Verbal or non-verbal acknowledgement should be used frequently to recognise students demonstrating expected behaviours. Praise emphasises the effort students have made to exceed behaviour expectations specific to them.

After identifying rigorous and relevant research evidence about an effective educational approach, teachers, educators and leaders will need to determine if they should use it and how to go about implementation. Deciding whether and how to apply research evidence in a school, service or learning environment is an ongoing process that involves careful reflection.

Regardless of the tools and resources teachers, educators and leaders use to find research evidence, they still need to assess it to have confidence that it’s high-quality and appropriate for their context. Knowing how to assess the reliability and relevance of research evidence can help with decisions about adopting and implementing new practices.

Not all research evidence will be relevant to a particular educational context. Some research evidence may have been generated in a different type of community, school or service, or with a different group of students or children.

This practice resource is designed to help teachers, educators and leaders reflect on and decide whether a piece of evidence is relevant to their context and whether the corresponding approach is likely to be effective in their school, service or learning environment.

This interactive tool below shows how the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) Language and Cognitive skill domain items align to both the Australian Curriculum (English and Maths) and the National Literacy and Numeracy Learning Progressions (NLNLP).
This tool is based on AERO's AEDC item analysis, which connected the sequence of skill progression to the Australian Curriculum (English and mathematics) and the NLNLP. The complexity of AEDC items builds across the tool from left to right signalling an increase in the difficulty of mastering the item skill for students.
You can use this tool to review student skill progression and help consider what ‘next steps’ can be taken to best support further development, in alignment with your teaching program and practice. You can identify the AEDC items students have achieved, and then follow links to the corresponding Australian Curriculum and NLNLP information.

This practice guide provides practical suggestions to build positive connections with your students leading to positive teacher–student relationships.

Circulation is a skill that supports and maintains positive student behaviour. Intentional circulation is systematically moving around the classroom and standing in key places to observe and actively interact with students.

Exit slips are an easy way to gather formative assessment data after a lesson or sequence of learning. These exit slips have been developed for you to print and use in your own classes. They ask students to reflect on the lesson and what they have learnt, as well as how they felt about the lesson. As well as providing valuable data for a teacher, exit slips are a great way to help students retrieve information from their memory and commit it to their long-term memory.

The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) has developed a suite of foundational resources for beginning teachers, teachers working in new environments, or experienced teachers who want to refine or refresh specific elements of their classroom management practice. They can be used to individually reflect on and refine one’s own practice, or as shared resources to support mentoring and other collaborative and whole-school approaches to improving classroom management. This user guide explains the resources and provides suggestions for their use.

Clear communication is a skill that supports and maintains positive student behaviour. Clear communication is the use of clear and concise language to set expectations, give instructions and address and correct behaviour. It models positive classroom talk that supports students to understand and do what is expected of them, whilst also supporting a positive classroom culture.

Deliberately pausing is a skill that supports and maintains positive student behaviour. A deliberate pause breaks the flow of verbal communication to gain students’ attention, emphasise a point, or give students’ time to process information, follow a direction or correct disengaged or disruptive behaviours.

A strong sense of belonging in the early years has fundamental benefits for children and flow-on effects for their learning, development and wellbeing. This guide outlines best-practice approaches for improving a sense of belonging and connectedness in children aged birth to 5 years. Educators and teachers working across diverse early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings can use the guide to support their practice and inform their future planning.

An effective entrance routine promotes safety, builds positive connections with students and maximises instructional time.

This practice guide will support you to refine an effective entrance routine, which is important for maintaining a safe, supportive and orderly start to the day and classroom environment.

This guide is the fourth and final guide in the series and focuses on evaluating the processes and outcomes in the strategic plan.
Evaluation is central to strategic planning as it allows you to review what is and isn’t working on the school improvement journey. There are 2 types of evaluation you should consider:
Process evaluation examines whether practices have been applied in the way they were planned.
Outcome evaluation examines whether practices are having the desired effect on student learning.
Process and outcome evaluation both play key roles at different stages of a strategic plan’s life cycle.

This guide recommends practical steps for evaluating processes for improving practices, as well as the effect of these practices on student learning. We recommend reading this guide after you have read the third guide in this series, Selecting Practices to Deliver Improvement.

An exit routine at the end of a lesson provides a safe, predictable and organised end to learning. It’s important to plan dedicated time at the end of a lesson to ensure a consistent exit routine can take place every time students leave the classroom.

This practice guide will help teachers create, explain and use well-informed learning objectives and success criteria and activate students’ prior knowledge.

This practice guide will help you reflect and take action to develop your practice with a greater understanding of:

*the learning benefits when students understand the objectives of a lesson and how they can be successful
*specific techniques and strategies you can adopt to understand students’ prior knowledge, create well‑informed learning objectives and success criteria and use them effectively.

Implementation checklists are a list of practical steps you can take to support the implementation of an evidence-based practice in your setting.

This checklist focuses on implementing explicit instruction.

Have I...

*Broken down the piece of curriculum/syllabus content down into smaller tasks for my students? (this is known as “chunking”)
*Removed any parts of information that are not relevant, necessary or at the correct level of challenge for my students? (see formative assessment for learning where students are at)
*Created a learning objective to establish what students will need to know and produce by the end of the lesson?
*Communicated this learning goal to my students, and explained how it links to their previous work?
*Sequenced the instructional tasks so that they build on each other so that students can see their improvement?
*Allocated time in the lesson for students to practise using the new information before moving onto the next section of work?
*Designed worked examples designed to guide students through their first interaction with the work?
*Provided students with scaffolds that increase in their complexity and decrease in their modelling of skills as student proficiency grows?
*Planned some opportunities for feedback, including giving my students time to action the feedback, before moving onto the next chunk of work?

This rubric outlines a set of capabilities to do with the evidence-based practice of explicit instruction. It can help teachers and their teams implement explicit instruction by demonstrating a shared understanding of what it looks like in practice.

This rubric outlines a set of capabilities to do with the evidence-based practice of explicit instruction. It can help teachers and their teams implement explicit instruction by demonstrating a shared understanding of what it looks like in practice.

This checklist can be used to plan the implementation of your school’s approaches for engaging with families to support student learning. It is based on work by Evidence for Learning, showing implementation in school as a series of stages relating to thinking about, preparing for, delivering, and sustaining change.
This checklist can be paired with AERO’s Promising approaches audit tool - primary classroom teachers, which will help schools determine the promising approaches areas requiring most attention.