Identifying
High-Leverage Practices
Given the size of the teaching force and
the nonintuitive qualities of the work,
we need to identify a common set of
high-leverage practices that underlie
effective teaching and to develop ways
to teach them. By high-leverage practices,
we mean those practices at the heart of
the work of teaching that are most likely
to affect student learning. One example
is conducting a meeting with a parent or
guardian about a difficult situation with
a child. Another is identifying common
patterns of student thinking in specific
subject matter—for example, upper
elementary children’s misconceptions
about the equal sign, young learners’
ideas about “living” versus “nonliving”
things, or adolescents’ approaches to
interpreting the motives and thinking of
people in the past.
High-leverage practices comprise
the essential activities of teaching;
if teachers are unable to discharge
them competently, they are likely to
face significant problems. Competent
enactment of such practices also lays
the foundation for beginning teachers
to develop into highly effective professionals (Teacher Education Initiative
Curriculum Group, 2008).
Identifying a set of core high-leverage
practices involves managing three
endemic problems.
The Content-Specific Nature
of Teaching
High-leverage teaching practices are
intimately tied to specific domains. For
example, consider two such practices:
Framing and delivering questions pre-
cisely and purposefully and eliciting and
interpreting displays of student under-
standing. A good question sequence
in a history class is different from one
in a mathematics lesson. As Grossman
and McDonald (2008) observed, we
have little formal knowledge about how
the work of teaching differs from one
subject to the next. However, we can
discern that in a history class, teachers
ask students to evaluate the credibility
of different sources and consider factors
that shape their reliability. Mathematics
teachers request and support math-
ematical explanations, which are dif-
ferent from historical or scientific ones.
Designing a prompt to assess students’
developing writing is different from
constructing a task to elicit students’
learning about a scientific idea, such as
force or light.
Teaching is one of
the most common—
and also one of the
most complicated—
human activities.
All of this is complicated by the
expectation for teaching complex
knowledge and skills. It’s one thing to
ask a question that prompts students
to reduce an improper fraction or to
figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar
word. It’s entirely another thing to pose
questions designed to support students’
efforts to prove a mathematical claim or
analyze data.
The Cultural Context
Classroom instruction is also situated
in specific cultural contexts, which
place differing demands on the teacher.
Introducing 9th graders to the work of
Maya Angelou may be a somewhat different task in a suburban Connecticut
classroom than it is in a classroom
in rural Mississippi. Students in each
location bring differing degrees of
familiarity with Angelou’s context and
language and may make different interpretations of the text. Expectations and
norms for communicating with parents
and colleagues might also vary.
Working at a Useful Grain Size
In other professions, from aviation to
medicine to cosmetology, professionals
are trained to carry out specific elements of their work. Prospective pilots
learn how to execute takeoffs, landings,
and turns; medical students learn how
to conduct a physical examination and
dress a wound; hair stylists learn how
to precisely scissor layers into different
textures and lengths of hair. Whereas
other trades and professions have been
able to break their work into meaningfully learnable skills and knowledge,
educators have—amazingly—not done
this for teaching.
Certainly, examples exist of efforts
to describe teaching in terms of its core
skills. In the 1970s, competency-based
teacher education programs trained
teachers in hundreds of “competencies”
(Houston & Howsam, 1972). These
focused on specific teacher behaviors,
such as giving praise, using wait time,
and calling on students. However, three
problems arose with this approach.
First, the lists contained microskills
from which it was not obvious how to
compose skilled practice. Second, these
skills were often content-free. Although
some specific practices were identified
within subject areas (for example, techniques and tools for assessing students’
reading proficiency or skills for teaching
counting to young children), these
tended to center on basic, primary-level
reading and math instruction. Third,
inattention to the judgments needed
to deploy these skills in context made
it difficult to know when a particular
practice would be appropriate and how
a teacher might use it.
Competency-based teacher education
programs were criticized for being
too behaviorist; teaching, obviously,
depends on significant cognitive and
ethical reasoning as well as manner and
style (Fenstermacher, 2001). Still, the
movement represented an important
effort to acknowledge the fact that
teaching is a practice that requires
skilled technique and action, not merely
