilities. We’ll look at four student case studies to make that real. Then consider, and this is the one I care the most about, you should leave having identified specific opportunities to strengthen HLP use in your own setting, and that is why we have three reflection pauses built into today. Note, these objectives are deliberately modest. We are not going to master 22 practices in an hour, but we are going to build shared language and get one actionable next step on your plate. So, before I define anything for you, I want to draw on what you already know. So I’m going to transition over to my colleague Jessica, and let’s start with your own experience.
Jessica Gray:
Okay, thank you. Okay, so here’s our prompt. We are going to do this as a waterfall chat, so don’t respond quite yet. So, I’d love for you to think of a time that you helped a student who struggled to understand a hard concept. What was the one instructional move that made the difference? So type your response in the chat, but don’t hit enter yet. I’m going to give you 45 seconds to think and type, and then, we’ll send them all at once, so we get a waterfall instead of a trickle.
Okay, get ready to hit enter. You can hit enter in five, four, three, two, one. Okay, great. So, we see modeling, increasing the use of visuals, connecting back to the concept, making the content relatable. So, take a look at what’s showing up here. I’m seeing, again, modeling, making the content relatable. And here’s the real point: Nobody typed in a program or a curriculum. You named some practices, and most of the practices that are in the chat are High-Leverage Practices, to some extent, or they fall into that category, which is exactly what we’re going to name and organize for the rest of the hour. So, you’re already doing some of this work, and today is about really doing it deliberately, consistently, and with shared language across your teams. So, let’s put a name and a research base to what you described, and I’ll pass it over to my colleagues.
Beckie Davis:
So, as Jessica said, we’re talking about High-Leverage Practices. And in 2015, the Council for Exceptional Children partnered with the CEEDAR Center and asked a very simple question: Of everything a special educator does, which practices matter most? And they landed on 22 and then organized these into four different domains. So the High-Leverage Practices, or HLPs, are research-informed, high-impact practices that represent essential features of effective teaching. Many High-Leverage Practices incorporate or guide educators in selecting and implementing evidence-based practices [EBP], but HLPs and EBPs are not synonymous. They are not the same thing. In other words, a High-Leverage Practice is what you do and how you teach. An evidence-based practice is a specific intervention with a specific research base behind it. HLPs often carry EBPs into the classroom, but the two terms are not interchangeable, and we shouldn’t use them that way.
Two other things to hear in the definition. First, HLPs are not a checklist of everything a great teacher does. They are the highest-impact subset. Second, they work across grade levels, content areas, and disability categories, which is exactly why they’re useful in a charter setting where staff may be small and wearing many hats. Notice the four domains on the screen: Collaboration, Data-Driven Planning, Instruction in Behavior and Academics, Intensifying and Intervening. We’re going to take each domain in turn, but we’re going to spend the most time on Domain 3 because today is about designing instruction.
So, let’s look at how those 22 practices are structured. High-leverage practices are practices that have been identified as particularly important to effective special education. They’re not intended to capture everything a strong educator does. Instead, they identify the practices that educators use frequently and that have significant potential to improve student learning and other important outcomes. Again, they can be used across grade levels, content areas, and disability categories. They are a fundamental set of practices. It’s an action or a task that’s central to teaching, and it specifies what teachers should know and define how they deliver instruction.
So, here’s the architecture. We’ve got the 22 practices, four domains, and importantly, six of the 22 are what we call “Pillar Practices.” So, Pillar Practices are the six load-bearing practices. If you only had the capacity to build a few things well this year, these are the ones that hold the most weight and that the other practices depend upon. So today, those are High-Leverage Practices 1, 3, 6, 7, 16, and 20, and the ones you’ll see flagged as pillars on the domain slides.
Embedded practices are the remaining practices that live inside and around the pillars. They’re not lesser, but they are specific moves that make a pillar work. For example, you can’t really do High-Leverage Practice 6, using data to adjust instruction, without Practice 4, using multiple sources of information, or HLP 5, interpreting and communicating that data. The embedded practices are how the pillar actually gets enacted. So, an analogy that tends to make sense is that the pillars are the load-bearing walls; the embedded practices are the framing and the wiring that make the rooms inside and make the rooms usable. You have to have both, but you don’t start by rearranging the wiring. These 22 practices are not a menu for you to pick from. They’re not a compliance checklist. They’re designed to work as a system. Collaboration feeds your data. Your data drives your instruction. Your instruction tells you when to intensify, and intensifying sends you back to collaboration. When they operate together, they improve outcomes for every student in the room, not just students with IEPs. And that’s the single most important idea of this section.
