Get It Right the First Time! Ensuring That a Teacher's First Lesson on a Standard Hits the Right Mark Is Essential for Moving Students toward Mastery

High-quality classroom instruction is paramount to student achievement. It strengthens their confidence, cuts down on the need for remediation, and increases opportunities to extend learning beyond mere proficiency. Quality instruction is what every parent hopes for his or her child, what every educator aspires to provide, and what every student needs. In this article, we focus specifically on what constitutes high-quality initial instruction, by which we mean instruction that has been carefully planned to include research-based strategies and elements known to help students acquire new knowledge. For example, such strategies include chunking content into manageable pieces, putting students into pairs or small groups to help each other assimilate new material, providing graphic organizers to help students see patterns, and focusing lessons on key content to avoid wasting time on less important material. Additionally, we suggest that teachers can support each other in providing effective initial instruction by engaging in collaborative conversations--within their existing professional learning communities--about how specific academic standards translate to classroom practices. When lessons go wrong Consider what happened in one 9th-grade algebra class that we observed recently. This particular school is high performing, as indicated by student test scores, graduation rates, and other common measures. Its teaching culture is extremely individualistic --rarely do teachers discuss their work, collaborate on lesson planning, or take concrete steps to ensure consistency in their instructional strategies, approaches to assessment, grading practices, or expectations for student performance. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The algebra teacher in question has taught for several years, she appears to have a solid grasp of her subject area, and her instruction seems to be effective for some of her students; those who pick up the material quickly tend to do well in the class. However, as we observed during her initial round of instruction on the year's first unit of study, she struggles mightily to engage students who find mathematics difficult or who need more elaboration of critical content. Her pacing is too fast for them to keep up, and she gives them larger chunks of material than they can handle. Additionally, she teaches them new and more advanced content alongside the basic concepts that they haven't yet mastered. Although students repeatedly make errors during class and in their homework, she forges ahead in the curriculum as planned. Though it is clear to us, as we observe the class, that her familiar strategies and resources are not working for many students, we never see her reach out to colleagues for new ideas, support, or advice. When she has her students take their first test of the year, more than half of them fail miserably. The consequences are dramatic. Students are visibly frustrated, many of them saying that they are stressed out by the alarming pace of the class. Most tragically, some of them begin to doubt their ability to succeed in algebra or even to succeed in high school. While the teacher may have good intentions to reteach the material and offer students an opportunity to take the test again, the damage has already been done. The teacher is frustrated as well. Frantically, she looks for new materials and activities and tries to find time to reteach and reassess over half of the class, even while continuing to introduce new content during regular class periods, to keep moving ahead with those students who passed the test. Without a small miracle, her challenges will only compound themselves throughout the rest of the course. Both she and her students will become more and more frustrated, and many of them will be left behind. From standards to instruction Collaboration is a nice buzzword, but it doesn't actually play out very often in schools. …