Instructional Principles and Best Practices

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Five principles gleaned from cognitive science and best practices in adult learning guide the Academy’s lesson design and classroom activities:

1. Participants come to the Academy with some knowledge and expertise rooted in their social, cultural and political experience. Academy instructors make learning relevant and accessible by using these collective experiences to guide lesson planning and instructional activities. Effective learning begins with what learners bring to the classroom. This includes cultural practices and beliefs along side the learner’s experience navigating racial and social politics in their communities. Evidence shows that learners use their current knowledge and preconceptions of the work at hand to construct new knowledge.
   
2. Academy instructors create explicit learning scaffolds for participants by connecting all new skills and content to existing skills and knowledge. Effective instruction uses external scaffolds to allow the learner to build on prior knowledge and skill mastery gained in the previous lessons.
3. Academy instructors make learning explicit by making the “invisible” internal cognitive processes visible to participants. The ability to think and solve problems requires that knowledge of a subject area be accessible and linked to current understanding of when and how to use cognitive strategies to make meaning of content.
4. Academy instructors provide learners with timely corrective feedback to facilitate each learner’s self-correction and monitoring skills. Once thinking is made visible and students become meta-cognitive around their own skill development, feedback must be provided on an ongoing basis to give learners the opportunity to revise and improve the quality of their strategic thinking, skills application and understanding.
5. Academy instructors create a community of learners in the classroom to facilitate deeper learning. The classroom environment promotes a sense of community that encourages students to learn from each other and take advantage of their collective knowledge.

[National Research Council, 2000; Gillespie, 2003]