In a recent report published by The Education Commission of the States, Bridging the Gap, the authors stated that, "…the most promising reforms are aimed at what goes on in the classroom: strengthening the interaction between student and teachers and enhancing the curriculum. The models most likely to succeed also seem to be those that give teachers, students and other stakeholders a clear and common vision of their school’s direction." When teachers take these visions and translate them into classroom practice, there are several guidelines that can help ensure success in instructional change.

The first is that the emphasis in teaching is moving away from a model of expert delivery of knowledge from the teacher to the student to a model of facilitated, engaged learning environments, where the students are actively engaged in discovery and authentic tasks and the teacher is more of a coach, giving more individual attention to students as they go about their activities and delivering information as useful to the activities at hand.

This style of teaching is the outgrowth of experiences and research which show that there are several interrelated learning techniques that can improve student achievement, including:

1. Learning by doing
2. Learning in context of something interesting and challenging
3. Learning by imitating experts
4. Getting immediate feedback on performance
5. Separately practicing difficult parts of a task and then incorporating them

As teachers work to incorporate these ideas into their instructional practices, the following concepts (developed by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory) can help:

Resources

Some useful resources for teachers in developing this kind of instructional practice can be found at:

In this section:

In the Toolkit: