Routines for Enhancing the Instructional Route with Students

The SMARTER Planning Routine: enables teachers to utilize a macro structure for reflectively planning and evaluating courses, units, or lessons that align standards and proficiencies with assessments to ensure that they are embedded into differentiated instruction for diverse students in general education classes.

The Course Organizer Routine: is used by teachers to launch and maintain a course so that all students in an academically diverse class have a clear understanding of the course direction, expectations, how learning will be accomplished, and how it will be supported. Major components on the associated graphic organizer include critical course questions developed from standards or proficiencies, a course map, critical concepts, strategies or teaching routines to be used for learning course content, and performance options.

The Unit Organizer Routine: is used by teachers to launch and maintain a content unit so that all students in an academically diverse class see and understand the "big ideas" of the unit, their relationships to each other, the unit questions to be answered (derived from standards and proficiencies), learning strategies to use when answering these questions, and their assignment responsibilities.

The Lesson Organizer Routine: is employed by teachers to initiate a lesson lasting one or more days so that diverse students are aware of its relationship to the larger unit of instruction, content relationships within the lesson, strategies to employ while learning lesson content, related tasks, and self-test questions.

The Survey Routine: enables the teacher to increase the probability that students with a diverse range of reading levels will successfully comprehend an upcoming reading assignment by providing an interactive overview of it. The teacher takes the leadership to explicitly identify what is essential to focus on, including main ideas and critical details or terms. Paraphrasing of this critical information on a graphic organizer is a major component of this routine.

Routines for Enhancing Critical Ideas with Students

The Concept Anchoring Routine: gives teachers a process for explicitly and interactively grounding a new, critical concept on a graphic organizer, with a concept that is well-known and understood by diverse students in the class, thus increasing their ability to retain and connect the new concept with other essential information in a course, unit, or lesson.

The Concept Mastery Routine: is employed by teachers to interactively analyze a previously introduced, critical concept in depth with diverse students on a graphic organizer by relating it to their prior knowledge, identifying always, sometimes, and never characteristics of the concept, sorting examples and non-examples, and synthesizing their understanding of it.

The Concept Comparison Routine: allows the teacher to pause and consolidate diverse students' understanding of two or more critical concepts by analyzing salient characteristics of each, sorting them into like and different categories, then synthesizing their conclusions about the concepts.

The Clarifying Routine: is used at the beginning or end of a lesson to develop a clearer understanding of a crucial term, person, place, or event on a graphic organizer by interactively discussing its "clarifiers," paraphrasing its essential meaning, personalizing its meaning by making a connection to prior knowledge, articulating the parameters of the term's correct and incorrect usage, and finally embedding it into the context of an original sentence.

The Framing Routine: gives teachers a highly flexible process and graphic organizer to help diverse students organize and paraphrase a large body of information related to a key topic by focusing on critical main ideas and details within the information's structure (narrative, cause-effect, sequential, compare/contrast, problem-solution).

Routines for Enhancing Recall and Production with Students

The Recall Enhancement Routine: is employed by teachers to cue diverse students that lists and small groups of facts need to be memorized by transforming the information into study formats with the application of a variety of mnemonic devices (keywords, first letters, visual imagery, rhymes).

The Vocabulary LINCing Routine: is employed by teachers to interactively help students store the meaning of important terms by designing auditory and visual memory devices that are "LINCed" on a graphic organizer.

The Quality Assignment Routine: allows the teacher to co-create differentiated assignments with students so that the completion rate and quality of their products is increased. This is accomplished by engaging in a 3 phase process of planning the assignments on a graphic organizer, sharing options with students as they apply the REACT strategy (ensuring they have the needed information, set goals, and make plans for completing the assignment), and co-evaluating the final products.

The Question Exploration Routine: is a package of instructional methods that teachers can use to help diverse students understand a body of content information by carefully answering a 'critical question' to arrive at a main idea answer.