Plan observations and track data with intention, in service of developing engaging instruction.

Observations can be a powerful tool for formative assessment and data-informed teaching, whether you're working alone, or in a co-teaching partnership that's utilizing the One Teach, One Observe approach.

This observational planning template utilizes a before, during, and after approach to observation, providing an outline to guide you in identifying the focus of your observation; a place to collect and record observational data during the lesson; and a guide for analyzing the observational data in order to inform instructional next steps.

As you track your findings intentionally and connect them to your instruction, students are more likely to be engaged and appropriately challenged in the classroom. 

Support students with word choice and the use of descriptive details.

This resource includes student-facing questions to guide the writing process, as well as a wheel of emotions to help students choose descriptive, emotionally-provoking language. 

By engaging in this exercise, students can acquire tips and techniques for their own writing. 

This resource is brought to you by the Student Press Initiative, which partners with schools and community-based organizations to raise the bar for what, how, and why students write. Since its founding in 2002, SPI has been revolutionizing education by advancing teacher leadership in reading and writing instruction, and bringing authentic student voices to life. ​

A five-step process to help students develop discrete skills needed for test-taking. 

How can we intervene when our students struggle to develop necessary skills in our classes?

This resource is a five-step intervention process for teachers to increase student performance on discrete skills as they prepare for exams. Through intervention and targeted instruction, students’ learning outcomes will improve on exams like the Regents and disciplinary-specific content. 

A three-fold approach for helping students move out of cycles of failure.

How can we help students to feel empowered and prepared for their Regents exams?

Our intervention resource provides a three-fold approach to helping students move out of cycles of failure. By utilizing these straightforward entry points for planning and instruction, you can help your students to excel on the Regents and beyond. 

Set students on a path to conduct their own research, gather information, and generate real questions that lead to deeper exploration.

In the science classroom and beyond, we hope for our students to explore genuine questions and inquiries that interest them. 

This resource is a graphic organizer that can be used with students as they generate their own wondering or question, discover potential answers through research, and then consider how their findings might inform future inquiries. 
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By inviting students to pursue their own questions and answers, this resource can be a tool to support student agency in their own learning. 

Move through a mindful reflection protocol that will increase understanding between co-teachers and act as a bridge for broaching conflict. 

If you teach with a co-teacher or work closely with a colleague, it could be that you’ve experienced moments of disagreement. This mindful reflection protocol provides a series of four steps adapted from Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (2015). 

These steps support collaborative, critical reflection and strategic action planning with your co-teacher to resolve disagreements and chart a course forward together. 

Encourage student-led annotating that builds a community of readers.

How can you make annotating a student-led process that builds a community of readers? 

This resource includes directions and materials for an annotation method called The Traveling Text, which invites students to collaboratively annotate short passages of texts in small groups, writing and responding to one another’s thinking. 

Invite students to unpack and engage with Zora Neale Hurston's novel.

Finding ways to engage students in the reading of classic texts can be difficult. Invitations to Create — a method from our Literacy Unbound initiative, which reinvigorates students and teachers through project-based, collaborative curricula developed around challenging texts, ultimately increasing student engagement and building classroom community in the process — offer engaging multimedia prompts that are designed to support students in their reading and understanding of a shared piece of literature. Each invitation offers an opportunity to reflect, analyze, and synthesize the text at hand. 

Our Invitations to Create provide key opportunities for educators to move students from talking about the text to experiencing the text. Through Invitations to Create, students can feel the story in ways that might not otherwise be possible — they can talk from within a text, and speak directly from the perspective of the characters. This process allows rich meaning-making to happen, and will allow you and your students to find ways to experience literature together.

Each invitation is focused on a meaningful quote that our team identified as a hotspot for further thinking, discussion, and creation. Additionally, the hotspots are accompanied by multimedia connections, which are meant to inspire further thinking, engagement, and curiosity for students while they're reading. ​​

Reflect on student data and develop an action plan for responding to the data at hand.

Analyzing data leads us to a few different ‘tions:

• Confirmation — confirming something we believed to be true but didn’t have the evidence to prove
• Revelation — new information we’d never thought of
• Inspiration — new ideas for us to use
• Application — space for us to take action

This resource offers guiding questions for each of these ‘tions to support data analysis, critical reflection, and the process of developing an action plan for responding to data. 

Backwards plan the skills & knowledge required to complete a final writing task. 

Backwards planning is one of the keystones of project-based learning, and this template supports educators in thinking about the skills and knowledge required to complete the final task, as well as anticipate where we might see strengths and struggles. 

By engaging in this exercise, students can acquire tips and techniques for their own writing. 

This resource is brought to you by the Student Press Initiative, which partners with schools and community-based organizations to raise the bar for what, how, and why students write. Since its founding in 2002, SPI has been revolutionizing education by advancing teacher leadership in reading and writing instruction, and bringing authentic student voices to life. 

Support students in examining mentor texts and acquiring tips and techniques for their own writing. 

Defining a genre serves to support students in thinking about the genre, audience, and purpose of a text to identify the key traits of the genre, as well as moves for how to write to a particular audience and for a particular purpose. 

This analyzing genre template supports students in examining mentor texts by thinking about their content, structure, and format. By engaging in this exercise, students can acquire tips and techniques for their own writing. 

