The How: Pedagogical Principles

What We Do

How We Do It

• Reduce extraneous cognitive load
• Use a clear routine for gaining learner attention
• Use volume and tone
• Have students adopt a posture of attention
• Insist on 100%
• Use proximity
• Use a consistent signal to start
• Pause teacher talk whilst learners follow instructions
• Explain value
• Specify action and time limit
• Ensure practice is quiet

What We Do

Embed Retrieval to Make Learning Stick Over Time: Normalise struggle and celebrate effort, helping learners understand that forgetting is natural and retrieving helps strengthen memory.

Make Retrieval Inclusive & Accessible: Adapt retrieval tasks to ensure all learners (including SEND and EAL) can access and engage meaningfully.

Connect the Past to the Present- and the Future: Help learners see how retrieval links to current and upcoming learning so they can make sense of the bigger picture over time.

Ensure Retrieval is Purposeful, Not Perfunctory: Select questions and tasks that connect meaningfully to prior learning to ensure retrieval is impactful.

Make Retrieval a Conscious Habit, Not a One-Off Event: Regular and deliberate retrieval helps learners retain knowledge and develop fluency, reducing cognitive load when learning new content.

How We Do It

• Use retrieval to link prior knowledge to new learning
• Keep to core content in spaced retrieval
• Plan coverage systematically in spaced retrieval
• Establish a quizzing routine for spaced retrieval
• Frame retrieval quizzes as low stakes 
• Choose the most efficient retrieval activities
• Design for quick analysis
• Ensure independent completion
• Encourage self-marking
• Normalise error

What We Do

Carefully Sequence New Learning to Build on Prior Knowledge: Effective instruction is positioned clearly linking to familiar concepts and highlighting relevance.

Focus Instruction on Key Concepts and Powerful Knowledge: Remove unnecessary detail and signposts powerful knowledge explicitly, helping direct attention to core ideas.

Use Clear, Efficient Language to Support Understanding: Concise, purposeful language directs learners’ attention to key concepts and vocabulary, supporting clarity and retention.

Break Complex Ideas Into Manageable, Meaningful Steps: Instruction is broken down into logical steps building on what learners already understand, so knowledge and skills can be mastered incrementally.

Anticipate & Address Misconceptions Through Deliberate Design: Anticipate and plan for likely misconceptions, actively addressing them during instruction and explanation.

Adapt Instruction to Meet the Needs of Learners: Adapt instruction and explanations to ensure all pupils can access and engage with new content successfully.

How We Do It

• Plan lessons around key knowledge points
• Make objectives manageable and measurable
• Begin and end lessons with lesson objectives
• Script explanations and keep teacher talk lean
• Provide outline before detail
• Signpost what to remember
• Limit new content
• Chunk and clarify instructions
• Proactively address misconceptions

• Build in processing time 

What We Do

Model the Process as Well as the Outcome: Make each step of the process explicit, revealing the decisions, strategies, and thought processes, so learners understand how to approach similar tasks themselves.

Make Expert Thinking Visible and Accessible: Slow down and verbalise expert thinking, helping learners grasp not just what to do, but why each choice is made.

Use Deliberate, Well-Chosen Examples to Model Success: Draw on purposeful examples that illustrate key features of success, enabling learners to recognise, replicate, and eventually apply them in their own work.

Return to Models to Reinforce and Refine Understanding: Revisit and deconstruct models at key points, helping learners consolidate understanding, identify features of quality, and reflect on how their own work compares.

Model Common Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them: Demonstrate common errors and how to address them, building learners’ ability to self-correct and avoid similar mistakes.

Gradually Release Responsibility Through Shared and Guided Practice: Gradually reducing support helps build confidence and independence in applying new skills and strategies.

Chunk Complex Tasks into Manageable Steps: Breaking down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable segments helps learners process information without feeling overwhelmed.

How We Do It

• Create success criteria
• Prepare a model
• Explain the purpose of the model
• Live model the process
• Chunk models

• Fade modelling scaffolds

• Provide examples and non-examples

• Live model improvement
• Form a collaborative live model
• Use checks for understanding whilst modelling

What We Do

Use Independent Practice to Strengthen Learning Through Application: Give learners opportunities to apply knowledge and skills in varied contexts, helping to embed learning in the long-term memory and supporting confidence and the development of fluency.

