High Impact Instruction

 Jim Knight is a prolific writer and educational coach. His articles in ASCD's EL magazine are always a good read. His style is highly readable and follows his own advice- love it when people walk the talk. His book High Impact Instruction: A Framework For Great Teaching, met my expectations for good advice with a practical spin. Jim is very aware that making changes to teaching is a process and he advises picking an area of focus and working on that. He also, unsurprisingly is a big fan of using an instructional coach. These team members are becoming more common in our schools and offer a great opportunity to teachers to help improve their practice. 

One of Jim's baseline ideas is using recordings of teaching to really look at your practice. This is not about posting to social media, spotting and reporting on student behavior or sharing with the class, it is about being reflective. If your district allows it, always check before you record something, it is a great tool to critically look at your practice and identify opportunities for improvement.

His book includes video of teachers doing what he suggests and reflecting on the practice. In this day and age, a useful component to any text.

His first advice is around planning. He recommends that when planning a teacher develop guiding questions, formative assessments and learning maps. You can pick your starting point with these items. His book is complete with a planning map for each chapter. There are many types of mapping that have been developed. His planning maps pull from these, outlining what are the knowledge, skills and big ideas that you wish to teach in the unit. He suggests when teaching the material that students have access to these maps and help develop them themselves. Making students write, helps put things into their brains. Identifying how you will assess each part of the learning and what you will do with students who don't get it is essential. He tells about one teacher who realized about 1/6 of the class did not understand the learning. The next day she review the writing expectation by having student identify strong points of high quality answers. By showing this model of high quality work and reviewing the material, a small amount of time was spent helping students improve their skills.

In order to obtain teacher engagement, Jim presents a number of ideas, one of which is cooperative learning. Like many, I have seen many cooperative learning flops. He suggests starting with simple cooperative learning activities like think-pair-share and turn and talk. I never really considered them as cooperative learning, but since they involve peer work, they qualify. He highly recommends Sue Vernon's book: The Score Skills: Social Skills for Cooperative Groups. These skills include share ideas, compliment others, offer help/encouragement, recommend changes nicely, and exercise self-control. By identifying critical social skills of group work and explicitly teaching them at every grade level, we increase the likelihood that the groups will function productively.

One idea that I really liked was what he called Lasorda's Law, named after famed baseball coach, Tommy Lasorda. This involves giving enough freedom to empower students while providing enough control to ensure that the work gets done and learning the objectives is met, a difficult balancing act for some. 

It is a great read with some solid advice to improve teaching. Definitely worth tracking down.