So, look at the four domains. In the chat, name one thing you already do that you think might live in those domains. You don’t need to know the High-Leverage Practice number. In fact, most of you are already using several of those without even calling them High-Leverage Practices. You mentioned them in the chat previously. So, in the chat, name one thing you already do that you think lives in one of these domains. Data-driven intervention, exactly. Has anybody ever posted a visual schedule? That’s a High-Leverage Practice. Collaboration with SPED and gen ed teachers on a frequent basis, that’s a crucial strategy and practice. If you’ve ever called a parent to convey good news or to brag on a student, that’s another High-Leverage Practice.
So, why put the effort into the shared framework? We’ve got four reasons that this matters, and one matters the most in a charter setting. A common instructional focus and language across staff is critical. In a charter school, your special education team is probably one or two people, and your general ed teachers may have had very little special education coursework or experience. When everyone has different vocabulary for the same practice, then co-planning turns into translation. HLPs give your whole staff a shared vocabulary, and it’s the same vocabulary that research uses. They apply across settings, the resource room, co-taught classroom, full inclusion, small group. The practice doesn’t change when the setting changes, which matters when your students move between settings during the day. They’re developable. This is not a list of traits that good teachers happen to have. These are practices that a new teacher can be coached on, observed doing, and get better at. For schools hiring early career teachers, that’s the difference between hoping for good instruction and building it. And they’re relevant in every classroom, and this is the point that I want most to stick. HLPs are not those special ed teacher’s checklist. Nearly all of them improve instruction for every learner in every room. Strong Tier 1 instruction is a special ed strategy.
So, let’s walk through the four domains, starting with Collaboration. Domain 1 in a school context is where the leverage is the highest because collaboration intends to be either built into the schedule or absent altogether. There are two Pillar Practices here. HLP 1 is collaboration with professionals, and someone had already mentioned gen ed and special ed teachers collaborating. It’s direct about why this qualifies as a Pillar Practice. It’s a major responsibility shared across special educators, general educators, paraeducators, specialized instructional support personnel, and families. In practice, this looks like a standing co-planning block with gen ed and your service providers. It’s scheduled in advance. It’s where the team looks at the same student data together. Each person contributes their expertise that others don’t have. The gen ed teacher brings knowledge of grade-level expectations and the general curriculum. The special educator brings expertise in learning and error analysis, and together, they determine the instructional path forward.
HLP 3 is collaborating with families to support student learning and secure needed services. The full title of this is worth noticing. This practice positions families as instructional partners. Here’s a concrete version. A student is moving into a new class and has difficulty getting started: sits down, doesn’t open anything, and just waits. The team builds a task initiation checklist with the family, and that same checklist is used for homework in the home language. The student practices one routine across both settings, which supports transfer of learning. The family contributes what they already know about what helps the student begin tasks, and the team produces a research in the language the school may not have been able to produce on its own.
HLP 2, lead effective meetings, sits underneath both pillars. The example on the slide is small but consequential. Send the agenda ahead of time, so families arrive prepared. The parent who has received the agenda is much more able to participate in the discussion. That is what embedded means in this domain. The HLP book identifies nine types of collaboration, and nearly all of them take the form of a meeting. Meetings are where professional collaboration and family partnerships take place.
A quick one in the chat. Of these three, which is the weakest link at your particular school right now? Type A, B, or C. A is scheduled co-planning need time. B is how we run our meetings, and C is families as instructional partners. Which one of these—A, B, or C—is the weakest in your school or needs the most focus on support? A, co-planning time; B, how you run your meetings; and C, families as instructional partners. A lot of the families as instructional partners, yeah, but a good mix across the board. So, you’ve done a good job of identifying where you might need to spend some time shoring up support. And now Robin is going to help us look at this domain with one particular student. Robin?
