Today’s post continues a multiyear series on simple changes teachers can make in their classroom that can have positive results.
Avoid ‘Cognitive Overload’
Melanie Battles, Ph.D., founding consultant of Scholars for the Soul: An Educational Solutions Firm, has over a decade of experience working in education as a K-12 literacy educator, college adjunct faculty member, instructional coach, and educational consultant:
As teachers, we are pressured to teach everything that is on our pacing guide and to check items off the list so that we can get them done before the school year is over. The unfortunate result is that in reality, many of us are not actually teaching the content but standing before students and talking about it. We may even give a few assignments, but it is hard to actually pinpoint if a student has actually learned the content that was “taught.” So the lessons are taught really fast, typically overloading students with too much information, resulting in cognitive overload.
A small teaching move for teachers that should be more common is to actually stop, release the pressure to perform and check off the list, and incorporate movement throughout every lesson. Students should have an opportunity to transition, move, or rotate the space every 10-15 minutes based on their attention span.
Allowing for movement throughout the lesson breaks up the stagnation of a lesson and keeps students engaged. When incorporating movement, the transitions can lead to different groups with different tasks, or students can move around to various parts of the room, engage in flexible seating, and even walk around the room to answer questions posted in various spaces of the classroom.
Movement is a simple way to engage students within a review. You can take questions from a worksheet or textbook, put them on separate sheets of paper, and post them around various parts of the classroom. Students can find the questions around the room and answer them together or independently, but they are not in their seats sitting still for prolonged periods of time.
A simple move in how students engage with information by simply incorporating movement is a small but substantial move that will ensure students are engaged and you are responsive to how the brain processes information with movement as an anchor and culturally responsive strategy that keeps the mind and body connected.
‘QSSSA’
Isabel Becerra is the multilingual consultant for the Region10 Education Service Center in Richardson, Texas. She was born in Bolivia and has been an educator since 1992:
A small teaching move refers to a strategy that educators use in their daily instruction to enhance student learning. These moves are often simple yet impactful actions that can significantly improve teaching effectiveness and student engagement. Small teaching moves are often easy to implement and require minimal preparation. They can be integrated into daily lessons without disrupting the flow of instruction.
Small teaching moves allow educators to cater to diverse learning needs and styles. They can adjust their approach based on students’ responses and adapt instruction to better meet individual or group needs. Engaging students actively in learning through varied activities and methods keeps them interested and motivated. This fosters a positive learning environment where students are more likely to participate and contribute.
One of my favorites “small teaching move” is the Question, Signal, Sentence Stem, Share and Assess, or QSSSA, strategy. Created by John Seidlitz and Bill Perryman, this is a strategy teachers can use effectively across content areas and grade levels.
This strategy is especially effective with emergent bilingual students as it engages them to constantly practice talking about their learning. Engaging all students in a variety of academic conversations effectively enhances comprehension, fosters academic language proficiency, promotes literacy, reduces misbehavior, and develops a sense of community in the classroom. These conversations help create a more interactive, supportive, and inclusive learning environment for our emergent bilingual students. Research has shown that regularly using QSSSA results in enhanced participation and enthusiasm from students (Seidlitz et al., 2024).
This is how you use the QSSSA strategy:
- Question – Provide a question for students to ponder on. This can be an open-ended question that can be answered in multiple ways and that will require students to expand on it rather than a yes or no response. An example would be: What do you think was the most important issue in the Boston Tea Party Act?
- Signal – Ask students to show you a signal or hand gesture—thumbs-up, stand up, hand on chin, or knock on the table—to let you know they are ready to share. This step gives the students wait time to process and think about the question and it gives them the opportunity to take them to the resource they are asked to use to respond to the question. I believe this step is the most important because it builds a sense of community and allows for total participation.
- Stem – Providing students with a sentence stem will allow them to participate in the conversation in a nonthreatening way. The sentence stem will help them organize their thoughts so that they just plug in the academic word (missing words) and have a structured complete sentence to share. Example: The most important issue in the Boston Tea Party Act is _____ because ______.
