Guided Instruction: How to Develop Confident and Successful Learners, October/2010

You know one of the real sweet spots of teaching is when you say or do the just-right thing to get students to do the cognitive work of learning. Now you can get there more often with the advice and steps from the book Guided Instruction. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, two of ASCD’s most popular authors, explain why telling students things over and over—and perhaps more slowly and more loudly—does not result in understanding. Instead, discover how to use a combination of questions, prompts, cues, direct explanations, and modeling to guide students’ learning and build their understanding. Explore an approach to instruction that ensures you make the four strategic moves that help students become more capable and independent learners:

Using robust and productive questions to check for understanding.

Giving students prompts that focus them on the thought process they need to complete a learning task.

Providing students with cues that focus them on specific information, errors, or partial understandings.

Explaining and modeling when students do not have sufficient knowledge to complete tasks.

Find out how using guided instruction in any grade or subject can take students from where they are to where they can be, close the achievement gap, and raise your expectations for your students to new heights.