Robin Chait:
Great. So, here’s an example of the collaboration domain in action. So, Ava is a 2nd grader with an IEP under Other Health Impairment. During a 15-minute independent reading block, she reads about a page, then she gets up, sharpens a pencil, asks for water, talks to the student beside her. Her general educator spends much of the block redirecting. Both educators have a stake in this. The general educator is losing instructional time, and Ava’s not accessing the reading block. Both have reason to be at the table. So, each of these steps is labeled with a type of collaboration from the framework since they serve different purposes. So, the first is a consultation between the special and general educator, discussing what the specially designed instruction should look like inside the reading block. They decide the special education teacher will check in on Ava during the reading block to make sure she’s on task. The second is a problem-solving meeting that includes Ava’s family. The agenda went out a week ahead with one specific question, “What helps Ava stay focused on something at home?” Her mother described a visible timer that Ava responds to, which the school hadn’t tried yet. That became part of the plan. The third is a progress-monitoring meeting to review Ava’s data, examining the instruction and making adjustments.
So, the team implemented the plan, and then, they had a progress-monitoring meeting. They met to discuss how the plan was going. They realized the check-in wasn’t helpful because it was too late in the reading block, and Ava was already off task; so, they decided to move up the check-in. They also added the visual timer Ava’s mother had described. Those adjustments are what made the plan work, and they surfaced because a progress-monitoring meeting was already on the calendar. So, the collaboration structure is what allowed the team to develop solutions to support Ava. So, Ava’s plan involved three different types of collaboration. In the chat, what would need to be in place in a school to make this collaboration possible across a caseload? What do you think the school would need to have in place to make this collaboration possible? Protected time, absolutely. Aligned planning periods. Yeah, shared planning time. Yeah, definitely. Definitely shared planning time that’s protected and aligned across general and special education teachers. Okay, great. Now, let’s move on to Domain 2, Data-Driven Planning.
Beckie Davis:
Domain 2 is “Data-Driven Planning,” and there’s one pillar with four embedded practices, which tells you something about how the framework views this work. The pillar is the decision, and the embedded practices are what make the decision sound. So HLP 6 is a pillar. Look at the full title carefully: Use student assessment data, analyze instructional practices, and make necessary adjustments. The object of the analysis is the instruction. Data that tells you how a student performed is the report. Data that tells you whether your instruction is working is a decision. That distinction is the whole practice, and it’s the thing most often missed when a team says they’re data-driven. The four embedded practices support the decision. Four is using multiple sources—family input, student interviews, standardized results, curriculum-based measures, observation. We look at what that produces in a moment.
HLP 5 is interpreting and communicating the information so that families and students—notice “and students”—can use it. Not receive it, but actually use it. HLPs 11 and 12 are the goal practices. Eleven is deciding which goal gets instructional time, and 12 is designing the path to it. One idea runs through all five, and it’s worth stating directly: Education is implemented with students—”with,” not “to.” Students can select work samples and explain why those samples show what they’ve learned. Students can track their own progress. Students can help set the next goal. When that happens, the data stops being something collected about a student and becomes something that the student uses. Now, let’s look at what happens when a team gathers all of these around one student. Robin will take us through that.
Robin Chait:
Great. So, Elias is a 4th grader with a specific learning disability in reading. His team is preparing for his IEP meeting, and they’ve pulled together information from several different sources. They start with a family questionnaire. Elias’s family tells us that he becomes upset when he has to read in front of other people. That gives the team important information that an assessment score alone would not capture. Next, look at the curriculum-based measure. Elias is reading 54 words per minute on a 2nd grade passage, up from 35; so, we can see that he is making progress, but he’s still working well-below 4th grade expectations. Then, we have the teacher observation. Elias is motivated by tracking his own progress toward his reading goals. That’s a strength the team can build on. Notice what happens when we put these sources together. We have a fuller picture of Elias, what he can do, where he’s struggling, how he experiences reading, and what motivates him, but we still don’t have all of the information we need to adjust his instruction.
The team left the Questions column blank. What is one question you’d want to answer before deciding what to adjust in Elias’s instruction? So, what is one question you would want to answer before adjusting Elias’s instruction? It could be about the family questionnaire, the curriculum-based measure, teacher observation, or other data. So, I would want to know what other assessment data do we have available on Elias and how frequently the teacher is giving it. So that might be one question.
