Rehearsing Lessons Together Helps Teachers Build Good Habits

It’s long documented that teachers improve rapidly during their first years of their careers and considerably more slowly thereafter. A 2021 review of evidence attributed this deceleration in part to habit formation.

Teaching is almost perfectly designed to build habits: same room, same bells, same sequence, same challenges. We go on autopilot, making decisions and solving problems how we’ve solved them before. Habits aren’t the enemy, though. They’re the reason experienced teachers have the capacity to recognize patterns in students and manage the procedural demands of a lesson while attending to student thinking.

But automaticity of behavior carries a consequence: New instructional moves often don’t make it into a teacher’s repertoire because they compete with established practice. One way teachers can build high-leverage new habits is by doing something they seldom do: practicing or rehearsing lessons together. Rehearsal is a way to overwrite and upgrade well-established behaviors prior to teaching live in front of students.

Rehearsal is realistic enough to activate a habitual response and controlled enough to interrupt it. Rehearsal works because it provides individuals and teams:

• Deliberate practice. Teachers practice a specific instructional routine repeatedly instead of discussing it abstractly.
• Reduced cognitive load. Because students are not present, teachers can focus on improving one instructional routine at a time.
• Immediate feedback. Feedback occurs while the instructional move is fresh and can be revised immediately.
• Collective learning. The rehearsal benefits everyone in the room because colleagues analyze the instructional decisions together.

There are two types of rehearsal that teams can engage in: routines rehearsal and lesson rehearsal.

Routines Rehearsal

Routines rehearsal is an easy entry point into lesson rehearsal. Practicing routines together is a quick, powerful way to create norms across a team or school. Adult cohesion creates predictability for students.

When teams norm together on routines and what they look like and sound like, they frontload practices that compound in value over the course of a year because they maximize instructional time spent on learning. Teams can ask: What do we do most often that we do least well? And then practice those things:

• Call backs and countdowns
• Transitions
• Evergreen questions with wait time
• Redirection with a firm, but caring tone and body language
• Instructions for routine strategies like turn-and-talks, pair-share, or table conversation

Routines rehearsal benefits from having a model. One person models and names the most important features of the routine, and then teachers practice with each other, engaging in the same behaviors. Colleagues watch, listen, and provide feedback on the established criteria, all of which create consistency in high-leverage moves, allowing teachers to know what the routine looks like, sounds like, and feels like as they rehearse. Routines rehearsal is powerful in the beginning of the year as teachers establish these habits with students. These rehearsals set the foundation for content-specific lesson routines.

Lesson Rehearsal

Whole-class instruction is the most efficient lever teachers have to maximize time and enhance learning in a classroom. Getting it right requires communicating explanations, responses to misconceptions, and classroom connections clearly the first time.

Lesson rehearsal has gained momentum over the past six years, driven by more districts adopting high-quality instructional materials (HQIM). For many scripted and structured HQIM or district-mandated curricula, the lesson sequence and tasks are already designed and aligned to the standards, and a teacher’s job is to own the lesson so they can communicate the intended learning effectively to students. Teams can use lesson rehearsal to “try on” a high-leverage segment of an upcoming lesson to work out all the kinks, increase clarity, and build confidence in delivery.

The goal of lesson rehearsal is not to rehearse an entire lesson or perform for our colleagues, but rather to enhance teaching to impact learning. Consequently, the rehearsal should focus on a transferable aspect of teaching that can build over time. While it’s possible to focus solely on a lesson’s content, the highest leverage lesson rehearsal improves the teaching itself. There’s no single best answer for what teams should rehearse, but consider three-to-five-minute segments in which teams practice:

• Modeling, explanation, or think-alouds that introduce essential knowledge
• Content that is new or uncomfortable for team members
• Whole-group questioning for clarity and brevity
• Embedding resources in content explanation (e.g., anchor charts, vocabulary walls, student-facing learning progressions, success criteria)
• Parts of the lesson with high cognitive demand or high potential for misconceptions
• Anticipated student responses and intentional feedback moves

A helpful place to start rehearsal is the direct instruction: Tighten the language, separate the need-to-know from the neat-to-know, and practice the pauses and surveys of the room.

As teams gain momentum, the focus of the rehearsal can deepen as teachers rehearse increasingly challenging parts of the lesson by analyzing which parts of the lesson will break down and prevent students from reaching the intended learning. Teachers should ask: What part of this lesson requires the most precise teacher thinking? Where might misconceptions surface? Where does questioning need to be tight and intentional? When is it critical to facilitate discourse? Where do we tend to “overexplain” or “rescue” students?

What Makes Rehearsal Work

Regardless of whether teams engage in lesson rehearsal or recurring routines rehearsal, there are four major conditions necessary for the efficacy of the practice:

1. Live enactment. A teacher teaching the segment or practicing the routine live as they would teach it to students.
2. Colleagues with designated roles. No one is a spectator. Some teams opt to engage through the lens of students, deliberately offering a range of student responses. Others opt to assign roles in what the observer is looking and listening for based on the goals of the rehearsal (wait time, clarity, brevity, questioning).
3. Pauses and enhancements. A coach, a lead, or the rehearsing teacher can call the pause and name something to be enhanced before running the segment again with the upgrade.
4. Feedback that describes rather than judges. Rehearsal can build automaticity. Feedback from self and team makes the automaticity intentional. The question colleagues are asking is “What will communicate learning most clearly to students?”

Rehearsal builds fluency and automaticity of content, explanations, and teacher moves in a safe environment that promotes professional growth. It makes habit formation more deliberate and creates in-the-moment readiness by helping teams become increasingly proactive in their teaching by anticipating potential hiccups and misconceptions and working them out prior to teaching students.

Whatever goes awry in the room is a learning opportunity for teachers that costs students nothing. The mistakes are free.