in hand. You can’t separate them. They have the same goals for student learning, and they mirror our goals for students as well.
• We want students to joyfully learn the curriculum and more.
• We want students to be active learners with opportunities to make the content more meaningful and connected to their lives and their world.
• We want students to be independent thinkers, so they can use powerful strategies that allow them to learn faster and more efficiently.
• We want to partner with our students to guide, facilitate, help, support, and cheer them on to do their very best thinking daily.
• We want students to take on the responsibility of monitoring their own learning, reflecting on it, and determining next best steps with our guidance, teaching, and facilitation.
• We want students to be prepared for life outside the classroom and to be productive citizens who help lead us successfully into the future.
To that end, we’ve included dozens of strategies so K–8 teachers around the world could see effective instruction and differentiation as doable and as a must do. You will see templates filled in as examples throughout the book. Elsewhere in the book, and online at go.SolutionTree.com/instruction, you can access blank versions of these templates. Here, teachers see the brain-based evidence that proves that using daily formative assessment and differentiation is not a choice, but rather a necessity. As teachers, we put this process into play in our own classrooms with great success, and as educators and consultants, we saw teachers’ mindsets and toolkits, as well as students’ engagement and achievement, change throughout the years we coached. This book is a mindset changer. Teaching With the Instructional Cha-Chas: Four Steps to Make Learning Stick will introduce four steps into your instruction: (1) chunking, (2) chewing, (3) checking, and (4) changing. Content mastery and greater student achievement will result.
This Book’s Strategies
Each strategy in chapter 2 through chapter 6 includes the grouping method (whole group, small groups, partners, or individual), directions, an example or template (or both), simple suggestions for differentiation (ways you can change the lesson by bumping it up for advanced students, breaking it down to scaffold for learners who are struggling, and specializing it for some of the other challenges you face in your classroom), and how to incorporate technology (including links to useful websites and apps). Because websites frequently change, you can visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a list of current websites.
Every strategy we included addresses a variety of learning preferences, and literacy components (reading, writing, listening, and speaking). While you won’t see those features specifically called out, you can use the strategies in confidence knowing they are there. Also, be aware that chapter 7 addresses more purposeful differentiation strategies.
You shouldn’t give the strategies independently as worksheets, but rather use them as thinking and discussion templates, and as part of the gradual release of responsibility model (Fisher & Frey, 2015; Pearson & Gallagher, 1983), which requires the teacher to model each strategy (I do), provide opportunities for guided practice (we do), and small-group or partner practice (two do) before expecting students to demonstrate the strategy independently (you do).
Chapters 4 and 5 talk more about this model, but table I.1 shows how our four-step instructional cha-chas cycle correlates with Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey’s (2008) gradual release of responsibility. While most lessons follow the gradual release in the order here, a teacher may choose to change this. For example, a lesson might start with a you do that has a question to activate prior knowledge. Either way, the goal in each lesson is to have all four types of release, done gradually and based on the checkpoints and data received from those checkpoints.
Table I.1: Gradual Release of Responsibility in the Instructional Cha-Chas Cycle
Source: Adapted from Fisher & Frey, 2008.
During each phase of the gradual release of responsibility, as the students chew on the content, you will check their understanding and change instruction as you need to. We’ll go into this in more detail in chapters 6 and 7 (page 117 and 159, respectively).
We firmly believe this book will enhance your teaching in many ways. You will enjoy the strategies that are in line with high-quality standards. They are rigorous, highly engaging, and easy to implement with any topic in grades K–8. They are not suppositions. They have and are producing results in classrooms across the world.
This Book’s Organization
Because we know that dancers never step on stage without choreographing their routine and effective teachers never step into a classroom without first choreographing their instruction, we’ve split the book into two parts, the first of which guides your planning. The second guides your step-by-step instruction implementation.
Part I includes chapters 1–3. Chapter 1 examines the formative assessment process and introduces our four-step instruction cycle to help you maximize learning. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the planning required to effectively frame your instruction before embarking on the four-step cycle. Specifically, chapter 2 deals with how to design effective daily learning targets and formative assessments to ensure that each student meets the standard. We present a lesson-planning template to get you started. You’ll see this template in later chapters as well. Chapter 3 explores the importance of knowing your students academically, socially, and emotionally, and planning the most effective methods for instruction. That includes strategies for preassessing, activating prior knowledge, pre-exposing, and priming their brains for the content.
Part II includes chapters 4–8. In each chapter, we’ll share strategies that help you accomplish each step in the instructional cha-chas and provide ways to differentiate for students as well. Chapter 4 introduces the first step of our instructional cha-chas cycle: chunking, or breaking, the content into manageable