- Share: Instruct students to share their answer to the question by using their sentence stems with a small group, with their elbow partner, their peanut butter and jelly partner, at their table group, with their designated-number partner, or with the whole class. It’s very important to let them know exactly who they will share it with. It will make the process easier if you also structure who will share first and who will go next. You can get creative and ask the students to share their answers with their “Sole mate” (same kind of shoes), the person with the longest/shortest hair, or with the person with the same color shirt.
- Assess: Finally, you will ask students to share their answers with the whole group. This will be an opportunity to assess and check for understanding in real time. It is a best practice to have a randomizing system in place. That way, students know they will be called on and will prepare to engage in the conversation.
The QSSSA is a great strategy to scaffold for your language learners. You can use this strategy according to your students’ language proficiency level. You can go as simple or as rigorous in level to meet your students’ language needs. It is also a great strategy to practice all language domains, listening, speaking, reading and writing, and you can use this small move consistently to help your emergent bilingual students master their linguistic skills all in one activity.
The QSSSA strategy requires minimal planning, and it encourages student engagement, active participation, and deeper thinking in any content. Engaging emergent bilingual students in academic conversations is essential for their linguistic, cognitive, social, and academic development.
‘Turn-and-Talks’ and ‘Cold Calling’
Courtney Rose, Ed.D., is a professor, educational consultant, culturally relevant/responsive educator, founder of Ivy Rose Consulting, and the author of the book, Woven Together: How Unpacking Your Teacher Identity Creates a Stronger Learning Community:
This question took me deep into reflection on my time in the K-12 classroom and the many teaching moves that I tried as I grew into my identity as “classroom teacher.” The moves that made the most positive impacts on my classroom environment were those that were woven from deeper understanding of myself and my students and the places where our experiences as learners overlapped.
During my time as a 5th grade math/science teacher, I had an observation that resulted in a map of my movement around the room and tallies of the number of times I called on each student.
After reviewing the map, I was shocked to see that I was spending the majority of my time around the tables closest to my desk and calling on the students at those tables more. This was leading to students on the other side of the room to become disengaged in the activities. Some deeper reflections on who I was calling on led me to realize that these students had been more actively engaged early in the year, and I’d conditioned myself to look for their hands.
To combat this, I actually combined two small moves: Turn-and-talks (which my students loved) and cold calling (which they and I didn’t love so much). At the top of the lesson, each student took a colored connecting cube (red, blue, green, or yellow) making sure no two people at any table had the same color cube.
I would pose a question or problem to the entire class and gave students 1-2 minutes to speak with either the person sitting next to, across from, or diagonally to them about the answer. To select the person, I spun two spinners, one with the cube colors and one with the table names/numbers. The student at the chosen table with the chosen cube color gave the answer. If the answer was incorrect, I spun again and if that answer was also incorrect, we did a little reteaching before moving on to the next question.
Within days of implementing this strategy, which required VERY little planning and prep outside of regular lesson planning, engagement and participation in lessons increased TENFOLD. Students were asking and answering more questions during whole-group lessons and working together even better during centers and small-group work time. On rare occasions, some questions could earn table points (usually not tied to academic content), but my students really just enjoyed the opportunities to speak with and learn from each other.
Turn-and-talks and other methods that give students time to chat before answering a question are proven approaches that have many benefits including but not limited to:
- Encouraging collaboration among students.
- Helping students to see each other as assets and resources in their learning process.
- Disrupting hierarchies and dynamics that place the teacher as the sole owner of the knowledge.
- Developing students’ sense of ownership and engagement with the learning process.
- Strengthening class culture and community through a collective responsibility for our learning.
This method also helped me break away from my practices that negatively impacted the learning environment without unnecessarily adding stress or pressure to students. As a student, I hated cold calling because of the ways it was often used as a punishment or gotcha by teachers.
My belief then, and now, is that I’m never the only teacher in the room. Sometimes, the most effective teachers for our students are the people in the seats right next to them. As I communicated that trust in their ability to drive and support each other in their learning, they rose to and surpassed my expectations.
