High Leverage Teaching Practices

This is a list of 17 High Leverage Practices modified from a framework at the University of Michigan.

Teachers...

1. Collaborate effectively with colleagues, parents, school leaders, and other professionals (e.g., agency personnel, OT, PT, speech pathologist, social workers, etc.).

2. Advocate for students and families to secure needed services and promote social justice.

4. Select and use specific methods for assessing student learning before, during and after instruction to check student understanding.

5. Use grade level standards, learning progressions, IEP goals and benchmarks, and student learning history to identify short and long-term goals;

6. Design a sequence of lessons towards a specific learning outcome around a core topic;

7. Adapt curriculum tasks and materials for specific learning goals; choosing, adapting tasks, text, and materials for specific learning goal;

8. Make content, skills, and concepts explicit through modeling, think aloud, guided practice and examples;

9. Use strategies to promote active student engagement in whole class and small group instruction;

10. Scaffold instruction during lessons;

11. Teach students to work independently;

12. Select, implement and evaluate instructional and assistive technologies to support student learning;

13. Identify and implement an instructional strategy or intervention in response to common patterns of student performance or individual need;

14. Analyze one’s teaching for the purposes of improving one’s instruction;

15. Establish and implement effective classroom and individual student management plans to increase student social and academic outcomes;

16. Create an engaging and positive learning environment to improve student outcomes;

17. Provide high rates of behavior specific feedback to improve student outcomes.