Middle School English Language Arts Instructional Guide

Canyons School District

Instructional Supports Department

INSTRUCTIONAL PRIORITIES FOR ACADEMICS High Yielding Strategies to increase Student Achievement and Engagement

Priority

Effect Size

Critical Actions for Educators

● Provide clear learning intentions for students daily. ● Share rubrics, exemplars, models prior to student work time. ● Assess to identify who needs further support. ● Give clear, straightforward, and unequivocal directions. ● Explain, demonstrate and model. Introduce skills in a specifc and logical order. Supporting sequence of instruction in lesson plans. ● Break skills down into manageable steps. Review frequently. ● Demonstrate the skills for students and give opportunity to practice skills independently. ● Explicitly teach a skill to students by explaining, demonstrating, and modeling. ● Build the skill through practice and use, to gain automaticity. ● Provide students with multiple opportunities to apply the skill. ● Explicitly teach critical vocabulary before students are expected to use it in context. ● Teach students to say, defne, and use critical vocabulary in discreet steps. ● Explicitly teach common academic vocabulary across all content areas. ● Create norms for classroom discussions. ● Use prompts and cues to help students zero in on new learning, remember critical points, and connect to previous learning.

0.84 1

Teacher Clarity

Explicit Instruction (I do, We do, Y’all do, You do) Instructional Hierarchy: Acquisition Automaticity Application (AAA) Systematic Vocabulary Development

0.59 1

0.58 2

0.62 3

Structured Classroom Discussion

0.82 1

● Scaffold discussion by using structured discussion frames. ● Provide opportunities for verbal and written practice. ● Use academic language.

● Actively engage ALL students in learning; students are active when they are saying, writing, or doing.

Maximizing Opportunities to Respond (OTR)

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● Pace instruction to allow for frequent student responses. ● Call on a wide variety of students throughout each period.

● Provide timely prompts that indicate when students have done something correctly or incorrectly. ● Give students the opportunity to use the feedback to continue their learning process. ● End feedback cycles with the student performing the skill correctly and receiving positive acknowledgement. ● Present information at various levels of diffculty. ● Use data to identify needs and create small groups to target specifc skills. ● Frequently analyze current data and move students within groups depending on their changing needs.

0.92 1

Feedback

Scaffolded Instruction and

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Grouping Structures

1 Corwin (2021). The visible learning research . http://www.visiblelearningmetax.com