You are here

Planning Powerful Instruction

 Are you ready to plan your best lessons ever?

Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 2-5

Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12

With so many demands and so much content available for teachers, we must put a higher value on an often-overlooked skill: planning learning experiences that increase student engagement and inspire students.

Planning Powerful Instruction for Grades 2-5 and Grades 6-12 are your go-to guides for transforming student outcomes through stellar instructional planning. The seven-step framework—the EMPOWER model—provides you with classroom-tested techniques for lesson planning that are proven to help students develop and deepen their understanding.

You’ll have at your fingertips:

  • the reasons why students engage in lessons—or don't
  • a framework for creating, planning, and teaching effective units and lessons in any subject area
  • 50+ actionable strategies to use right away
  • strategies for tailoring units for a wide range of learners
  • downloadable, ready-to-go tools for planning and teaching

Whether you are a classroom teacher, an instructional leader, or a pre-service teacher, Planning Powerful Instruction will forever change the way you think about how you teach and the unique value you bring to your learners.


Free Resources for Planning Powerful Instruction

 

  1. Introducing the Empower Canvas
    In this excerpt from Planning Powerful Instruction the authors introduce and explain the EMPOWER framework that will improve your units and lessons for transformational teaching and learning.
     
  2. Questioning Move 1: Three-Level Questioning Guide
    This three-level questioning guide moves learners through the levels of literal, inferential, and reflective evaluation and application questions.
     
  3. Visualization Move 2: Picture Mapping
    In this activity, students use a picture map to walk through the skills of (1) identifying key details and capturing the connections among them in order to (2) identify topics, then (3) identify patterns of key details in order to identify main ideas and make deeper meaning of the text.
     
  4. Frontloading Move 2: Where Do I Stand?
    This activity primes and orients students through discussion of controversial concepts that they will explore in the unit. Students also practice complex processes like making claims, supporting reasoning with evidence, listening and mirroring, summarizing, and addressing opposing viewpoints and reservations to their own thinking.
     
  5. Traditional Teaching and Transformational Teaching: The Pedagogy of EMPOWERment
    In this excerpt, the authors clearly define the difference between traditional or informational teaching and transformational teaching or the pedagogy of EMPOWERment.
     
  6. ARC Recorded Webinars with Jeffrey Willhelm
    1. Sustaining a Learning Community During Challenging Times - 4/30/20
    2. Planning Powerful Instruction: 7 Must Make Moves of Transformative Teaching and Learning - 6/11/20
    3. Planning Powerful Instruction: 7 Must Make Moves of Transformative Teaching and Learning - 6/18/20
    4. Planning Powerful Instruction: 7 Must Make Moves of Transformative Teaching and Learning - 6/25/20
    5. EMPOWER Webinar Series: Reflection - 7/30/20

 

Helpful Blogs for Planning Powerful Instruction
 

Are Your Lessons Starting Strong? Priming and Orienting Learners for Success

Are Your Lessons Starting Strong? Priming and Orienting Learners for Success

"The most effective teachers don’t take student engagement for granted. Yet in our work in classrooms, we see that not enough attention is paid to good beginnings; this lack of attention violates much of what we know from research about motivation, optimal experience, schema theory, reading research, and cognitive science in general..." Keep reading.

Are You Planning the Best Possible Instruction?

Are You Planning the Best Possible Instruction?

"You face a high-stakes conundrum when it comes to planning instruction: either create curriculum from scratch, cobbling together their own resources with ones from online repositories that have little to no quality control OR follow a mandated, scripted curriculum from publishers that requires extensive supplementation, personalization, and/or renovation to make it usable..." Keep reading.