High Leverage Practices

1. Identify a clear teaching point for each lesson.

• The teacher identifies a clear goal for each lesson
• The daily goal connects to the Standards and is clearly posted so that students can see it and understand what they are going to learn.
• The class revisits the goal during the lesson in order to help students understand what they are learning and why.

2. Provide models of high-level performance.

• The teacher selects particular student work to share with the class in order to model high-level performance for a specific articulated purpose such as:        

• Recognizing connections among different representations
• Honoring alternative solution strategies
• Highlighting particular solution strategies
• Modeling a problem-solving process
• Exploring misconceptions
• Increasing student justification

• The teacher voices his/her thinking aloud, for example:

• "I chose to do this because..."
• "I wonder why..."
• "I think to myself..."
• “When I get stuck here, I..."

3. Support the development of academic language.

• The teacher highlights particular words that students need to know or be familiar. These words include:

• Content terms
• Process terms

• Key words are used daily in

• Purpose statements
• Public records
• Discourse with and among students

4. Press for justification and/or reasoning.

• The teacher identifies opportunities to press for justification when planning a lesson.
• The teacher uses thoughtful questioning strategies so that students can state why and how they solved a problem or made a decision in their process to solve or create a representation.
• Students press each other for justification.
• The teacher anticipates when students might struggle so that, when necessary, an alternative task or question can be posed that gives students an opportunity to think and reason about the key math concepts and processes rather than simply being told or shown what to do.

5. Promote rich and engaging discourse.

• The teacher establishes an effective classroom culture and designs tasks that support students' opportunities to listen to one another, ask each other questions, and share their thinking and learning.
• The teacher supports students in learning how to listen to each other and encourages the sharing of thinking and ideas.

• Turn & Talk
• Mathematician Dyads (A/B Partners)
• Think Pair Share
• Group Roles
• Go Around Protocol

• The teacher teaches students how to use private think time to process and formulate ideas.

6. Use public records.

• The teacher plans which student work will be shared using a document camera and which student work will become part of the public record so that students can reference the ideas/strategies throughout the unit.
• The teacher models referring to the public records.
• Public records include:

• Anchor charts of key ideas created for ongoing reference
• Records of student work or instructional methods used to support students during lesson(s), including student-generated anchor charts

7. Encourage the use of notebooks for capturing key ideas, insights, and student reflection.

• The teacher uses student writing in notebooks as a record for:

• capturing key ideas and insights
• recording important ideas and processes
• supporting student self-assessment
• providing example of justification
• encouraging student reflection at the end of a lesson

8. Use ongoing formative assessment.

• The teacher regularly measures student learning to inform next instructional moves.
• The teacher and students refer to the clear teaching point at the end of the lesson through an exit task or self-assessment.
• Formative assessments can be in the form of:

• Exit tickets or tasks
• Notebook entries
• Selected homework problems
• Conferring to leam more detail about the thinking of targeted students
• Pre- and post-assessments
• Entry tickets related to the previous day's goal

Created with inspiration from TDG work & encouragement from Seattle PS administration then improved based on the work and wisdom of the Seattle Middle School math coaches.