Our Purpose

Our instructional routines are designed to tackle common  barriers that students encounter across content areas, when it comes to connecting to content, and to one another. One way to overcome these barriers is to provide students with more opportunities to foster independent thinking, peer listening and the development of their unique voice. 

Our instructional routines are organized around:

Micro-Routines are organized around the following suggested use cases: 

There is also a guide for responsive planning with Micro-Routinesas well as aresource index, blog and a video index.

Any Micro-Routine may be used on any day, depending on your students' familiarity with the topic, their comfort with discourse and critical thinking, as well as the level of synthesis you want your students to engage in. 

Routines have the power not only to give students multiple and rich experiences in learning but also to transfer ownership of learning to the students themselves. In this way, students are free from the need to depend on teachers for access to knowledge. This transition in learning behavior also allows teachers to listen and observe their students in action.

We provide concrete examples to inspire teacher teams and students. Just as we see sharing routines as a hand-off of expertise to students, they can live and grow with your school teams, customized by you, for you.

Why Should I Use Routines?
  • I value student ideas and voice.
  • My students struggle with listening and responding to their peers in discussion.
  • I'm in my first year at a school.
  • I want to increase student engagement.
  • I'm a veteran teacher looking for new ideas around instructional delivery.
  • My colleagues use terms like 'GIST' and 'annotation' and I'm not exactly sure what they mean.
  • I see annotation taught differently in other classrooms, which must be confusing for students.
  • I want to rethink how I approach vocabulary.
  • I am looking for more ways my students can gain independent habits.

The Teacher Perspective