Tilting Your Teaching: Seven Simple Shifts That Can Substantially Improve Student Learning

Want to improve your classroom’s learning climate in just a few seconds?
With the Seven Simple Shifts—a set of research-based, practice-proven techniques every teacher can use to gain students’ cooperation, engagement, and focus, and help them learn even more. Sometimes all it takes is an intentional pause, a purposeful glance, or a few well-timed words to keep a lesson on track.
Developed from extensive research and decades of teaching experience, the Simple Shifts do not require you to totally change your teaching—just “tilt” it a bit with these practical, teacher-friendly strategies: Low-Key Interventions: Nudge off-task students back to their work. Pivoting and Reframing: Defuse conflict and steer argumentative students back to their learning. Instructional Clarity: Secure complete student attention before issuing instructions or making transitions. Wait Time: Extend the amount of thinking time you give students before expecting them to respond. Pause and Elaboration Time: Extend your pauses after students answer, encouraging them to give more detailed responses. Snapshot Feedback: Use fast, formative feedback from students to assess the immediate impact of your teaching. Reflection Time: Give students an opportunity to quickly demonstrate that they have taken your advice.\nThe key is to be prepared to match the Shift to the moment. Chances are, you’ve already seen some of these techniques in action—probably even used them yourself. Now’s your chance to put them together in a way that works best for your grade level, subject, and teaching style. Tilting Your Teaching will show you how to get big results by managing your room just a little differently.
Tilting Your Teaching comes with “micro-data tools” so you can track and fine tune your progress.