The Power of Instructional Routines

This practical book offers an effective and efficient approach to using four interactive instructional routines to integrate assessment with learning and teaching in kindergarten classrooms:
1. Photo Chats (Oracy)
2. Counting Collections (Number Sense of Quantity)
3. Storytelling/Story Acting (Emergent Writing)
4. Numberless Word Problems (Number Operations)

The instructional routines, “notice and wonder” assessment strategies, and teacher experiences shared in this book come from Project Connect, a professional development series for kindergarten teachers developed through a learning partnership between the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and the Erikson Institute, the premier graduate school for early childhood development, education, and social work.

These culturally and linguistically responsive routines provide embedded differentiation while offering teachers a window into their students’ understanding. They require minimal materials, preparation, and classroom time and have been field-tested by over 250 public school teachers who use a wide range of curricula and work in urban, rural, and suburban settings with diverse students, including English language learners. Using examples from these teachers, this book demonstrates how these instructional routines worked for them and how they can work for you too!

Book Features:

• Access to free Supporting Resources for The Power of Instructional Routines that include printable planning and assessment templates, image libraries for Photo Chats, videos to strengthen content knowledge, and audio-visual documentation of the routines in classrooms.
• Descriptions of the four instructional routines are clearly presented, so that they are ready to be tried by other teachers.
• Photographs of young children and their work samples with detailed descriptions and analysis from their teachers, offering a glimpse into students’ thinking.
• Information grounded in state-of-the-art research about language, literacy, and numeracy development within a multilingual framework.
• A framework of “notice and wonder” that connects teaching and assessment, offering a shift from the common practice that these are separate endeavors.

Rebeca Itzkowich is a teacher educator and director of Project Connect at Erikson Institute. Jie-Qi Chen is an endowed professor and holds the Barbara T. Bowman Professorship in Early Education at Erikson Institute. Anita Evans is a doctoral candidate in child development at Erikson Institute. Martha Pott is a distinguished senior lecturer in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University.

“For generations, philosophers and educators have encouraged teachers to provide children with time and opportunity to learn through action, experience, and reflection, rather than repetition, memorization, and rote exercises. This book, rich in examples, detailed protocols, and inspired stories from committed teachers, provides a unique and imaginative roadmap for bringing early childhood classrooms to life.”
—Samuel J. Meisels, founding executive director emeritus, Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska

“The Power of Instructional Routines paints a roadmap for an education system that values the natural strengths of young children—to notice, wonder, tell stories, and learn constantly—as the tools for classrooms that spark growth and build lifelong learners. The authors and the nine featured kindergarten educators masterfully introduce instructional routines, not as a curriculum to be fought over, but as the building blocks for a sustainable teaching approach that will ‘let the kids think’ and empower educators to teach through joy.”
—Bryan Stokes II, director, Education Portfolio, Robert R. McCormick Foundation

"’To stimulate curiosity, you must find something out of the ordinary.' This advice from one of the teachers in the book holds true both for implementing the instructional routines and for describing the impact this extraordinary resource will have on readers. The four routines demonstrate how to achieve the seemingly impossible: integrating practical teaching routines, meaningful assessment, and genuine joy across all areas of children’s development.”
—José Martínez Hinestroza, associate professor, University of Texas at San Antonio