Shorten Your INM

Coming straight from college lecture halls it’s clear why so many incoming corps members tend to run INM-heavy lessons. But studies show that elementary grade students retain little of what they hear after 8-10 minutes of teacher-driven direct instruction. If they still appear to be following along after this time, they are likely doing so in a rote and superficial way— motivated to do the right thing, to seek praise or a reward or to avoid consequence—but are no longer learning and internalizing new material. 

One of my most frequent points of feedback to CMs has been to shorten the introduction to new material and to, in turn, provide more practice during an extended GP and IP (which may include group work or a class-wide game, where students attempt to exercise knowledge/skills with virtually no support from the teacher—but all are held accountable for taking part).

Proposed Lesson Timing

Intro to New Material (INM): For most every lesson, your time would be best spent briefly introducing, modeling and applying the key points in several problems/questions/cases in the first 5-12 minutes.

Guided Practice (GP):

Typically, by the 15-minute mark of the lesson, you’ll already be running through a series of new examples class-wide to begin ushering students toward the ability to apply the new skill on their own. This is the guided practice, where the teacher typically calls upon students to apply the new skills while lending a hand to shepherd students toward success.

Independent Practice (IP):

Typically, by the 30 minute mark, students will be working on some form of independent practice, whether this be a worksheet, group assignment or interactive game where all students are responsible for taking part.

* An exception to the timing recommendations above could be a lesson where an extended hook is used to build investment/engagement. You may need to pay extra attention on these days to ensure you don’t run out of time for significant group or independent practice.
 

There may also be exceptions in those cases where one lesson involves teaching a number of bite-sized objectives, as in a math class where students may review a teacher's modeled example, practice a similar problem together, and then another problem on their own, before moving on to the next modeled example of a slightly different type of problem that is aligned with a related, but distinct, objective.