Build capacity for general ed and special ed teachers to design responsive instruction that supports a range of student needs
Instructional practices promote students’ belief in themselves as learners
- Teach a Growth Mindset
- Build winning streaks
- Mistakes and struggles are opportunities for growth & learning
Students Learn by Doing
- Active engagement is key to learning - talking, writing, experiencing, making meaning
- Talking is learning
- Curriculum and tasks should be relevant to learners
Rigor and Access for All
- Consider principles of Universal Design for Learning
- Pacing should be responsive to individual needs
- Students can benefit from repeated exposure to concepts - cycling back to previous learning (presented in new ways) while continuing to move forward with new learning
Assess Well, Assess Frequently
- Provide explicit feedback sooner rather than later
- Adjust instruction in response to data
- Frequency of progress monitoring should be related to the gap
- Students track their own progress
- Students need a variety of ways to demonstrate learning
- Quality assessment guides teams in making critical decisions about instruction, placement, etc.
Student Voice and Agency
- Students express long-term goals and design individual pathway for college & career readiness
- Students understand their different strengths and abilities as learners
- Students learn to self-advocate and take ownership of own learning
- Student Talk is fundamental to learning
Inclusive Cultures
- Students learning from/with peers
- Relationships Matter
Make the Hidden Explicit
- Even within a constructivist pedagogy, there is an important role to instruction that is explicit and systematic. This includes providing models of proficient problem-solving, verbalization of thought processes, guided practice, corrective feedback and frequent cumulative review