Increasing Your Instructional Support Scores

In most Head Start programs, it is the instructional support domain that produces the lowest CLASS scores. As you know, high CLASS scores are important to ensure best practices in the classroom as well as to prepare for a successful CLASS Review event. Consider providing training to your teaching staff specifically on strategies to increase instructional support scores.

We’ve found that successful teacher training in this area includes the following 3 points:

  • Share examples of the dimensions, indicators and behavioral markers.  Review what each part of the instructional support domain is all about.  Describe each dimension, indicator and behavior marker – in terms of the Head Start classroom.  Provide teachers with examples that that they can use every day with children.  Examples can include what to say to children to help them think critically, activities to encourage their creativity and lessons to expand their language.
  • View and discuss videos of “rich” classroom interactions.  Show video clips that demonstrate the interactions and teaching strategies your teachers should display. Take each dimension within the instructional support domain and view videos of what each dimension should look like and shouldn’t look like.  Take time to discuss the video clips.  “What did you see?” and “How can you do that in your classroom?” are good questions to explore.  Seeing videos and discussing them are effective, hands-on learning strategies.
  • Play to all learning styles.  Use a “learning by doing” training methodology.  Be sure that the teaching staff can truly experience each facet of the instructional support domain.  In addition to showing videos and facilitating large group discussions, include other types of learning such as pair and share, make and take, small group activities, role plays and other highly interactive exercises.  This interaction results in high impact learning, in which the teaching staff can take back the information that they learned and implement it immediately.

Looking for highly interactive training for your teaching staff on increasing instructional support scores?  Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.