This resource is brought to you by the Student Press Initiative, which partners with schools and community-based organizations to raise the bar for what, how, and why students write. Since its founding in 2002, SPI has been revolutionizing education by advancing teacher leadership in reading and writing instruction, and bringing authentic student voices to life. 

Utilize the spectrum of thinking skills to promote rigor in your daily lessons.

How can we utilize the spectrum of thinking skills to build rigor in our daily lessons?

This resource is a visual meter of the developing levels of mastery of learning new skills presented alongside Bloom’s Taxonomy. In addition, the meter includes verbs for constructing AIM questions, skills, and curricular objectives. 

This tool empowers teachers and administrators to build rigor into their daily lessons by visualizing the process of learning in a new way.

Tap into critical reflection and unpack professional challenges.

Using our 5 Whys protocol, we can tap into critical reflection and dig below the surface to identify factors within your sphere of influence that are contributing to the challenge you're facing.

This resource is a thought-organizer for identifying the most common factor among the challenges you are experiencing and engaging in the process of critical reflection. By investigating the root of the common factor, you can ​then identify leverage areas that will help you to reframe your challenge and feel empowered to take action. 

A “during reading” structure designed to invite students to engage with a text three times, each time employing a different modality.

How do we encourage and support students to close read texts? 

Three Highlights is a “during reading” structure designed to invite students to engage with a text three times, each
time employing a different modality. This structure invites students’ minds and bodies into the reading process, uncovering multiple meanings in an author’s words and choices. 

​Recognize common types of student behaviors, understand the motivations behind them, and explore how to respond appropriately.

As teachers, we need as many tools as we can to interpret student behavior and respond appropriately. In order to interpret behavior, we must challenge ourselves to see beneath the surface and identify why the behavior is happening.

This resource describes the four types of off-task behaviors and ways that teachers can respond to each. When encountering inappropriate student behavior, our goal is to respectfully communicate the expectations, de-escalate the conflict, and maintain teacher authority.

Invite students to unpack and engage with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Finding ways to engage students in the reading of classic texts can be difficult. Invitations to Create — a method from our Literacy Unbound initiative, which reinvigorates students and teachers through project-based, collaborative curricula developed around challenging texts, ultimately increasing student engagement and building classroom community in the process — offer engaging multimedia prompts that are designed to support students in their reading and understanding of a shared piece of literature. Each invitation offers an opportunity to reflect, analyze, and synthesize the text at hand. 

Our Invitations to Create provide key opportunities for educators to move students from talking about the text to experiencing the text. Through Invitations to Create, students can feel the story in ways that might not otherwise be possible — they can talk from within a text, and speak directly from the perspective of the characters. This process allows rich meaning-making to happen, and will allow you and your students to find ways to experience literature together.

Each invitation is focused on a meaningful quote that our team identified as a hotspot for further thinking, discussion, and creation. Additionally, the hotspots are accompanied by multimedia connections, which are meant to inspire further thinking, engagement, and curiosity for students while they're reading. ​

​A template students can use to independently identify, track, and archive unfamiliar words as they read.

How do we support students in using context to figure out the meaning of new and challenging words? 

This resource can be used as a tool with students that prompts them to look for context clues, make predictions, connect to prior knowledge, and discover definitions of new words. By teaching a process for figuring out difficult words, we can empower students to monitor for their own meaning as they read. 

Provide structures that help your community cultivate ways of working, learning, and growing together to meet the evolving needs of students.

The L.A.R.S. cycle — learn, apply, reflect, share — is an effective sequence of PD sessions when we’re seeking to not only build the knowledge base of our participants, but when we’re seeking our participants to implement specific strategies, concepts or techniques into their practice.
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This resource includes a detailed explanation of the sequence, as well as usable agenda and reflection templates for participants to use as part of sessions. 

Outline a path toward mastery and balance necessary supports for students, no matter where they start from.

How can we help students to build independence and mastery over new skills and content information?

This framework is a tool for teachers to use progressive scaffolding: techniques, learning activities, and assessments that help students to build their own independence & mastery over new skills and content. 

The framework for progressive scaffolding is applicable to all content areas, grade levels, and performance levels to increase student agency and purpose over their own learning.

A comprehensive guidebook for implementing culturally relevant and sustaining education. 

Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education was adapted by the New York State Education Department in 2018, as a part of their wide-ranging plan to meet students’ needs through the Every Student Succeeds Act. The approach includes a commitment to acknowledge and affirm that students’ culture and identity are valid and valuable and that educators who cultivate culturally relevant, responsive and sustaining spaces for learning will increase student academic, intellectual, social, and emotional growth.

NYSED identifies four elements of the CR-SE Framework: Welcoming and Affirming Environment, High Expectations and Rigorous Instruction, Inclusive Curriculum and Assessment, and Ongoing Professional Learning. To further develop these broad categories, this professional learning document that expands on the original elements to bring the principles to life.

Our Guidebook is organized by five Pedagogical Principles: Welcoming and Affirming Environment, High Expectations, Rigorous Instruction, Inclusive Curriculum, and Assessment Design. Within each principle, we’ve illustrated specific attributes that serve as characteristics of the principle.

This project sought to provide an in-depth analysis of CRSE principles and attributes, including connections between The Danielson Framework for Teaching and the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) Framework. These concepts are illustrated through portraits of practice, and concrete look fors to support teachers, school and district leaders to identify CRSE aligned practices.