1. Educators can can prioritize the curriculum; they focus on the critical course learning and make sure their students can do that learning well.

The teachers decide on the 80% of the curriculum that is “need-to-know”. Instructors can pretend they are teaching summer school so they pick out the critical part of the course. As the teachers weed through the course for a six week summer session, they focus on the truly essential learning for the course. They take out all the “nice-to-do” non- essential activities. In addition, the classroom leaders decide for the “need-to-know” material, whether the learning is to be at the mastery level (about 60% ) or the introductory level (about 40%). These educators do not need to spend as much time on introductory materials as on mastery level materials.

2. Efficient teachers incorporate numerous learning styles into their classroom strategies.

When instructors include text, visuals, and some kinesthetic in the content presentation, they are likely to incorporate the learning styles of many students; therefore, more students can be successful in their learning the first time. For example, teachers may talk through the text and images in on a PowerPoint screen about the social studies economic concepts of “supply and demand”; the talk, text and images all convey the same information. The teacher may also incorporate a movement such as one hand going down to indicate low supply and the other going up to indicate high demand . Likewise, during the learning, teachers may have a tic-tac-toe listing of possible ways to develop more understanding about the topic; each area focuses on learning through a different learning style. By encouraging students to learn in their learning style, the teacher maximizes the students' learning opportunities within a limited time frame.

3. Classroom leaders save time when they use formative assessment since they know in-route student learning progress.

If they find out through the formative assessments that students are having trouble with a certain concept, they immediately can make minor adjustments to instruction to help the pupils overcome their learning gap. For example, as a Spanish teacher has her students look at sentence missing past tense verbs, her students use one finger for the preterite tense and two fingers for imperfect tense to indicate which tense goes in each sentence. This language instructor can ascertain difficulties and give immediate feedback. If the educators wait until the unit test, they may need to have numerous major review sessions to overcome the cumulative learning gaps from throughout the whole learning goal.

4. When teachers give feedback, they will save class time by giving feedback to the greatest learning need area that the largest number of students have.

Work their way to the learning needs of small groups of students and then to the learning need of an individual. When math teachers see a gap in most students' concept of Geometry , they give whole class feedback to overcome that gap. They will always focus on their maximizing their feedback to help as many students at once.Teachers may create feedback-giving PowerPoints or TeacherTube videos so that while some students are viewing the media presentations, the educators can work with small groups or individuals.

5. Finally, educators can have well-established procedures for the classroom to reduce class management time and therefore create more instruction time.

They will have established many procedures such how and when to hand in homework (at the beginning of class in the “Class In” folder), where to find extra copies of materials (in the blue notebook and on the class wiki), and how small groups will form (count off by four).

Teachers' efficiency results in more time for learning and more focused learning. Students learn more.

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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