🗑 Level up your teaching with these 10 practices

📱 Do you follow me on the socials???

I share a LOT right here in the newsletter. But I’m also all over social media as well! I’d love for you to connect and follow me on …

• Twitter/X: @jmattmiller (me) AND @DitchThatTxtbk (the brand)

• LinkedIn: Matt Miller (Ditch That Textbook)

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💻 TECH TIP 💻

🤖 THE NotebookLM notebook for AI guidance

If you haven’t checked out NotebookLM yet, it’s amazing. It’s one of my favorite ways to take large texts, files, and resources — and quickly make sense of them. Read my tutorial on NotebookLM here.

Recently, I added every U.S. state’s guidance documents about AI for K-12 schools. If you’re trying to make sense of AI and how it applies to education, this notebook is amazing! It gives you a place to see what all states are telling their schools. Get my notebook with state AI guidance documents here.

Even if state AI guidance documents isn’t your thing, go check it out to see how NotebookLM works — and check out the audio overview and video overview it created from scratch based on my files!

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

📈 Level up your teaching with these 10 practices

I’m a teacher. I’m also a newsletter operator.

So when a newsletter for educators catches my eye, I subscribe …

… but I only STAY subscribed to the good ones. And DistillED is one of the good ones.

Authored by Jamie Lee Clark, it provides these “one pagers” — quick, engaging explanations of sound teaching techniques and pedagogical principles.

• Subscribe to the newsletter …

• and when it comes in, you can download and read the one-pagers …

• or you can read a summary right there in the newsletter …

• OR you can go to the newsletter’s website to find all of it.

I asked Jamie if I could share some of his one-pagers with you and he said YES! So I thought this would be a good place to start.

His Rosenshine series. (Go with me on this … it’s good stuff.)

Jamie writes: Barak Rosenshine (1930–2017) was an American educational psychologist whose research focused on effective teaching. Drawing on classroom observation, cognitive science, and teacher expertise, he developed the Principles of Instruction—ten practical guidelines that highlight what the most effective teachers do.

Jamie created these fantastic one-pagers for each one. Below are summaries of Rosenshine’s 10 Principles of Instruction (from the DistillED newsletter) — and links to the full one-pagers for each.

And if you like this kind of thing, you should subscribe to the DistillED email newsletter (like I do).

1. Start class by reviewing the previous day’s material.

The aim isn’t to test students or trip them up—it’s to warm up their memory, make prior knowledge available, and prepare the ground for new content in the lesson. This review can take many forms: a quick quiz, a short recap task, a moment to turn and talk. What matters is that every student is engaged in active recall and pulling information from long-term memory.

2. Present new material in small, manageable steps (with practice after each one).

Rosenshine’s second principle is clear: present new material in small, manageable steps with practice after each one. The aim is to respect the limits of working memory and secure understanding before moving on to the next step. Each instructional step is modelled, checked, and practised, so knowledge builds steadily into a stronger, more durable schema.

3. Ask LOTS of questions.

Effective teachers don’t just explain and then move on—they thread questions throughout their lessons to secure attention, check for understanding, and prompt deeper thinking. Questioning is a core part of responsive teaching and act like a pulse check—letting you see if the class is ready to move on or if something needs to be retaught.

4. Provide models that demonstrate the process.

Instead of leaving learners to figure things out independently, teachers explicitly demonstrate the process. This often takes the form of worked examples, think-alouds, and annotated exemplars. It helps you to reveal not only the process, but the reasoning, strategies, and steps that lead to it.

5. Guide student while they practice new material.

Guided Practice is the “We Do” phase between teacher modelling and student independence. Instead of moving straight from demonstration to “off you go,” it’s about staying with the class, prompting, questioning, and correcting as students practise new material in small steps.

6. Check for student understanding.

CfU is the ongoing process of asking students to show you their thinking so you can adjust teaching immediately. Rather than asking “Does that make sense?” or “Who can tell me the answer?” you ask targeted questions so every student demonstrates what they’ve understood.

7. Design student practice for a high success rate.

Rosenshine observed that the most effective teachers engineered lessons where students were successful around 80% of the time during guided practice. That sweet spot provides the right balance between security and stretch: it’s challenging enough to sustain effortful thinking, yet achievable enough for students to consolidate new knowledge and taste the joy of success.

8. Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.

Scaffolding refers to the temporary supports teachers provide to help students master complex skills or concepts. These supports might take many forms — worked examples, modelling, visual cues, sentence starters, checklists, prompts, or partially completed tasks — but the defining feature is that they are temporary.

9. Require — and monitor — independent practice.

Independent practice is the stage where students work on their own to rehearse, apply, and consolidate what has been explicitly taught and guided. This process is all about building fluency and automaticity whilst monitoring progress, correcting misconceptions, so that students achieve a high success rate (around 80 %).

10. Do weekly and monthly review to go back over content.

While daily review activates prior knowledge at the start of a new lesson, weekly and monthly review aims to strengthen long-term retention by deliberately revisiting, retrieving, and reconnecting knowledge over time… Unless we revisit knowledge, we will forget it!

Get these one-pagers in your inbox!

If you sign up for the DistillED newsletter, you get these one-pagers delivered right to your inbox for free — just like I do!

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!