Ensure Tasks Align With Taught Content and Curriculum Goals: Connect practice to what has been taught, reinforcing key concepts and supporting progress towards curriculum aims and mastery of powerful knowledge.

Design Tasks That Offer Appropriate Challenge and Support: Ensure learners experience desirable difficulty while remaining accessible, enabling all learners to practise and refine their knowledge and skills successfully.

Use Clear Success Criteria to Guide Independent Work: Show clear, shared success criteria, helping learners monitor their own work, reflect on quality, and make improvements as they move towards mastery.

Use Independent Practice to Secure Learning and Inform Next Steps: Tasks provide vital feedback to teachers, helping to identify gaps, address misconceptions, and inform responsive teaching that supports long-term retention and mastery.

How We Do It

• Prioritise independent practice
• Choose the most efficient independent task
• Plan check points
• Provide challenging practice time
• Make starting accessible
• Prime before circulating
• Position for accountability

What We Do

Deliberately Plan Feedback Around the Most Important Content: Learners are supported to understand key concepts and powerful knowledge, deepening their understanding and avoiding cognitive overload.

Make Thinking Visible: Highlight key learning and shifts in understanding, helping learners recognise their progress, build confidence and refine their thinking.

Use Precise, Actionable Feedback: Specific and actionable detail allows learners to clearly understand what they need to improve and how to do it.

Create a Culture Where Feedback is Constructive and Positively Received: Forward focused feedback encourages learners to see it as a necessary tool for learning, and ultimately improves outcomes.

Inform and Adapt Teaching Based Upon Feedback: Identifying and addressing gaps in understanding in a timely and meaningful way supports all learners to make progress.

Promote Metacognition and Mastery Through Feedback: Fostering metacognitive awareness supports learners to monitor and regulate their own learning.

How We Do It

• Plan feedback for the most important content
• Circulate and record ideas for whole class feedback
• Classify student errors for effective feedback
• Highlight key learning
• Highlight changed thinking
• Give precise praise

• Right is right

• Make feedback precise and actionable
• Insist on corrections
• Re-teach, re-check

What We Do

Monitor Understanding Throughout All Phases of Learning: Continuously monitoring learners’ thinking allows teachers to catch misconceptions early and offer real-time support to keep learners on track.

Use Purposeful Questions to Assess Powerful Knowledge: Targeted questions challenge learners to demonstrate their grasp of key concepts, encouraging connections, justifications, and explanations.

Identify & Address Misconceptions to Support Secure Knowledge: Identifying and addressing misconceptions helps learners progress toward secure knowledge in an environment where errors are expected and openly explored.

Ensure Inclusive Assessment Practices for All Learners: Inclusive assessment methods—such as cold calling, mini whiteboards, or choral responses—engage all learners and provide a comprehensive view of progress and thinking.

Welcome Errors as Learning Opportunities: Foster a classroom culture where errors are seen as learning opportunities, helping learners refine their understanding.

Encourage Learners to Explain Their Thinking to Deepen Understanding: Prompt learners to elaborate on responses, encouraging them to justify their thinking and make connections.

How We Do It

• Check understanding and tackle misconceptions
• Checking for understanding during independent work
• Plan key questions to test powerful knowledge
• Use techniques to sample all learners
• Use hinge questions 
• Use question, pause, name
• Use choral response to check for understanding
• Insist on participation
• Prompt to correct and extend
• Push for how or why
• Welcome errors
• Celebrate learner feedback

What We Do

Balance High Expectations with Genuine Care: Clear, consistent boundaries are balanced with kindness, empathy, and belief in each learner’s potential, building trust and ensuring that behaviour management feels fair, not punitive.

Respond with Empathy and Curiosity: Professional curiosity helps understand the causes of behaiour, showing care and understanding while maintaining boundaries.

Reduce Cognitive Load Through Consistent Routines: Embedding routines as habits allows greater focus on learning and instructional decision-making.

Reinforce Routines Through Repetition and Consistency: Rehearsing, reteaching and refining routines helps learners form habits that support a calm and purposeful environment.

Prioritise Fewer, Well-Practised Routines: A core set of familiar instructional and behavioural routines enables deeper engagement with content and smoother classroom management.

