Explicit Direct Instruction – December 2018

This month’s student outcome bright spots come from the 17 teams who celebrated their student outcomes at SOcon, and shared what works, and how we can do more of it.

Transforming Evidence-Based Practices into Usable Innovations: A Case Study with SRSD

This summer when we presented our Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) workshop, we wanted to ground the workshop in a highly effective, evidence-based practice (EBP). We decided on Self Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), a set of student strategies for writing that teachers can explicitly teach to students, that is an all-star EBP with a very high effect size (1.14) for both behavior and writing. The only problem was that teaching SRSD could potentially take a week or more and our workshop was only three days! It was clear to us that, in order to provide effective training on SRSD, we needed to clearly define it and identify the critical core component in terms that could be taught, learned, practiced, and assessed efficiently and effectively. We would have to transform SRSD into a “useable innovation”.

Formative Assessment

As I coach teachers in classrooms on instructional practices that improve outcomes for struggling students, I have become convinced that formative assessment is one of the most powerful tools we have for ensuring student success.  Formative assessment is a tool that provides teachers with critical information throughout a lesson that can be used to improve teaching practices and student achievement. In contrast to summative assessment, which tells us whether students have mastered or failed to master content and skills at the end of a course of study, formative assessment guides both students and teachers during instruction and helps them to avoid failure altogether (Bambrick-Santoyo, 2010). .
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