High-Impact Instruction

I have just finished reading High-Impact Instruction by Jim Knight. I received this book as part of the Instructional Coaching Institute I attended in April.

As part of the IMPACT Cycle of instructional coaching, Knight says that coaches must have a secure understanding of strategies that they can help teachers implement within their classrooms. These strategies should be high impact, and easy to implement, and this books is his attempt to detail what he sees as the most important strategies for coaches (and teachers) to master.

After a short introductory chapter, the book is split into 3 categories: Planning; Instruction; Community Building. Each of these is split into strategies that teachers can use which fall under these broad headings.

In each chapter, Knight explores one strategy, detailing why it is important, what it looks like, how to make it work, and many other ideas linked to it. There are lots of checklists of important parts, and each chapter starts with a learning map to guide through the main ideas of the chapter (learning maps are one of the strategies explained).

The book is a practical toolkit, in many ways similar to Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, full of practical tips and ideas. It is useful both to coaches and teachers.

I have summarised the main ideas in the below placemat, which can be downloaded in PDF format here.