Oh, here we go. What methods of tracking has the teacher tried with Elias? Yeah, that’s a great question. Like, what’s been tried? Has it worked? So, what else might we want to try? Kelly, what are Elias’s other interests or motivations? Yeah. What motivates him to want to read? Like, what topics does he want to read about? Is the curriculum culturally relevant so that he sees himself in the curriculum? Another great question. If not, how can we supplement it? Any pattern in the real progress he’s making so far? That’s another great question. Like, where are his strengths? Does he struggle more with phonics or whole language? Great. That’s a related question. Great. So, all of these are fantastic questions that would definitely help you adjust Elias’s instruction. Now, let’s move on to talking about Domain 3.
Beckie Davis:
So Domain 3 is “Instruction in Behavior and Academics,” and this is the largest domain. It holds the most Pillar Practices, and it’s where we’re going to spend more time later on. Domains 1, 2, and 4 set the conditions, but Domain 3 is the instruction, itself. High-Leverage Practice 7 establishes a consistent, organized, and responsive learning environment. This is a Pillar Practice, and it comes first for a reason. No instructional practice survives a chaotic environment. Consistency is not about compliance or quiet rooms. It’s about predictability so that a student’s working memory goes to the content instead of figuring out what is happening next. Note the word “responsive.” A consistent environment that ignores what students bring is just rigid. “Responsive” means that the routine holds, and you adjust within it. The through line for this domain—what we teach and how we teach—are two different design decisions. Domain 3 covers both, and most instructional problems are “how” problems, not “what” problems. We know what to teach. It’s how to teach that will make a difference. So, let’s look at this domain in perspective about a student who struggles with multi-step word problems.
Robin Chait:
Great. So, let’s take a look at Sophia. Sophia is a 3rd grader who struggles with multi-step math word problems. She can do the computation. The difficulty comes when she has to figure out how to approach a problem with several steps. So, the instructional need isn’t more practice with math facts. Sophia needs a clear, predictable process for working through the problem. Her teacher makes that process visible. She models a step-by-step strategy, thinking aloud as she works through the problem and using a graphic organizer to help Sophia organize the steps. Then, Sophia practices with support before gradually doing the work independently. There are two HLPs working together here. HLP 7 gives Sophia a predictable routine for approaching a multi-step problem, and HLP 16 makes the thinking behind that routine explicit. That distinction is important. When students get stuck, we want to identify the specific point where the thinking breaks down. That helps us to determine what we actually need to do to help the student understand.
So, think about a lesson you’ve taught or observed recently. At what specific point did students get stuck, and what thinking could the teacher model at the moment? Type one example in the chat. So, at what specific point did students get stuck, and what thinking could the teacher have modeled to support the student or students in getting unstuck? Jessica, brainstorming during a writing assignment, like helping the student brainstorm so that they had more ideas to write about. Any other examples from a lesson that you’ve observed? Where did students get stuck and what could the teacher have modeled? Any ideas? Beckie—
Jessica Gray:
I can expand a little bit on the brainstorming. I was observing a classroom, and the teacher had done a beautiful lesson, and when it came time for the students to start to brainstorm for the writing, the student was just really just stuck, wasn’t really sure where to get started or what the narrative should be in their head. And so, I think the teacher, if she could have modeled a little bit more around brainstorming, either using a graphic organizer, the process of thinking of things, and when you’re marking something like, okay, that doesn’t really fit in with the story or things along those lines. So, I think just providing that type of opportunity for students.
Robin Chait:
Great. And we have another example in the chat about answering comprehension questions. The teacher could have modeled strategies for reading comprehension to support students. And then another example is sentence frames for younger students. So, when students are struggling with writing a complete sentence, providing sentence frames to help them so that they can fill in the words and complete a sentence. Yeah, that’s another great example of modeling.
And then, oh, color coding on the step-by-step or graphic organizer to help students know what to do next. Sentence frames for English learners as well. Yeah, that’s a great idea to help students construct complete sentences if they’re getting stuck in their writing. So, those are all great examples of strategies for modeling. So, making instruction more explicit is one response, but sometimes strong instruction and support still aren’t enough and that brings us to Domain 4, intensifying intervention.
