• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Blog
  • Podcast
  • Course
    • Teaching Every Reader
  • Subscriber Freebies
  • About
  • Contact
  • Shop
  • Member Login

The Measured Mom

Education resources for parents and teachers

  • Alphabet
  • Reading
    • Structured literacy
    • Printable Books
    • Pre-Reading
    • Phonics
    • Sight Words
    • Comprehension
    • Fluency
    • Vocabulary
  • Writing
    • Grammar
    • Handwriting
    • Spelling
    • Writing in Pre-K
    • Writing in K-3
  • Math
    • Counting
    • Number Recognition
    • Addition & Subtraction
    • Colors, Shapes & Patterns
    • Visual Discrimination
    • Time, Money & Measurement
    • Place Value
    • Graphs
    • Multiplication & Division
    • Fractions
    • Problem Solving
  • Book Lists
    • Letter of the Week
    • Early Childhood Themes
    • Pre-Reading Skills
    • Math Concepts
    • Writing Mentor Texts
    • Versions of Familiar Tales
    • Holidays and Seasonal
    • History
    • Leveled Book Lists
  • Join Membership
Home
  • Shop
  • Blog
    • Alphabet
    • Reading
    • Writing
    • Math
    • Book Lists
  • Podcast
  • Courses
    • Teaching Every Reader
    • Teaching Every Writer
  • Subscriber Freebies
  • About
  • Membership
  • Contact

PSPKK123Leave a Comment

The 3 important parts of an explicit lesson

This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Sharing is caring!

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

 

TRT Podcast #91: The 3 important parts of an explicit lesson

091: Learn the structure of an explicit lesson, and get a free template in the show notes!

Listen to the episode here

Full episode transcript

Transcript
Email Download New Tab

Hello! Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom for Episode 91 of the Triple R Teaching podcast. This week we are going to look at explicit instruction. Last week we talked about what it is, and today we're going to look at the structure of an explicit lesson.

I talked last week about how, to me, in the past, explicit instruction sounded boring. It sounded like it had to be scripted, and that it was just the teacher talking at the students. Drill and kill. But now I understand that explicit instruction is actually proven by research to be most effective in teaching students academic skills. It's also been shown to be most effective at improving students self-confidence and self-esteem because, as Anita Archer likes to say, success breeds motivation.

If you want to know more about that research, go ahead and check out Project Follow Through, which I will link to in the show notes.

As I mentioned last week, if you really want to know about explicit instruction and the ins and outs of it, I would recommend checking out Anita Archer. She is the queen of explicit instruction, has been in education for decades, and has produced many wonderful workshops and online trainings, and especially her book "Explicit Instruction," which she co-wrote with Charles Hughes. Anytime you're wondering about explicit instruction, you can be sure to learn something when you find Dr. Archer. Today a lot of what I'm sharing is from her book "Explicit Instruction."

When we think about an explicit lesson, we think about three parts. We want to have the opening, the body, and the conclusion. Of course, most of what you're doing is going to be happening in the body of the lesson, but it's important to set it up well.

To start your lesson, you want to have a routine where you get your students' attention. Now, as a teacher, I wish I would've done this, I think it would've saved a lot of transition time and a lot of headaches. It's something you want to teach at the beginning of the year, or the middle of the year if that's when you're going to implement this.

There are many ways to do this. A lot of teachers like to do something called call and response. That's where you say the same thing always, and your students respond the same each time. For example, "One, two," and the students respond, "Eyes on you!" Or the teacher says, "Eyes," and the students say, "Open!," the teacher says, "Ears," and they respond, "Listening!" or something like that. I will go ahead and link to some different call and response ideas in the show notes for this episode so you can pick one, if you're not already doing this, that will work to get your students' attention at the beginning of every lesson that you give.

Once you've gotten their attention, you want to tell them what it is you're going to teach them that day. So maybe you would say, "Today, we're going to learn how to spell the /sh/ sound with S-H." And then, if necessary, you can talk about how this is relevant, and why this is important to know.

Then you're going to move into the body of the lesson, and that's where you want to follow the, I do, we do, you do model. I was recently listening to something by Dr. Archer and she mentioned having coined this phrase, so if I heard that correctly, she's the one who came up with this, probably a long time ago, because like I said, she's been in education for decades.

