How are Core steps designed?
Core steps move from broad to deep. It starts with broad areas of teaching – strands – down through more specific classroom goals and finishes at precise, granular action steps. We’ve designed our Core steps to be thorough: the curriculum covers a great many of the key areas of effective classroom teaching, no matter your subject or age range. We’ve also designed it to be extremely adaptable: you should be easily able to customise it to fit your school context. Before we can do this, it’s important to understand exactly how we’ve structured our Core steps.
What is a strand?
Core steps are built from six central strands. Each strand is built around a universal teaching problem: a classroom challenge that exists for all teachers – no matter their subject or age range - and is intrinsic to the process of teaching. Every teacher spends their entire career addressing these problems, and as such they are the most appropriate foundation for any coaching sequence. They aid in accurate coaching diagnosis. The six strands are as follows:
Create culture - has the teacher built the necessary routines, environment and behaviour for learning?
Secure attention - has the teacher got students’ attention?
Optimise communication - is the teacher presenting ideas in a way that is manageable for students?
Drive thought - is the teacher pushing students to think hard about ideas?
Gather and give feedback - is the teacher assessing student learning and responding appropriately?
Ensure consolidation - is the teacher supporting the students to consolidate their learning?
These six universal teaching problems help to support coaching diagnosis when organised into a diagnostic chain:
Culture → Attention → Communication → Thought → Feedback → Consolidation
If coaches identify multiple teaching problems in a teacher’s practice, they should focus on the problem that is closest to the beginning of the diagnostic chain. In other words, if there are problems with attention, communication and thought, it may be optimal for coaches to help teachers solve the attention problems first. It is important to note that this isn’t an iron law – teachers and coaches should feel very free to use their best judgement – but simply a useful rule of thumb for effective diagnosis.
Within each strand of Core steps are a set of more specific classroom goals.
What is a goal?
Each strand contains a series of classroom goals. A classroom goal is a more specific area of teaching, but could still be the focus of coaching for a sustained period of time.
An example of a goal within the ‘Create culture’ strand is to ‘Establish an entry routine’. It may take a teacher multiple weeks of coaching to be finished working on this goal.
Within classroom goals are granular and precise action steps.
What is an action step?
Each goal within Core steps contains multiple action steps. Each step is an action that a teacher can take to achieve a classroom goal. All the steps on Steplab are:
Precise and granular.
Focused on teacher actions, rather than simply on improving what they think or know.
Underpinned by evidence or a shared consensus of impact.
A coach and teacher may be working within the ‘Create culture’ strand and focusing on the goal of ‘Establishing an entry routine’. Within this, there are multiple steps that they could choose to work on. These steps often build in difficulty. Some examples of these steps are:
Create a silent starter: Create a task that students can complete in silence as they enter, without any help. A recap of previous learning works well
Set clear entry expectations: Outline your expectations for students when entering the classroom: "Morning, class. Remember, walking in silently and all pens moving within 45 seconds. Thanks."
Manage classroom entry: Stand at the threshold of the classroom so you can see both inside and outside, control the flow of students, and monitor them during entry. Exaggeratedly observe both the inside and outside of the classroom
Each step comes with some additional support for high quality coaching including a success criteria to enable effective modelling and rehearsal, and a rehearsal task that powers an effective feedback conversation.
Step
Manage classroom entry: Stand at the threshold of the classroom so you can see both inside and outside, control the flow of students, and monitor them during entry. Exaggeratedly observe both the inside and outside of the classroom
Success criteria
Scan: regularly sweep both the inside and outside of the classroom with your eyes
Control: manage the flow of pupils to ensure they enter slowly and calmly; students should move in slowly enough that you can carefully monitor all students as they sit down to work
Express: use a bright, open face and tone to welcome students to the class
Rehearsal task
Plan to rehearse
Select an upcoming lesson and open the class list
Go to the classroom and choose a position at the threshold where you can see inside and outside the room
Plan how you will control the flow of students as they enter and monitor behaviour
Review against criteria
Rehearse (multiple rounds + feedback)
Establish the context. For example, students are lining up outside your classroom. You are standing at the threshold greeting students and monitoring their entry into the room
Rehearse this moment in the lesson. Feedback and refine using the criteria until mastered
Add complexity. For example, students enter in a way that does not meet expectations; students do not sit in the seat allocated to them in the seating plan
Many of the Core steps are accompanied by a model video to support impactful modelling.
What is a model video?
A video of exemplary practice that demonstrates the use of the step in action. They can help the teacher to visualise what they are working towards and are best used alongside the success criteria to help deconstruct its component parts and identify the specific areas of practice that resulted in success.
Where can I watch model videos?
1. Library: model videos are attached to the step they represent. Choose a goal and step and then click “Explore this step” to view the model video representing the chosen step.
2. Learning content: you can locate and view all Core steps’ model videos by heading to Manage → Content → Learning content → Global content → Core steps. Model videos have been placed in folders according to the strand, goal and step they represent.
Core steps
Now that you understand the structure, let’s take a deeper look at what is included within Core steps.
Below you can see the six strand headings, with the goals within each of those strands sitting beneath as bullet points. Alongside the goal name, is a summary of the action steps covered within the goal. Finally, if model videos exist for this particular goal, we’ll add 📹 followed by the phase represented.