Beckie Davis:
So, intensifying an intervention, as needed. HLP 20 is providing intensive intervention for academics and behavior. And in this situation, we’re grouping students by a common need. We are looking at a small number of high-priority skills, and we’re monitoring students’ response to the instruction in order to adjust. So, this is where we’ve used our data to identify a particular need, either behavioral or academic, and we’re grouping, we’re pulling students together into a smaller group who have a common need for this particular instruction or skill. HLP 10 looks at functional behavioral assessments. And as a school psychologist, I talk about capital FBAs, Functional Behavior Assessments, and lowercase fbas. So, Functional Behavior Assessments in capital are the formal reevaluations that we conduct when a student is having behavioral issues, and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on, what’s causing, what the antecedent is for the behavior, and what we’re going to do to help shape the student’s behavior. Lowercase fbas are when we do that in a less-formal manner. We are looking at that type of process in the gen ed classroom to figure out what can we do to set the student up for success. And we’re going to, in a few minutes, look more closely at these practices. But in the meantime, we’re going to talk just a minute about that small-group setting.
In the chat very quickly, tell me how your intervention groups are formed. Is it by grade level, A; B, by IEP status or disability category; or C, by specific-skill need? So your groups, your intervention groups, do you form them by grade level, by IEP or disability category, or by specific-skill need? Yeah, good. So, some of it is by grade level and specific-skill need. Some of it is specific-skill need. And that, I think, is one of the differences you’ll see across school settings or even grade level sometimes, is how you’re grouping for intensification of intervention. And so, we’re going to talk now about taking a closer look at Domain 3. So, I’m going to turn it over to Jessica.
Jessica Gray:
Thank you. Thank you so much, Beckie and Robin. So we’re going to spend the rest of our time together really taking a closer look at Domain 3, Instruction in Behavior and Academics. This is the domain that shows up in every lesson, in every classroom for every student, and it’s also the domain where we might not have the most direct control. You may not be able to hire a specialist tomorrow, but you can change how a lesson is structured tomorrow. So, we’re going to take a look closely at three practices that are embedded in Domain 3. So, let’s take a look.
Here’s the domain. You saw this image earlier in the session. I want to speak specifically about these Pillar Practices. So HLP 7 is around establishing a consistent, organized, and responsive learning environment. So, when you walk into these classrooms, you’d like to see predictable routines, seating, and behavior expectations. HLP 16 is around explicit instruction. You want teachers to be modeling, guiding, providing space for guided practice, and then releasing to independent work. And we think about these things, I think, traditionally in the traditional academic sense. So, you want those in your small-group lessons and your whole-group lessons, but you also want those around life skills and other things that your students might need support around. And so, as we move through around looking at this domain and practice, just be mindful of that piece.
Okay, so HLP 7 is establishing a consistent, organized, and responsive learning environment. This is a Pillar Practice, and it’s first for a reason. You can’t teach explicitly into chaos, which we mentioned earlier. You want students to know what to expect, how to get help, and what happens when they struggle. And I think, too, thinking about it in terms of general education and any gen ed teachers in the room, this isn’t necessarily a special education practice. It’s a teaching practice that disproportionately benefits students with disabilities. So, students with attention difficulties, multilingual learners, and, frankly, anyone having a hard time can benefit from a consistent, organized environment.
I think the other really important piece is the consistency and responsiveness. Consistent means predictable. The routine is the same on Monday and on the Friday before break, and responsive means that the environment adjusts to what students actually need. So, let’s look at what this looks like in practice. So, if we were looking at a HLP 7 and we were in a classroom, before learning, we want to see materials ready, routines explicitly taught, expectations clear. And notice the word “explicitly.” We often assume that students absorb routines by watching, but students with disabilities frequently don’t. And so routines have to be taught the same way that content is taught—modeled, practiced, and given feedback. So during learning, we want the predictable transition. Students know how to get help, and adult responses are consistent. The middle one, I think, is really, really important because if a student doesn’t know how to signal that they’re stuck, they’ll either guess or shut down or act out. And so every one of those can look like a behavior when it’s actually a design issue. And then over time, routines will get reinforced, and supports can get adjusted toward independence for students, really leaning into kind of that zone of proximal development.
