Step 1: put your objectives from the roadmap into a learning sequence (for a single lesson) or indicate where your students stand (for a lesson series). Step 2: click a learning principle to read why it works. Step 3: choose one of the matching teaching techniques. Step 4: you get a worked-out lesson plan with your own content, including the strategies of formative action (Short loop, Sense for Quality, Feedback). Remember: you can always switch techniques, as long as the principle stays intact.
Put your objectives into a learning sequence and choose what needs to happen at each step
This is how the brain learns: click for an explanation
Appear with the principle you choose on the left
Click a technique and a worked-out lesson plan with your content appears here
What works depends on how much a student already knows. What helps novices move forward (lots of support, worked examples) can actually slow experts down, and the other way round. This is called the expertise reversal effect. Choose your approach per group and fade the support deliberately.
| Novice | Expert | |
|---|---|---|
| Instruction | Explicit direct instruction in small steps, with lots of modelling | Inquiry tasks and more independence |
| Examples | Study worked examples and imitate them step by step | Solve independently; examples only as reference |
| Sense for quality | Compare examples and model while thinking aloud | Apply criteria independently to their own work |
| Feedback | Directive and corrective: what is wrong and how do you improve it | Greater call on independence: questions instead of directions |
| Support | Support card or writing frame at hand | First the bare version, then without |
Based on the expertise reversal effect and the golden rules of formative action. Also read What you need to know about novices and experts (in Dutch), and see Wijze Lessen (in Dutch) building block 7 and Rosenshine principle 8.
The Model for Great Teaching (Evidence Based Education) describes good teaching in four dimensions. This page mainly helps you with dimensions 1 and 4, the other two are the conditions around them:
Knowing your subject deeply, knowing how the material builds up and which misconceptions students hold. Exactly what you map out with your Pedagogical Roadmap.
Relationships with respect and warmth, high expectations with plenty of trust: making mistakes is part of it.
Smooth routines, clear instructions and calm in the classroom, so as much time as possible is left for learning.
Structuring, explaining, questioning, giving feedback, practising and self-regulation: the techniques above, each with its matching element (4.1 to 4.6).
Six insights about emotion, safety and belonging, from the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning (CTTL), filling in dimension 2:
Why: Emotion and thinking share the same brain systems: how a student feels in your lesson helps determine what they can think, remember and learn.
Why: A perceived social threat (losing face, being excluded, confirming a stereotype) triggers the same stress response as physical danger, and switches off the thinking systems students need.
Why: Students who feel at home in your lesson think harder, persist longer and perform better. The reverse is just as true.
Why: The right amount of tension sharpens learning, but beyond a limit the brain's survival response switches off exactly the systems students need to think.
Why: Challenge without support breeds anxiety; support without challenge breeds boredom. Neither produces learning.
Why: Rest, choice and play are not a break from learning: that is exactly when the brain consolidates and makes the creative connections that focused work does not reach.
Matching articles, podcasts and videos for the topic you click above.