According to Dr. Archer, the "I do it" is my turn, "we do it" is let's do this together, and "you do it" is your turn. I think that a lot of us assume we're kind of doing this in our lessons automatically, but then if we would actually look closely at our lessons, we would find out, "Oh, actually I'm not really doing that," because that's probably what I would've thought. Then if I would've looked at it closely, I would've seen, "Oh, I jumped right to the we do it. Or for the I do it, I really wasn't very explicit, and I didn't explain it very well."

It's a good practice to think through some of your lessons before you give them with this in mind. I'll provide a free template in the show notes so you can try that for a few lessons just to make sure this is really what you're doing.

So with the "I do it," you're going to model the new skill. Going back to the SH, I could show a card and I say, "These are the letters SH. SH spells /sh/. Here are some words with SH. Watch as I blend the sounds together to read the words." The maybe I would have the word "ship" so that all the students could see it, and I would probably underline the SH as I read it to show them that this makes one sound, "/sh/-/ĭ/-/p/, ship." Then there's another word, maybe "shed," and then I would, again, underline it. "Watch me blend the sounds, /sh/-/ĕ/-/d/, shed." Then I could do some with the SH at the end of the word.

Then I could also model spelling words with SH. "I'm going to spell the word 'shut,' as in 'I shut the door.' The sounds of shut are /sh-/ŭ/-/t/. I'm going to draw three lines and I'm going to spell each sound in a line. So the first sound is /sh/. All right I know that S-H spells /sh/ that goes in my first blank," and so on. After you've done the modeling during which you are engaging your students, it's not just you talking to them, there's going to be some back and forth.

Then you're going to go to the "we do it" where you do these things with them. This might be a set of blending lines, I've written a blog post about that and I'll link to it in the show notes. These start simply. On the top, the first line, the words could be in pairs that differ by just a single phoneme, we call those minimal pairs. So you could have a word like "ship" and "shop" only one phoneme changes, the vowel. Then as you go on, they get more complicated. So then you could have a line of words that have SH in them, but all the vowels are different. The idea is to start simple and move to more complex, but you do those with your students to start. You show them, you point to each sound spelling and have them kind of think it through in their heads, and then altogether they say the word. You could also do dictation together where you dictate a word, but together you spell the sounds. So that's the "we do it" part.

Then, of course, "you do it" is when they get a chance to try this out on their own. Now let's say you're doing an explicit phonics lesson, a small group lesson just like I talked about with the SH, and the lesson is done and you want them to do this on their own. I would recommend doing some kind of decodable book work, where they have to read the words themselves, or maybe reading a list of words, or also doing dictation.

Now just to be clear, if you're teaching a very complex topic the "I do, we do, you do" may not occur all at once. You may spread those out over several days, but they're all included as you're teaching this new skill.

The closing of the lesson is very brief. You're just going to review what you taught your students, and then you may set them free for independent work. So if you are doing that SH lesson in a small group, you might send your students off to centers and have the first activity that they do be a worksheet or more reading of words that have the SH in them.

Normally, of course, your centers need to be review from previously-learned skills, but you may have just one be always a continuation of independent work from that new skill that they learned.

As a review, an explicit lesson should have three parts: the opening, the body, and the closing.

In the opening, you're getting their attention. You're stating the goal of the lesson. Something I forgot to mention at the beginning, sorry about that, is that you want to include review of critical prerequisite skills. That's anything they have to know to understand this new skill, and you're not sure how well they know it, make sure you review it at the beginning of your lesson.

Then, of course, in the body, you're going to be modeling it. Then you're going to have them do it with you with scaffolding and prompting. And then, finally, they're going to do it on their own with you watching.

Finally the closing, you're going to review what they learned, and then you're going to assign independent work.

Again, I will provide a free template in the show notes so you can try this out and see if you're really doing this already and how you could improve the structure of your lessons for the future. You can find the show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode91. See you next week!

Scroll back to top

Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by

Related links

  • Explicit Instruction, by Anita L. Archer and Charles A. Hughes
  • Why Explicit Instruction? video with Anita Archer on Center for Dyslexia MTSU
  • Project Follow Through
  • 50 fun call and response ideas
  • How to use blending lines (with free editable template)

Get on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

  • Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

Get your free lesson plan template!