This collaborative and collective approach to teaching and learning continues to drive my practice today, and although I’m not using connecting cubes and spinners, I still provide my students (both undergraduate and graduate) an opportunity to learn with and from each other as often as possible.
Student Identities
As a teacher, professor, consultant, and member of senior leadership teams, Kristopher J. Childs, Ph.D., focuses on excellence in teacher content and pedagogical knowledge, equity, leadership development, and organizational change. His book Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice, Grades K-12 was published in June 2024 (Corwin):
A small teaching move that every teacher should incorporate into their routine is the inclusion of children’s identities into core curriculum experiences. Each child brings into the classroom their unique identity, which is often not centered in an educational experience if their identity is not in alignment with the “dominant” societal identities.
However, this is problematic as it requires some children to assimilate into an environment to hope to achieve an impactful educational experience. In contrast, other children naturally fit into the environment as it was designed with them in mind.
However, we educators can take steps to decenter identities in the classroom. Picture a circle where no single identity holds the center; instead, each one is placed along the edge, with equal reach toward the middle.
In practice, this means designing lessons so that no cultural reference or family background is treated as the “default.” A mathematics teacher, for example, might rotate the contexts used in word problems—one day drawing from a child’s favorite sport, another day from a family tradition, and another from a cultural food. In classroom discussions, teachers can set expectations that every child’s perspective is welcomed and seen as a meaningful contribution. Over time, these small but intentional choices make the center of learning a shared space rather than a fixed point.
Consider a 3rd grade lesson on measurement. Instead of asking students only to measure desks or textbooks, the teacher invited them to bring in objects from home. One child measured their grandmother’s prayer rug, another measured a baseball glove, and another measured the pan used for Sunday dinner. In that moment, each child’s identity was not only acknowledged but became part of the mathematics lesson itself. This is what it means to place identities on the edge of the circle—every child has equal access to the center of learning.
This small teaching move allows all children not only opportunities to see their identities intertwined within the educational experience, but also other children can learn about others’ identities in the process. Using this small teaching move creates an inclusive educational experience where every child and their identity is valued, accepted, and, most importantly, intertwined in their educational experience. To accomplish this, a teacher must embrace the following five practices:
- Reflect upon who you are.
- Embody classroom equity in your environment.
- Authentically get to know the children under their purview.
- Incorporate children’s lived experiences in the educational experience.
- Be unapologetic in creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. despite “political pressures”?
By reflecting upon who you are, you can learn more about yourself and how your identity and lived experiences impact your instructional practices and the development of your educational environment.
Embodying classroom equity in your environment showcases your commitment to ensuring every child receives a high-quality educational experience that maintains high standards but is also differentiated to ensure each child receives what they need to be successful. Authentically getting to know the children under your purview involves taking time to find out who they are, their likes and dislikes, getting to know their families, and showing them through your actions that they are valued in your environment and their contributions matter.
Incorporating their lived experiences into the educational experiences showcases to the child that their life matters, and it provides them an opportunity when engaging in their educational experience to see themselves as naturally a part of the environment.
Being unapologetic in creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment is imperative in this small teaching move as schools are becoming more racially/ethnically diverse, and we need to ensure the environments reflect an understanding of the demographic shift through an all-encompassing experience that shows a child and their families that inclusivity is valued. Incorporating this small teaching move of including a child’s identity in the educational experience will transform your environment and create an improved educational experience for all.
Thanks to Melanie, Isabel, and Courtney, for contributing their thoughts!
Today’s post answered this question:
What is a “small teaching move” that you think is not as common as it should be? A “small teaching move” in this context is an action that would require very little prep, can easily be made into a routine or habit, and is likely to result in increased student engagement and learning.
In Part One, published last fall, Maegan Giroux, Amanda Muffler, Cindy Garcia, and PJ Caposey shared their ideas.
In Part Two, Laleh Ghotbi, Sarah Nichols, Valerie Bolling, and Angela M. Ward contributed their responses.
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social .
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