Zach Groshell Profile picture
Jun 5, 2023 12 tweets 1 min read Read on X
If you're an instructional coach or have experienced instructional coaching, let me hear your thoughts on this series of 10 polls about this field:

1. Teachers should always choose the topic of their coaching
2. Teachers should always be able to choose whether they engage in coaching or not
3. Coaches should mostly listen, and rarely show, tell, or direct teaching
4. Coaching is mostly about leadership, and less about pedagogical expertise
5. Coaches can be weaker teachers than their mentees
6. Coaching can ignore specific subjects to focus on general teaching strategies
7. Coaches should keep everything confidential from their supervisors
8. Coaching inevitably involves non-coaching responsibilities, as required by their supervisors
9. Coaching should focus on individual teachers’ needs and not the needs of the building
10. A coach shouldn’t come out in favor of one form of pedagogy over another
Many of these beliefs were discussed on a recent live streaming of Teachers Talk Radio

@TTRadioOfficial @teacherhead @olicav @Josh_CPD @jon_hutchinson_ @overpractised @jimknight99 @erickalenze @GTavernetti @RogersHistory

educationrickshaw.com/2023/06/05/10-…
@TTRadioOfficial @teacherhead @olicav @Josh_CPD @jon_hutchinson_ @jimknight99 @erickalenze @GTavernetti @RogersHistory @threadreaderapp unroll

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More from @MrZachG

Oct 11, 2025
Direct Instruction (DI) provides a clear path for evaluating instructional design. Here are 20 rules and recommendations for effective programs:

1. Maintain stable difficulty. Difficulty should rise slowly and predictably so students never hit a sudden cognitive spike.
2. Tasks must allow high response frequency. Aim for roughly 9–20 learner responses per minute to keep attention, cognitive processing, and provide diagnostic data.

3. Lessons should contain multiple short “tracks” to coordinate and interleave knowledge and skills.
4. Roughly 10% of a lesson should be new material. Most of the block should be practice and application of already-taught content.

5. Every lessons should include cumulative review that integrates previously mastered content into current tasks.
Read 12 tweets
Sep 2, 2025
I fundamentally believe we’re missing something when we talk about spacing and interleaving without talking about track design. @Kris_Boulton’s Substack is an excellent resource for learning about such blind spots. This is a case of cog sci providing principles without solutions.
What is track or “strand” design? First you have to understand atomization, or decomposition of material into its smallest units. This is aligned with cognitive load theory: kids are easily overloaded when given material that contains too many new elements
To teach an element, you have to teach it over multiple days to 1. harness spacing of that element and 2. Allow for spacing of other past elements. You also can’t violate the principle of 85:15 review. So you can’t design lessons in which only a single objective is mass taught.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 15, 2024
The recording of my recent webinar on Direct and Explicit instruction is available on YouTube:

Here are some of my favorite slides!

1. Cognitive load theory suggests that novices are easily overloaded by unguided problem solving youtube.com/live/p-qMhvdy4…
Image
2. Understanding limited WM gives rise to all sorts of techniques that can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of instruction. For example, drawing on a blank canvas allows you to funnel just one item at a time into WM compared to presenting everything at once. Image
3. Economy of language is also important, as is unambiguous communication. Cutting out unnecessary words and tangents and highlighting essential information is the foundation of explicit teaching.

youtube.com/live/p-qMhvdy4…
Image
Read 7 tweets
Apr 22, 2024
So, your school has bought you a bunch of vertical whiteboards and says you have to use them to teach math. When would it work?

Well, let's start with how novices and expert process information, cognitive load theory, and the instructional hierarchy. 1/

thescienceofmath.com/how-teachers-c…
Students who do not know the material very well are in the acquisition stage of the hierarchy. They are novices, in the sense that they don't have much prior knowledge to draw from. It wouldn't be a good idea to have students work on an unknown problem on these whiteboards... 2/
because the students need models to think with and immediate feedback on errors. If you put kids without much prior knowledge at whiteboards, the students who know the material will take the lead, while the rest copy by rote or become confused and overloaded. 3/
Read 12 tweets
Apr 9, 2024
As someone who taught LEGO class for two years, here's what I observed:
1. Kids that have LEGO at home are quickly bored of it at school, and not necessarily better at them
2. Teaching kids to do anything useful with them (make an arch) requires di, not discovery 🧵
3. The kids actually don't like free play with them for that long. They much prefer following the instructions. If your idea of good education is learning to read instruction manuals, then 👍
4. They are not a good way to teach math. Kids need to work problems to learn math.
5. A lot of fighting occurs with 30 kids and LEGO. Kids want to put their hands on other kids' stuff and steal parts. The kids loved when they didn't have to work with anyone. If your idea of a good education is separating students into corners of the room, then 👍
Read 8 tweets
Mar 26, 2024
When I watch good math teaching, I see purpose and urgency in the instruction - "not a minute to waste". This on its own is not to everyone's taste, same with the concept of bell-to-bell teaching. These teachers "teach briskly" both for attention and to fit in more practice. 1/
Kids like these teachers. It feels like they are athletes getting their reps in. The briskness makes it so other kids don't have time to disrupt the learning. But above all, they feel successful because they are getting adequate practice and seeing their own rapid growth. 2/
One technique among many is to time the students for speed and accuracy. The teacher gives more problems than can possibly be done in a minute and the students track on a graph how many can complete over several weeks. This allows for goal setting and progress monitoring. 3/
Read 8 tweets

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