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

SUBSCRIBE AND REVIEW IN ITUNES

Are you subscribed to my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode!  Click here to subscribe in iTunes!

Now if you have an extra minute, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes , too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast, and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review. You’ll need to click to “Listen on Apple Podcasts” and “write a review.”  Let me know what you appreciate about the podcast. Thank you!

Listen and Subscribe On:

Love Freebies?

Subscribing to our email newsletter is completely free. And when you do, you'll get access to our library of subscriber freebies! Sign up below to get access to a wonderful variety of math and literacy resources.

Sharing is caring!

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Filed Under: Podcast, Science of reading, Structured literacy Tagged With: first grade, second grade, third grade, kindergarten, preK

You May Also Enjoy These Episodes:

Should we use running records? Reaction to Fountas & Pinnell #6: We can teach phonics AND language comprehension Science of reading-aligned literacy centers
The what and why of explicit instruction
How to give systematic phonics instruction

Reader Interactions

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Grade Level Key

  • PS Preschool (ages 2-3 years)
  • PK Pre-K (ages 4-5 years)
  • K Kindergarten
  • 1 1st grade
  • 2 2nd grade
  • 3 3rd grade

Hello, I’m Anna!

Welcome to The Measured Mom. I’m so glad you’re here!

Meet Our Team

Love Freebies?

Subscribing to our email newsletter is completely free. And when you do, you'll get access to our library of subscriber freebies! Sign up below to get access to a wonderful variety of math and literacy resources.

Shop Our Newest Resources

At The Measured Mom®, our mission is to share high quality educational resources that are engaging for students and easy for educators.

Fluency Centers – MEGA BUNDLE

$39.00

Phonics Centers – MEGA BUNDLE

$49.00

A-Z Letter Cards & More

$12.00

Shop All Resources

Members get more!

The Measured Mom Plus is the perfect online membership for Pre-K to third grade educators.

Learn More

Love Freebies?

Subscribing to our email newsletter is completely free. And when you do, you'll get access to our library of subscriber freebies! Sign up below to get access to a wonderful variety of math and literacy resources.

Join our online course and get the tools you need to teach every learner in K-2!

Confidently teach every reader in your classroom. Still have time to live your life.

Learn More

Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher

Check out these recent podcast episodes:

  • My response to Jan Richardson & Michele Dufresne, Part 1
  • 6 Things to remember about the science of reading
  • What order should we teach the letters of the alphabet?
More Episodes

Check out these FREE email courses...

Get strategies and tools to teach a particular topic with a free 5-day email series! Just click an image to sign up. We recommend signing up for just one at a time.

For Pre-K Educators

How to teach letters and sounds to preschoolers

How to teach letters and sounds to preschoolers

Learn my must-follow tips for teaching the alphabet in this free 5-day email series!

How to teach phonological & phonemic awareness

How to teach phonological & phonemic awareness

Learn how to develop this important pre-reading skill with a free 5-day email series!

How to teach preschool math

How to teach preschool math

Learn exactly what to teach your preschoolers in this free 5-day series!

For Kinder & 1st Grade Educators

How to teach kids to sound out words

How to teach kids to sound out words

Learn my top strategies for teaching kids to "sound it out"

How to teach sight words

How to teach sight words

Get strategies and tools for teaching sight words to young learners!

Tips for teaching phonics

Tips for teaching phonics

Sign up for our free 5-day email series to learn what phonics skills to teach and how to structure your phonics lessons!

For 2nd & 3rd Grade Educators

How to build reading fluency

How to build reading fluency

Learn smart strategies for helping your learners become fluent readers with this free 5-day series!

How to teach writing in 2nd & 3rd grade

How to teach writing in 2nd & 3rd grade

Learn the most important writing skills to teach to 2nd & 3rd graders in this free 5-day series!

How to build reading comprehension

How to build reading comprehension

Discover the essential reading comprehension strategies for 2nd & 3rd grade and how to teach them!

“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” –Matthew 6:33

Copyright © 2023 The Measured Mom •  All rights reserved  •  Privacy & Disclosure Statement  •  Site Design by Emily White Designs