Overview

Phase of the Instructional Cycle

What Teachers Do

How Paraprofessionals Help

• Combine knowledge about students’ needs with knowledge about significant academic outcomes as a way to determine what to teach and how to teach it.
• Design one or more lessons leading to mastery of one or more significant academic outcomes.
• Select or develop a set of universally accessible materials that will enable students to master one or more significant academic outcomes.
• Select or develop one or more assessment tools (including rubrics or scoring guides) to measure the extent to which students have mastered the academic outcomes.

• Share insights about students’ academic needs.
• Search resource materials (e.g., books, internet sites) that provide ideas for helping students learn the academic content targeted in the lesson or series of lessons.
• Assist in the development of universally accessible materials.

• Link new academic outcomes to students’ prior knowledge and skills.
• Describe to students the outcomes they are being asked to master.
• Present information or lead activities that present information (e.g., guided reading) or demonstrate new skills.
• Provide opportunities for students to attempt new skills or attempt to make use of new information.
• Observe students as they attempt new skills or to use new information.
• Provide feedback to help students see where they are succeeding and where they are making errors in their efforts to attempt new skills or make use of new information.
• Provide opportunities for students to practice new skills or the use of new information independently, once they achieve sufficient mastery to perform the skills or use the information correctly.

• Provide repeated demonstrations of a new skill based on the model presented by the teacher.
• Help students record new information or the steps in performing new skills (e.g., through note-taking.
• Observe students while they are practicing using new knowledge or performing a new skill and provide feedback.
• Using a protocol developed by the teacher, systematically observe students to determine their level of mastery.
• Help students organize practice work completed in school, at home, or both.

• Administer an evaluation tool.
• Use the already developed rubric or scoring guide to evaluate the extent to which students have mastered new knowledge or skills.
• Create a chart showing the levels of student mastery across members of the class.
• Add information to student-by-student charts to show levels of mastery across academic outcomes.

• Observe students while they complete the evaluation to answer their questions and monitor their behavior.
• Assist with the scoring of students’ work.
• Assist with the charting of students’ progress.

• Use information about students’ performance to determine the extent to which instruction has been effective for each child.

• Share insights with the teacher based on observations of students during instruction and assessment.

• Identify next steps (e.g., re-teaching knowledge or skills if students did not achieve mastery, moving on to the next lesson in a sequence if students did achieve mastery, providing extra support if students have achieved partial mastery.
• Revisit original lesson plans and make necessary adaptations (e.g., creating a second lesson or set of lessons to teach the same content, creating a new lesson to teach incrementally more difficult content).

• Search resource materials (e.g., books, internet sites) that provide ideas for helping students learn the academic content targeted in the lesson or series of lessons.
• Assist in the development of universally accessible materials.