Intentional Teacher Moves to Ensure a Supportive Community and Provide In-the-Moment Scaffolds

Within each routine activity in the SISL curriculum, teachers make countless instructional moves that impact students’ language development and science learning, including:

• Focusing on and affirming the ideas students express, rather than language forms and accuracy
• Facilitating student discussion for sense making, including strategically prompting students, deciding who to call on, and responding to students’ ideas and questions in ways that open up thinking and discussion
• Creating a safe, productive, and collaborative classroom culture that values the contributions and intellectual capacity of each child
• Strategically grouping students in triads to maximize engagement and language use
• Carefully observing students and circulating intentionally to ensure students are engaged in rich interactions, with particular attention to newcomers and other students who are emergent English learners
• Communicating in ways that support the comprehension and participation of newcomers—grounding talk in concrete objects and visuals, rephrasing and elaborating on key ideas, using an engaging tone, offering supportive choice and yes/no questions, and monitoring students’ comprehension and adjusting one’s talk accordingly.

Many of these teacher moves are split-second instructional decisions teachers make about when and how to intervene in an interaction, which child to prompt, how to phrase a question,  and how to respond to a student’s nascent thinking or misconception. When making these instructional moves, we always want to act in ways that encourage students to take on as much of the intellectual work as possible, experience agency as learners, and maximize productive talk amongst students. In doing so, we are guided by our foundational conceptions of language development and our students.

< Back to SISL Approach