What are high leverage practices?
The idea of HLPs has been developed within the mathematics education community and in particular by Franke and Chan (2007) and Ball and colleagues (2009), whom we paraphrase here. Broadly speaking, high-leverage practices are those most likely to stimulate significant advancements in student thinking when executed with proficiency. For example, one of the HLPs is eliciting students’ ideas in order to adapt further instruction. This is a discourse strategy that helps teachers build upon the ideas that students bring to the classroom. Focusing on such practices equips the beginning teacher with skills that are unlikely to be learned through personal experience. The first two sets of criteria below for HLPs are based on the nature of teaching itself and on the exigencies of the teacher preparation context (from Ball et al. 2009, p. 460).
Criteria for HLPs based on examinations of the work of teaching:
• Helps to improve the learning and achievement of all students
• Supports student work that is central to the discipline of the subject matter
• Are used frequently when teaching
• Applies to different approaches in teaching the subject matter and to different topics in the subject matter
Criteria for HLPs necessitated by teacher preparation contexts:
• Are conceptually accessible to learners of teaching
• Can be articulated and taught
• Are able to be practiced by beginners in their university and field-based settings
• Can be revisited in increasingly sophisticated and integrated acts of teaching
• HLPs should have features that readily allow novices to learn from their own teaching.
An example here would be instructional routines that make students’ thinking visible and that create a record of students’ developing ideas and language across units of instruction in forms that allow teachers to reconcile these changes with instructional decisions they made along the way.
To this list we add two important criteria:
• First, HLPs should be few in number to reflect priorities of equitable and effective teaching, and to allow significant time for novices to develop beginning instantiations of each of these practices. If the identification of core practices for the different subject matters are considered a task that the field engages in (rather than an institution or individual), then making principled choices about what is not going to be part of a core set will be a critical part of the game. The idea is to select and refine rather than to accumulate practices that comprise an instructional core.
• Second, each HLP should play a recognizable role in a larger, coherent system of instruction which explicitly supports student learning goals. A single HLP, while accomplishing important aims, cannot by itself address the broader agenda of ambitious pedagogy. Moreover, a cohesive system of practices may be more likely to support an actionable theory of instruction than a menu of teacher moves whose sum is no greater than its parts. High-leverage practices are not scripts, rather, they are structures that guide teachers to think about the design of instruction—they have in fact become the stimulus for highly varied and innovative forms of teaching in groups of educators that we have worked with.
Ball, D. L., Sleep, L., Boerst, T., & Bass, H. (2009). Combining the development of practice and the practice of development in teacher education. Elementary School Journal, 109(5), 458–474.
Franke, M. L., & Chan, A. (2007, April). Learning about and from focusing on routines of practice. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago.
Hatch, T., & Grossman, P. (2009). Learning to look beyond the boundaries of representation: Using technology to examine teaching (Overview for a digital exhibition: Learning from the practice of teaching). Journal of Teacher Education. 60(1), 70-85.
