BEFORE: PREPARING TO TEACH

1. Identify the skills and subskills. Identify all the skills and their component subskills required to attain your teaching objective. When you arrange the skills in a sequence, your child will learn and remember them better. Build skills from the bottom up; new skills should be built on skills you have already taught. Know what you want to teach, and why.
2. Prepare materials beforehand. Prepare all materials before instruction begins to avoid inventing examples on the spot. If you make it up as you go, you may confuse your students and teach nonrules.
3. Seat students strategically. Seat students close to you, and opposite you. You should be able to make eye-contact easily with any student at any time during instruction. If you are teaching a group, arrange the students in a semi-circle in front ofyou. Place the lowest performers directly in front of you. Seat the highest performers on the ends of the group or in the second row. Assign seats. Have the children sit in those seats each day.
4. Choose instructional language carefully. Instructional language refers to the wording that you use to teach new information or to reinforce previous learning. It requires very careful consideration. You must be confident that the students know all the terms you will use to teach the new information. Try not to introduce new terms and concepts at the same time, unless you are teaching those terms.
5. Tell students what they will learn. Clearly, but briefly, explain the expectations before starting the lesson. Be specific. Tell students what they will do, how they will do it, and how they will know when they are successful.

DURING: PRESENTING LESSONS

1. Cue student responses. Use signals so that students know when to respond. Use hand signals, such as a hand-drop, clap, or finger snap. Signals can also be less obvious; such as a nod of the head or tap on the table if the group is good at responding together. If you are teaching a group, make sure that each student has an opportunity to generate his or her own response, not merely parrot someone else's response. Unless students initiate their own responses, you won't know if they really understand what you are teaching. If you are teaching in one-to-one situations, you still need to use signals to control response rate.
2. Control how much time students have to think. Students must take time to think before responding. You must control how much time they take. Control think-time by signalling; students answer when you signal. Think-time is that time between your request for a response, and your signal for the student to respond. If you insist on students answering on signal, you can help impulsive students to be more reflective or speed up slow responders. Think-time may be as short as one second or as long as five seconds.
3. Vary the pace of instruction according to need. Pacing is critically important to learning. Students can become overloaded and confused when instruction is presented too rapidly. Conversely if the pace is too slow, learners will become bored and distracted. When students say they are bored, it is often because the pace is too slow, not because the content is boring. Finding the right pace depends on paying close attention to student responses and behaviours. Appropriate seating and good signaling will make it easier for you to judge your students’ responses.
4. Interact frequently. Good teaching is highly interactive. Students who respond, through words or actions, about 10 to 12 times per minute, remember what they learn and understand it better. Teach, test, teach some more, test some more, and so on.Remember: If you are doing all or most of the talking, you are not teaching, you are lecturing.
5. Correct errors as soon as they occur. Correct all student errors immediately. No matter what the error is, the error-correction procedure is the same: First, tell the answer. Then, repeat the task or question. Repeat the task later.
6. Give corrective feedback and contingent reinforcement frequently. Reinforce students consistently and frequently for appropriate responses. Verify responses by repeating them. Reinforcement also helps to shape learning behaviour if it is specific and delivered immediately following the behaviour. Specific statements let students know exactly what they did well. For example, "good sounding out that word;" "good, you waited for my signal that time;" "good remembering;” “I like the way you are sitting still in your chair.”

AFTER: PULLING IT TOGETHER

1. Review strategically. After instruction, give students many opportunities to review content and skills just as you taught it, and also with novel items that will require them to generalize the new information to other circumstances.
2. Practice new skills. Use massed practice and distributed practice to review newly-taught skills. Massed practice involves many examples of the same skill. (e.g., a page of addition problems) Distributed practice involves strategic reintroduction of skills and content over time to ensure continued recollection of the information. ( e.g., a mixture of subtraction and addition problems).
3. Tell students what they learned. Finish each lesson by reviewing the skills or knowledge the students have acquired. Tell them specifically what they can now do that they could not do before the lesson.