So, let’s take a look at using explicit instruction. So when we use explicit instruction, we want to make learning visible and manageable. I think explicit instruction can often be misheard as scripted or rigid or joyless, and that’s not what this is. Explicit means the thinking is made visible. Nothing important is left for the student to infer. So, we want to show and tell, we want to model what students should do, and, critically, what they should think. Thinking aloud is a part that I think teachers can skip, and most struggling students really need that piece. So, after we show and we model what students should do and think, we want to clarify. We want to give really carefully chosen examples and non-examples. Showing what a strong claim is and what it’s not teaches that boundary concept for students. We want to anticipate. We want to think about what the misconceptions might be before it takes root and strip out any distracting information at the beginning.
An example might be, if the worksheet has lots of clip art and many different fonts, then some students will spend their time on that as opposed to the actual thing that we’re wanting them to learn. We want to scaffold, break really complex processes into supported steps. And I think the complex piece is important because what might not seem complex to us can be really complex to students. And let’s shift to what this might look like in practice. So here’s Daniela, she’s a 7th grade multilingual learner, and she has a specific learning disability in reading. So, the task in front of her is a science paragraph. She needs to make a claim. She needs to cite two pieces of evidence. And the difficulty is really not one skill. It’s language, it’s reading, it’s content knowledge and writing structure all at once, and there’s no separate intervention block in her schedule. So, we want to watch how her teacher works down the list on the right. She names the target concretely. It’s one claim, two pieces of evidence, not “write a strong paragraph.” Students can’t hit a target that they can’t picture. She pre-teaches the terms the task requires, not a vocabulary list of 20.
Three, she thinks aloud while writing a model so that Daniela hears the descriptions and hears the decisions that the teacher needs to make, not just the final product. And then, she shows a strong and a weak example side by side, and that’s the non-example piece that I mentioned earlier. She gives sentence frames, which I know is a strategy that somebody in the chat mentioned, and she gives feedback on one criterion at a time. And this can be really helpful for struggling or striving writers. We want to make sure that they’re getting really explicit feedback. And then she fades the frame. So, she doesn’t use the sentence frame all the time for the rest of the year. She fades that.
So, I want to pause and give you a moment to think about a lesson of your own. Think about a lesson that you teach or observe often. Where might instruction be more explicit, and what’s one thing that you could model a loud, chunk, or scaffold differently this week? And you don’t necessarily need to share it in the chat or out loud, but I just want to provide you some time to think about that.
Okay, so we’re going to watch a video so that you can see some of these HLPs in practice. And in the video, you’ll notice HLP 15, 18, and 22. And those are all in that instructional-design domain. And so, scaffolded supports provide enough support for students to successfully engage in learning without thinking for them. That could be prompts, graphic organizers, work examples, visual support. So, as you’re watching the video, notice what scaffold supports this teacher uses. There’s active engagement. So, create frequent opportunities for students to think, respond, and explain. And then notice the constructive feedback that this teacher gives. Is it specific, timely, and tied to what she’s asked them to do?
Video: Speaker 1:
In this first clip, Ms. Bree Barnes is reviewing class procedures for lining up at the door. The explicit review and reteaching of class procedures is an evidence-based practice in the domain of classroom management. The procedures are predictable, and promote the smooth operation of the classroom, given the clear steps. This procedure has been explicitly taught. Ms. Barnes is taking time here to review and rehearse the procedure. And this is a routine for a problematic area in the classroom. She also provides students with multiple opportunities to respond and has students model examples and non-examples of the expected behavior with corresponding discussion and confirmation of learning. For more information about EBPs for classroom management, please visit www.pbis.org.
Video: Ms. Bree Barnes:
So we’re going to go over just a few of our classroom expectations this morning so that you can remember them and end your time as a 4th grader really well. One thing I want to practice because we’ve been kind of being really noisy when we’ve been lining up, is lining up at the door. Who can tell us what that sounds like? When we line up at the door, Karen, what does that sound like?
Video: Karen:
Level Zero.