Create culture
Has the teacher built the necessary routines, environment and behaviour for learning?
Establish an entry routine: Managing student entry into the classroom; ensuring good behaviour at the start of lessons; ensuring students begin learning as quickly as possible. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Establish routines: Ensuring classroom routines are efficient, well-organised and well-rehearsed so that no learning time is lost. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Motivate students to learn: Motivating students through explaining the value of learning and effort; setting and maintaining productive classroom norms; enabling students to be and feel successful. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Reinforce positive behaviours: Communicating clear classroom expectations; building a positive classroom culture through recognising success; celebrating effort and high-quality student work. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Respond to negative behaviours: Effectively addressing non-compliance; moving from subtle and non-invasive methods through to sanctioning and resetting students; resetting classes. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Secure attention
Has the teacher got students’ attention?
Use an active listening routine: Ensuring student attention is focused on the teacher through building effective routines for achieving and maintaining silence; responding to students not meeting expectations. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Give clear directions: Gathering attention and giving clear, precise and focused instructions; checking that students understand instructions; ensuring a purposeful and focused start to learning activities. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Build a sense of pace: Creating a sense of pace and urgency throughout lessons so that students are motivated to attend, focus and make effort; making lessons feel purposeful. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Use choral response: Embedding routines where students respond in unison to strengthen key knowledge and vocabulary; checking for participation and understanding while fostering a sense of community and motivation. (📹 Secondary)
Optimise communication
Is the teacher presenting ideas in a way that is manageable for students?
Plan well-structured units and lessons: Ensuring that lessons are built around clear, precise, manageable knowledge. (📹 Secondary)
Plan clear tasks and resources: Streamlining explanations, resources and learning tasks to minimise cognitive load; skilfully modelling success; managing scaffolding as students move towards independence and mastery; taking steps to ‘own’ and internalise lesson plans. (📹 Secondary)
Give clear and memorable explanations: Scripting and delivering explanations that are clear and purposeful, as well as memorable, sticky and designed for lasting learning. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Use modelling as a scaffold: Supporting students to successfully and independently construct robust, developed answers through sharing models that highlight common misconceptions or set the standard for success, providing opportunities for students to engage with models and ensuring students act on feedback. (📹 Secondary)
Teach new vocabulary with active practice: Designing routines to support student mastery of new vocabulary. For example, scripting student friendly explanations, using dual coding to reduce cognitive load, providing written and verbal active practice, teaching etymology, word roots and patterns, checking student understanding and systematically returning to previously taught vocabulary. (📹 Secondary)
Explain for deeper understanding: Scripting and delivering explanations that outline new ideas and concepts with detail and precision; teaching according to the key principles of direct instruction. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Drive thought
Is the teacher pushing students to think hard about ideas?
Use accountable questioning: Creating a classroom culture where students are motivated to answer questions; framing questions to ensure students are accountable for thinking. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Add challenge or scaffolds while questioning: Responding to student errors and lack of effort during questioning; supporting students to get the right answer while holding them accountable for effortful thought; responding to student success with further questions that stretch and challenge. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Use paired talk: Building purposeful routines for effective and efficient paired talk; ensuring students are accountable during paired talk. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Use group discussion: Building a culture of focus and attention during class discussion; building systems to ensure cognitive accountability. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Plan, run and monitor independent practice: Designing lessons around high-quality extended practise of key knowledge and skills; effectively running classroom practice and motivating students to focus; gathering information on misconceptions, errors and progress towards mastery; designing practice activities to allow for efficient data gathering. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Build metacognition: Using teaching strategies that build metacognition, for example: summarising; effective notetaking; diagramming and concept mapping; peer-teaching and self-explanation. (📹 Secondary)
Gather and give feedback
Is the teacher assessing student learning and responding appropriately?
Build a culture of feedback: Building a classroom culture where students welcome error as part of the learning process; building a culture where students value learning from the work of classmates; ensuring students welcome sharing their own learning, mistakes and efforts. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Specify success and plan for feedback: Planning lessons around student errors and misconceptions; ensuring that teacher follow-up is carefully planned. (📹 Secondary)
Check whole-class understanding: Gathering information on errors, misconceptions and progress towards mastery through whole-class data gathering; withholding correct answers from students to increase thinking. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Circulate to check for understanding: Efficiently gathering data on student understanding through deliberate and focused classroom circulation. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Give individual feedback: Delivering high-quality feedback that supports and stretches students; building strong relationships with individual students while giving feedback. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Give whole-class feedback: Stopping the class and publicly addressing widely held errors and misconceptions; sharing exemplar student work with the class to address errors and improve learning; ensuring all students improve their work and make progress. (📹 Primary / Secondary)
Use exit tickets: Designing exit tickets that rapidly and efficiently analyse student learning of core content; developing methods for sampling exit tickets to gauge learning.
Ensure consolidation
Is the teacher supporting students to consolidate their learning?
Use retrieval quizzes: Designing retrieval quizzes that systematically consolidate core learning; building routines to develop accountability and motivation; building systems for marking and feedback; building approaches to re-teaching. (📹 Primary / Secondary)