High-Impact Instruction

Small changes can lead to big results!

The key to improving student achievement isn't more teacher time—it's more teacher impact. But how do you decide which instructional practices will deliver the most bang for your buck? In this handbook, written for teachers but suitable for use by principals and instructional coaches, best-selling author Jim Knight presents the high-leverage strategies that make the biggest difference in student learning.

This is no one-size-fits-all to-do list for the classroom—it's a simple and flexible framework you can customize to fit your working style and students' needs. Grounded in more than a decade of work with instructional coaches, this revolutionary book focuses on the three areas of high-impact instruction:

• Content planning, including using guiding questions, learning maps, and formative assessment
• Instructional practices such as the use of thinking prompts, effective questions, challenging assignments, and experiential learning
• Community building, in which you shape a classroom culture that promotes well-being, creativity, learning, and high expectations

This accessible road map for professional learning empowers and supports you in making changes to your practice with practical tools, including: 

• Checklists, numerous observation tools, and recommended resources for further reading
• Online videos that focus on implementation of high-leverage instructional practices
•  Ways that students, teachers, instructional coaches, and principals can support implementation of the practices
• Suggestions for using the book and videos in coaching and school improvement efforts

When it comes to teaching, little changes can make a big difference. With High-Impact Instruction, you have a rich toolkit for improving your own practice and promoting great teaching every day in every class.

"This book absolutely delivers on the promise of its subtitle, 'A Framework for Great Teaching.' It is breathtaking in its comprehensiveness and heartening in its practicality and detail."
—Robert J. Marzano, CEO
Marzano Research Laboratory

"Jim Knight has the capacity to be crystal clear at both the micro and the macro levels—a rare talent. High-Impact Instruction goes deep and it goes comprehensive. Planning, instruction, and community building become interwoven in a powerful manifesto for fundamental instructional and system change."
—Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus
OISE/University of Toronto

"Jim Knight's High-Impact Instruction honors teachers as intelligent, complex, and dedicated people. While many have attempted to identify the attributes of effective instruction, Knight's work singularly acknowledges the basi...