Elements of Effective Teaching from CISP

Elements of Effective Teaching

Several key instructional strategies are embedded in CISP’s conception of effectively managed classrooms. Consistent employment of any of them holds promise of instructional benefits for students. Teachers’ development of instructional skills across the broad spectrum of strategies yield significant gains. This is not an "all or nothing" proposition. As with any other set of skills, the benefits realized are proportional to the level of attainment that is achieved. With consistent practice and added refinements, greater learning and achievement benefits can be expected for students.

Equity and Access: Multiple Ability Instruction
The centerpiece of these strategies is ensuring that all students, especially the less academically successful, have full, equal access to the core curriculum and instructional resources. This includes:

Building a caring, mutually respectful classroom environment
Broadening the range of abilities required in instruction
Multiplying opportunities for students to use academic language
Building students’ repertoires of skills and experiences that support academic success
Preventing putdowns, stereotyping or prejudice
Establishing equity norms
Guaranteeing that higher-status students do not dominate discussions
Learning to respect wide-ranging differences in the classroom -- knowledge, skills, demographic characteristics, sexual identity, etc.
Developing students’ willingness to speak up and take risks
Using and regularly rotating roles in teamwork activities to ensure that all students experience all of the task management functions
Ensuring that less academically successful students have adequate opportunities to succeed academically and be acknowledged by the teacher and other students
Employing a system of randomly calling on students
All students become intellectual resources to the class

Setting Expectations
Instilling in all students the conviction that they can succeed at academic tasks and that each student is responsible and accountable for maintaining high standards of conduct and participation. This includes:

Setting expectations to which all students are held accountable
Developing classroom management procedures that ensures all students clearly understand the standards for behavior
Holding rich academic discussions
Building trusting relationships with and among students
Applying analytic thinking to the content materials
Being genuinely interested in students as people
Giving special, public recognition to quality student work
Scaffolding, developing, and enriching expectations over time
Making clear that a weak effort is not acceptable
Creating a learning environment that stresses the variety of paths to excellence

Holding Students Accountable
Being diligently consistent in holding all students to successful completion of assignments and to observing classroom norms, standards, timelines and schedules. This includes:

Firmly establishing teacher’s authority to manage the classroom
Demonstrating from the outset that solid effort is required
Maintaining high standards for students regardless of the type of assignment given
Lengthening “wait time” to ensure that passive and low-status students are not overlooked
Providing an understanding of the criteria on which student performance will be judged
Requiring consistent procedures be followed and appropriate behavior be maintained
Weighing short- and long-term objectives in responding to students’ performance and needs
Not accepting “the dog ate my homework”-type responses from students
Routinely providing specific, public and authentic feedback to student contributions that is needed to correct mistakes and enlarge understandings both for the student and entire class
Avoiding feedback that is generalized, superficial, or inauthentic
Engaging Students: Organizing instructional work that routinely requires active student participation and makes abundantly clear the importance given to high quality academic work. This includes:
Tightly aligning study-focused objectives and actual teacher practice
Making use of the intrinsic appeal within subject-matter content
Using a variety of lesson styles and tasks to increase the variety of skills students need
Minimizing teacher talk and maximizing student participation
Maximizing students’ use of accountable talk
Recognizing student contributions as an important source of knowledge in the classroom
Building upon existing skills by adding measured complexity to assignments
Making efficient and effective use of instructional time
Keeping organizational classroom procedures to a minimum
Ensuring that all students are participating and contributing

Sharing Authority
Giving students – as individuals, pairs and/or small groups – greater responsibility for developing and presenting the academic substance of the course. This includes:

Making use of classroom norms that support the sharing of intellectual authority
Giving students more choices about how to complete assignments
Using assignments that are open-ended and require the exercise of student judgment
Designing assignments that build self-reliance and problem-solving skills
Employing exercises that strengthen collaboration and communication skills
Recognizing student contributions to building understanding of academic material
Designing tasks that build confidence in working independently
Presenting the products of individual and group tasks to others as instructors
Building students’ ability to take a greater role in shaping their own learning

Developing Critical Thinkers
Establishing that higher order thinking will be a normal expectation as will critical evaluation of content material and peer’s contributions. This includes:

Increasing students’ ability and willingness to support their points with evidence
Applying academic content language to show understanding of key concepts
Building assignments that ask students to analyze the qualities of the information source
Identifying assumptions underlying academic material and its presentation
Utilizing multiple approaches to solving a problem
Designing tasks that use a variety of ways of communicating academic information, including texts, graphs, visual representations, and/or oral presentations
Building on ideas from students as well as from text or other sources
Supporting students in synthesizing information, making connections, developing relationships, and drawing conclusions
Encouraging the critique of information sources for validity and bias
Analyzing historical and contemporary issues within the subject-matter