Model Expectations Through Consistent Teacher Behaviour: Explicit demonstration routines, attitudes, and behaviours reinforces a culture of consistency, respect, and high standards.

How We Do It

• Set and maintain clear entry routines
• Build positive relationships during entry
• Establish and maintain classroom routines
• Set a culture of consideration
• Publicly narrate met expectations
• Narrate hard work and effort
• Narrate links between student behaviour and school reward systems
• Assume positive intentions

• Modulate your voice

• Use rapid anonymous public corrections

• Give private corrections

• Follow corrections with take-up time

• Connect and reset out of class

What We Do

Use Scaffolding to Make Ambitious Learning Accessible to All: Structured guidance—such as models, prompts, or visual aids—enables all learners to access the full curriculum.

Integrate Scaffolding Across the Teaching Process: Through modelling, instruction, retrieval and independent practice, learners stay engaged and successful—reducing cognitive load, reinforcing understanding, and guiding learners step-by-step towards independence.

High Challenge With High Support: Warm-strict teaching pushes learners to meet high academic and behavioural expectations while offering the scaffolding and encouragement needed to help them succeed.

Align Scaffolding With Clear Success Criteria: Clear, shared success criteria helps learners to understand the goal, navigate the task, and reflect on their progress as support is gradually withdrawn.

Adapt Scaffolding to Meet Learners’ Needs in the Moment: Responsive scaffolding—such as slowing instruction, chunking tasks, or offering prompts— can be adjusted in real time to extend or support learners, so they remain on track.

Make Scaffolds Purposeful, Varied, and Temporary: Scaffolding is always purposeful and gradually removed, ensuring learners do not become reliant and can ultimately succeed without support.

Use Scaffolding to Build Independence Through Guided Practice: Scaffolds guide learners through supported practice, gradually releasing responsibility until learners can apply skills and knowledge confidently on their own.

How We Do It

• Tailor tasks and scaffolds
• Fade scaffolds
• Provide student-friendly definitions
• Chunk tasks
• Provide concrete examples to explain new concepts
• Provide multiple and varied examples
• Provide strategic clues and prompts
• Use think, pair, share
• Use writing to scaffold thinking
• Provide response frameworks
• Provide additional practice
• Increase the challenge

What We Do

Intentionally Plan Language-Rich Classroom Environments: Language development is incorporated into all aspects of learning through speaking and writing opportunities, reading and active listening.

Opportunities for Verbalising Learning are Frequent and Structured: Designing purposeful opportunities for discussion allows learners to develop confidence, clarity, and the ability to express complex ideas in a range of contexts.

Build Reading Fluency and Comprehension Through Explicit Instruction: Modelling and scaffolding strategies such as predicting, questioning, summarising, and clarifying helps learners decode texts, build vocabulary, and understand deeper meaning.

Teach Writing as a Process, Not a Product: Breaking writing into manageable stages and providing feedback at each point helps learners communicate ideas with clarity, coherence, and confidence.

Explicitly Teach and Model Vocabulary: Conscious and deliberate vocabulary teaching helps learners acquire new vocabulary which supports them to use academic language and subject specific terminology with precision.

Support Deep Thinking & Social Interaction Through High-Quality Classroom Talk: Learners are given space to speak in full sentences, build on each other’s ideas, and engage in structured dialogue- enhancing their reasoning, listening, and collaborative skills.

Make Language Visible and Interactive: Accompanying spoken language with modelling, visuals, gesture, and shared sentence structures provides multiple entry points for understanding, supporting learners of all backgrounds and abilities.

Provide Ongoing Feedback on Language Use:  Prompting improvement and correcting errors sensitively supports long-term development in vocabulary, grammar, and overall fluency.

How We Do It

• Select words deliberately
• Repeat target vocabulary
• Explain the meaning
• Teach word roots and patterns
• Teach pronunciation
• Insist on use of key vocabulary
• Establish and rehearse paired talk routines
• Make paired talk visible
• I say, you say
• Use choral repetition
• Have learners build on each other’s answers
• Prompt to improve speech
• Insist on full sentences

• Support reading aloud

• Insist on purposeful independent reading

• Check and correct SPaG