Identify Needs and Opportunities
- Reflect on areas of your teaching where there is a need or an opportunity. Ideas may come through looking at data from your school/classroom, reflecting on your practice, discussions with others, and/or participating in professional development.
- Prioritize an area of focus
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Identify learning outcomes |
Select Evidence-Based Strategies
- Through reflection, discussion with others, and a scholarly literature review, determine evidence-based strategies that address the area of focus you have identified
- Write a research question that will allow you to test the efficacy of the strategy.
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Find or create a lesson plan aligned to your learning outcomes that reflects evidence-based strategies for teaching the learning outcomes. |
Plan for Implementation
- Create a plan to implement the evidence-based strategy.
- Identify 3-5 sources of data (ideally, both qualitative and quantitative) that will help you assess the efficacy of the strategy. Ensure that you consider the strengths and limitations of each type of data.
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Internalize the lesson. In particular, consider how you will be informed by data during and after the lesson:
- What is the final assessment that will provide evidence for whether or not the learning outcomes have been met?
- What evidence will you gather throughout the lesson?
- Opportunities to respond during direct instruction
- Ask, Ask, Ask
- Gestures
- Cold call
- Whiteboards
- Whip arounds
- Chat responses
- Games
- Self-assessment (e.g., fist-to-five)
- Monitoring student work and discussions
- Consider:
- Alignment - Is the evidence-gathering strategy aligned to the learning outcomes?
- Tractability - What will teachers do with the evidence? Does it allow teachers to take immediate or near-immediate action?
- Universalism - Do ALL students have the opportunity to show where they are in their learning?
- Feasibility - Can this data be collected with little additional burden on students and teachers?
- Learner variability - Does the assessment consider learner variability?
- Privacy - Does the data collection method (particularly if it uses technology) maintain student privacy, where required or desirable?
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Implement and Monitor
- Implement your planned strategies and begin collecting data.
- Monitor the implementation and make adjustments as you go if necessary.
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Implement the lesson and make in-the-moment adjustments based on evidence gathered during the lesson:
- Instructional Response in the Moment:
- If students struggle with responding, provide cues
- Cue with examples or non-examples
- Cue with a rule or misconception
- Cue by providing the missing (or first) step in a process
- Provide in-the-moment feedback, whole class or to small groups/individuals
- For quick adjustments, reinforcements, or corrections
- Re-Teach
- Whole Class - many students have the same misconception or error
- Most students understand the content, but a few have a misconception or error
- Check In (individually or small group)
- Re-teach considerations
- Slow down to "brighten" steps as you work through an example
- Provide additional examples or non-example
- Highlight a misconception
- Re-teach using a different method of instructional delivery.
- Consider UDL strategies.
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Analyze and Interpret Data
- Analyze and interpret the data that you have gathered. Be sure to be aware of your biases and the limitations of your study!
- Determine the answer to your inquiry question.
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After the lesson is over, examine the data to inform future lessons using the Data Protocol. |
Determine Next Steps
- Consider the implications of your inquiry for your classroom and beyond.
- Identify next steps. This likely means beginning the teacher inquiry cycle once again!
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After lesson adjustments:
- Given what you've learned from your data, how will you better teach this lesson the next time you teach it? How will you better teach other lessons?
- Revisit the UDL Framework and the UDL Strategies. How could you provide more options in future lessons to reduce barriers to learning?
- How can you better anticipate (or more quickly identify) misconceptions the next time you teach a lesson?
- How might you address misconceptions or errors that still remain from this lesson?
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