1. Establish and Sustain Your Authority as Leader by Virtue of Charisma, Tradition, and Expertise. A charismatic leader is passionate, evokes strong feelings, and appears to be inspired and chosen for a calling. By following a person who seems to "have" charisma, other persons feel connected to something powerful inside the leader--his or her spirit and wisdom. A traditional leader is seen as the current incarnation of a history of leaders. Persons follow an expert because he or she seems to be qualified. Foster charisma, establish your place of traditional leadership, and provide clear evidence of expertise through voice modulation; animated gestures; movement around the room; eye contact; humor; pacing (brisk); repetition of important words and phrases; appealing to "higher" principles; using additional sources (poems, quotations from philosophers, original materials); and displaying mastery of the subjects. (See Quotations That Shine a Strong Light.)

2. Work to Start a Learning Community. (See Script for Opening Classroom Discussion of a Learning Community.)

a. Begin with a motivational pitch. Appeal to the heart (e.g., evocative phrases about childhood, socially disvalued social positions, struggle, beating the odds) and to self, class, tribal or community interests (e.g., not being a dupe or a means to another class's ends).

b. Create guidelines for working together: attendance, bringing materials, quality of work, effort will pay off, progress (not perfection), showing respect, participation, supporting one another.

3. Organize the curriculum and all units of instruction around big ideas. Check the State Standard Course of Study and find the objectives. Identify big ideas in the standard course of study that (like a plot) run through some of the objectives. Also study the texts you will be using and identify big ideas. State the big ideas at the start of the course and before ("This is what guides us.") and after lessons ("Here's what you can now do" or "Here's what has been revealed.").

4. Have a flow diagram of the knowledge system for the whole course. Big ideas on the left; knowledge strands flowing to the right from each big idea (some strands before others); some knowledge strands woven together in the form of experiments, papers. class projects (strategic integration). Supply students with the diagram as a scaffold (script, strategy) for their own acquisition of knowledge. This makes each unit meaningful (both backward--"Here's why we did that."--and forward--"Here's why we will do the next thing.")

5. Identify for yourself and your students the concepts, propositions, strategies and operations that you will be working on during any lesson or assignment in a chunk of a knowledge strand. And state the objectives (how competencies will change) to be accomplished by the end of the unit. "You will be able to..." Of course, review these accomplishments at the end.

6. Identify the ways that competencies (concepts, principles, strategies and operations can be improved: accuracy, fluency, endurance, momentum, generalization, adaptation, retention, maintenance. Make sure to plan and work on fostering these. Some such work will be explicit (e.g., explicitly teaching students to adapt/alter lab procedures from one kind of problem to another); other such work will be incidental (i.e., reinforce changes as they occur. "That was great the way you gave more than one possible effect of that historical event." (See Eight Phases of Learning and Instruction.)

7. Use the Instruction Format (orientation, attention, model, lead, test, etc.), especially when you are working on acquisition and fluency on component or elemental concepts, propositions, strategies and operations. (See General Format For Instruction.) Try to think of this format as a fast-paced dialogue that breaks up what probably would have been a dull and incoherent lecture into focused, meaningful and followable units; and that enables everyone to work on the "matter" in many ways or learning channels (see, hear, touch, think, write), many times, and in a collaborative way ("We're getting this together.").

8. Think very carefully about the sequence of instruction--from one idea and example to the next (deductive style: general to specific, vs inductive style: specific to general)--and the juxtaposition of examples (glerm vs not glerm), to make the communication as faultless as you can. Students should have the sense that one idea builds naturally on the earlier ones. Also, if students have learned the elemental concepts, propositions, strategies, and operations, their next inferences or procedures--based on the prior ideas or examples--should be all but inevitable.

9. Teach students to accumulate and store knowledge on flash cards, and to use them virtually every day (say all fast a minute every day shuffled, safmeds).

10. Frequently comment on the class as a learning community--effort, mutual support, achievement.

11. Hard as it may be, try to correct every error. Basically, use the model, lead, test, new material, retest format. If needed, frame it as something the whole class needs to "firm up a bit."

12. Use practice sessions at the end of class and homework NOT as times for students to acquire the material (see #6), but to firm it and to reveal strengths to build on (generalization, adaptation) and weaknesses (e.g., in concepts, etc., and learning channels) that need extra attention.

13. Try Precision Teaching projects to help students accelerate some behaviors (e.g., flash cards, time working, problems solved, poems collected, new ideas thought of, logical flaws found in written materials) and to decelerate other behaviors (e.g., time loafing) (See Script For Introducing Precision Teaching to Secondary Students and
Script For Precision Teaching: Correcting Spelling Errors