Five Ways To.. The Collection

This post is a one-stop shop for my Five Ways To series and the superb one-page summaries produced by the wonderful David Goodwin. Download and share freely.

Five Ways to: Scaffold Classroom Dialogue

Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. The essence of scaffolding is that students are elevated to a level of performance and thinking that they couldn’t…


Five Ways to: Check for Understanding

Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. In Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, he stresses the vital importance of Checking for Understanding. I explore this in some detail in…


Five Ways to: Do Daily Review

Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. It’s now very common practice for teachers to begin a lesson with some form of retrieval practice activity.…


Five Ways to: Build Fluency

Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. Fluency is a concept in learning that suggests recall from memory with minimal effort and a level of automaticity.  Where we can do and…


Five ways to: Sustain Student Attention

Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. In order to learn new conceptual ideas and new skills, we need to focus our attention -our conscious…



Five Ways to: Build Confidence

There’s a lot to learn! Sometimes it feels overwhelming – especially to students with the least confidence; the weakest knowledge; the most tentative grasp of the ideas. Something…


Five Ways To: Weave Reading into the Curriculum

In my travels to various schools, one of the variables that I’m struck by is the emphasis placed on reading. I included this description of the range in a previous post on seven variables between schools: From extensive reading across subjects, quality texts, established reading routines/norms; high daily volume To:  Reading volume thin, class reading rare…



Five Ways To: Foster Student Agency

It’s common to come across situations where the idea of independent learning is being promoted. However, this can be quite a nebulous concept unless we break it…

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