Video: Ms. Bree Barnes:
Level zero. And what does that mean if you had a Level Zero, Karen?
Video: Karen:
Quiet.
Video: Ms. Bree Barnes:
Quiet. I shouldn’t hear you, I shouldn’t hear your feet. I shouldn’t hear your voice. Let’s talk about what that looks like when we’re lining up at the door, Josh, what should I see?
Video: Josh:
You should see us not talking and not pushing, bullying, or pushing each other.
Video: Ms. Bree Barnes:
So, our hands are to ourselves. What else should I see, Deangelo?
Video: D’Angelo:
Standing quietly.
Video: Ms. Bree Barnes:
Standing quietly. And I’m just going to put standing because sometimes we like to get over there, and we like to sit on the table or lean against Moses’s desk over there or get up against the mailbox, but we’re just standing in our spot. All right, I need some volunteers who are going to show us the correct way to line up at the door. So, when I tell you to line up, I’m going to have Carter, Naomi, Karen, Heritage, and Sierra, you five are going to line up at the door the right way, so show us what it should look like. Line up at the door. Who can tell us what they’re doing really well right now? I need some friends to show us how not to line up because some of us are in this bad habit of lining up totally, totally crazily, and we got to see what not to do.
Video: Speaker 7:
I’m about to take.
Video: Speaker 5:
Did you understand anything she is saying?
Video: Speaker 6:
Did you see that movie?
Video: Ms. Bree Barnes:
Who can tell us what they’re doing wrong, if it doesn’t sound like or look like what we just said we should be doing? Karen, what are they doing wrong?
Video: Speaker 1:
Now, let’s consider this—
Jessica Gray:
Okay, I’m going to stop the video there and hop back into our presentation. So, as you watched the video—if you can just drop in the chat or you could come off mute, we’ll just spend a minute here—which HLPs did you notice? And if you don’t remember the number, that’s fine. If you want to just share out or type in the chat, that’d be great. I know one of the things that I noticed in the chat, lots of opportunities for the students to respond. HLP 7, a consistent, organized, and responsive environment. The teacher definitely was modeling that procedure, and HLP 16, students got repeated chances to practice the routine. So, just a couple of things that I noticed.
I’m going to just share some key takeaways around HLP practices. So High-Leverage Practices are research-informed and practical. They’re effective implementation, improved student outcomes. Collaboration, data, instruction, and intervention can all work together, and small changes in daily practice can have a significant impact. Here are some of the resources we used today as a research base for our session, and I’m going to pass it back over to my colleagues.
Kelly Wynveen:
Thanks, Jessica. We hope that you found this information helpful. I know some of you are a month into school, and I hope that this timing really works so that you can think through what you’re coaching your teachers on or what you’re doing in practice. We will share this deck with everyone who joined today. This session also is recorded and will be posted on our website. Please feel free to use it with your own staff, but really, just thank you all for joining us today. Before you hop off, we left a little bit of time so that you could just take a couple of minutes to give us some feedback. I just dropped an exit survey in the chat. It’s just a few questions. And one of those questions on the exit survey is if you would like to share any promising practices you use around high-leverage instruction at our next Continuous Improvement Network.
We really hope that you can spend time with us October 20 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific. This will be not a sit-and-get, but really more time to talk with one another, connect with your peers, hear from other charter leaders across the state to share your best practices and leave us some actionable tools. In October, we’ll look even deeper at the High-Leverage Practices, share out a rubric that you can use as a tool as you observe teachers or in your own practice as a teacher. So, please join us for that. I just put the registration one more time in the chat there.
And then, we will continue to offer more Best Practice Webinars throughout Year 2 of this project. Registration is open for BPW Number 4, which will be in November. I’ll drop that in the chat, too. If you just want to register for everything right now, go for it. But this content is really intended to meet your needs. So, our topics we hope resonate with things that you’re seeing in your schools. We’re open to feedback on other topics that you want more information about. And you can always reach out to us individually, too. I’ll drop my email in the chat, which I think a lot of you already have. But we just really appreciate you joining us today. We hope to see you at another event soon, and have a great rest of your week and a great start of fall. Thank you all so much. We’ll see you next time.