Mr. Cortes is in his first two years of teaching. He wonders if he can arrange his lessons in ways that make use of what is known to be effective teaching. He starts the lesson by taking attendance, and then he discusses the purpose of the lesson. He teaches the content using questioning and experiential tasks, and he finishes with a closure. Though the types of tasks he asks students to do in each lesson are similar and he thinks they are good, he is unsatisfied with the structure of the lesson and feels that he is missing something.
What Mr. Cortes is reflecting on are ways of structuring lessons for repeated success. While this can be accomplished in many ways, none of which are the right way, the critical criterion is if the structure results in regular student learning. This can be true on some days and not on others. In this chapter we discuss components of the lesson that have been demonstrated by teaching practice and research to be overwhelmingly effective. Rosenshine (2012) found 10 teaching practices that have been shown to improve student learning consistently across all grade levels and most classroom subjects. (Physical education is an exception because it occurs outside the typical classroom setting.) Most of the practices have been discussed in other chapters (e.g., chapters 4 and 5), but in this chapter we focus on lessons rather than curriculum development. Rosenshine’s (2012, p. 12) teaching practices are:...
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