Classroom Non-Negotiable Focus: Lesson Includes Guided Practice

This week's Lyon Academy Instructional Blog post focuses on the classroom non-negotiable of Guided Practice.

Guided Practice provides an opportunity for the teacher to provide feedback to students without grading. Guided Practice is a central part of the lesson that is both student-led and differentiated. This is the "We Do" portion of a lesson where the teacher provides supports but allows students to work with some autonomy.

Today, I observed an excellent example of Guided Practice in Ms. Tuthill's classroom. After modeling a non-fiction reading task of identifying the main idea with a text on the Smart Board, Ms. Tuthill divided her students into instructional groups who followed the same procedure using a different article.

Each group of students read a different article, then created a poster presentation. One strategy to incorporate during Guided Practice is teacher and peer feedback. During student presentations, Ms. Tuthill and her students had a chance to ask questions and critique the student work. What an awesome higher level task!

Total Participation Techniques (TPTs) and Kagan Strategies are great for incorporating at the Guided Practice stage of a lesson. Resources for these strategies can be found on the Professional Development website.

In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov outlines two powerful Guided Practice strategies that can be used throughout the lesson:

• Technique 16: Break it Down: One of the best ways to present material again is to respond to a lack of clear student understanding by breaking a problematic idea down into component parts.

• Technique 17: Ratio: A successful lesson is rarely marked by a teacher's getting a good intellectual workout at the front of the room. Push more and more of the cognitive work out to students as soon as they are ready. 

Here are some other Peer-to-peer support strategies that can be implemented to support Guided Practice throughout the lesson and make the "We Do" portion of the learning more effective for students:

• Observe student work carefully during independent work- enlist strong students to help weaker students determine right answer during review of assignments.
• Have students teach parts of the lesson to small groups of their peers.
• Have students run stations.
• Train peer tutors- teach student tutors how to ask questions in stead of giving answers and how to get the tutee to do most of the talking.
• Think, pair, share: Have students think of the answer, talk with a partner, and then share as a large group. 
• Turn and talk: students turn toward partner and explain answers to a question.
• Peer to group: student models think aloud.
• Implement peer editing and revision.
• Develop study groups that jigsaw activities and content.
• Create mentoring relationships across grade levels.