Central Teaching Practices

across all Central teacher preparation programs

Central to Planning for Learning

  1. Set, for and with students, standards-based long and short term learning objectives that address student learning needs.
  2. Employ data on students’ prior knowledge and learning profiles to design learning sequences that support all learners.
  3. Plan instruction that reflects an understanding of common patterns of student thinking and development in a subject-matter.
  4. Plan instruction that promotes active student engagement in discipline-based literacy, accountable talk, argumentation, and inquiry.
  5. Plan learning opportunities that proactively integrate multiple means of engagement, expression, and representation to scaffold and support learning (Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
  6. Employ multiple explanations, examples, representations, and modeling to make content clear to diverse learners.
  7. Plan for and implement evidence-based strategies, including technologies, that are responsive to students’ needs and backgrounds.

Central to Instruction

  1. Elicit and interpret individual students’ thinking.
  2. Facilitate varied classroom discourse including whole group discussions and small group work.
  3. Foster student engagement in inquiry and self-directed learning.
  4. Check student understanding and continuously adjust instruction.

Central to Assessing Learning

  1. Select and develop equitable methods to assess student learning.
  2. Analyze student work, including daily assignments, quizzes, tests, projects, performances, and standardized assessments to establish next steps in instruction.
  3. Provide students with prompt, actionable, and individually appropriate feedback on learning processes and products.
  4. Analyze assessment data and report results appropriately to varied audiences (e.g. parents, colleagues, students, data teams, administrators).

Central to Creating a Positive Learning Environment

  1. Build on students’ cultural, personal, and community assets to foster a positive climate and support learning for all students
  2. Establish safe, organized, consistent, and positive learning environment. (Build respectful relationships with students; Implement organizational routines; Specify and reinforce productive student behavior; Implement norms and routines for classroom discourse and work).
  3. Support each student’s social and emotional development.
  4. Employ strategies that promote the development of student self-regulation, self-monitoring, reflection, and goal setting.

Central to the Professional Responsibilities of Teaching

  1. Interact collaboratively in professional roles beyond the classroom (e.g. data teams, professional learning communities, curriculum teams, school governance teams, PPT or SRBI teams, parent organizations, community partnerships, etc.).
  2. Collaborate with parents or guardian to support students.
  3. Analyze instruction and use feedback for the purpose of improving one’s own practice.
  4. Develop long- and short-term goals for professional growth and a plan to pursue them.

CTEN Home