05/30/2026
Do your students ever seem to feel like your lessons are overwhelming or difficult to break down and understand? When direct instruction goes on for more than 5-10 minutes, many students start to experience cognitive overload. It’s like we have inadvertently handed them a giant cement cinder block of information. It’s too dense and heavy for them to see or access the learning hidden inside.
The good news is that Conscious Teaching’s new book, "The Rules of Engagement," offers a whole buffet of simple, short engagement strategies you can weave into your direct instruction to help students build their understanding piece by piece, like connecting individual Lego blocks together to slowly build towards one large structure of new knowledge. Some of these engagement strategies include:
📖 Simple Summary! During direct instruction, pause and ask students to quickly summarize what they’ve learned so far.
📱 Social Media Post! During direct instruction, pause and ask students to write down a social media post about what you were just teaching. These should be 20 words or less, use hashtags and mentions and will be written on paper with pencil (no electronics necessary)!
🔮 Prediction! During direct instruction, pause and ask students to predict what they’ll learn next.
These and more than a dozen other examples can be found in Chapter 3 of our book, The Rules of Engagement. Go to www.consciousteaching.com to order your copy today!
