Gene Tavernetti and Glenn Whitman
In the fall of 2025, we had the privilege to attend, present, and learn at the researchED Conference (Denver) and 3rd USA Festival of Education (Maryland). These gatherings of educators from around the country and the world always inspire. Session topic staples this year included retrieval practice, direct instruction, cognitive load theory, belonging, metacognition, motivation, simple models of learning, scaffolding, mental models, and schema. Research, strategies, mindsets, and principles in the science of learning featured prominently in the sessions, keynotes, and panels at these conferences. Teachers, researchers, and authors shared promising research and often suggested strategies likely to have an impact, but these strategies still must be evaluated in the school and district contexts in which we teach and students learn. There was a lot to choose from and think about.
In many ways, it is an exciting time for the field of the science of learning. The number of teacher-friendly (a.k.a. short and usable) books continues to grow. Organizations worldwide are providing research-informed resources and models that validate, inform, and transform how teachers teach and how students learn. However, what we have learned is that it is quite challenging for a teacher or school leader to activate the promising research and strategies in the science of learning into their instructional design amid everything else they need to think about as an educator.
In 2016, Dr. Ian Kelleher and Glenn included this illustration in their book Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education. Readers encountered it in a chapter titled “My Best (Research-Informed) Class Ever.” What does it make you think about? When Ian and Glenn, who still teach Science and History, asked an illustrator to help them dual-code various segments of their book, they asked her to represent teachers as artists and scientists, and as instructional designers. Depending on the school or district, teachers have the power and privilege to design from scratch or add to existing “boxed” curriculum their adaptations, agency, experience, expertise, and personality. But teachers have varied instructional design experience.
At St. Andrew’s (MD) middle and high school teachers design four to five hundred classes a year, each lasting 60 minutes. Elementary teachers design even more classes than secondary teachers. Yet both are expected to use promising research-based strategies such as retrieval practice, formative assessment, direct instruction, and checks for understanding. When in a class period should these strategies be used, and toward what instructional and learning purpose? And, how does a teacher know they are working?
There is a macro and micro approach to knowing and embedding the science of learning in our classrooms, schools, and districts. We want teachers and school leaders to know the field (the macro), but then also to be able to make it usable every day in each interconnected class period (the micro). The CTTL at St. Andrew’s has been thinking about what kind of framework would further elevate each St. Andrew’s PS-12th-grade teacher’s flexible and adaptive activation of the science of learning in their classrooms. In 2025, The CTTL piloted this cognitively overloaded, still-evolving framework, not to create cookie-cutter classes, but to provide teachers with consistent guidance and opportunities to employ evidence-informed practices in all their lessons. It is a work in progress, but the framework and shared vocabulary are already helping us think more carefully about class period design to ensure the consistent and timely application of retrieval practice, formative assessment, direct instruction, metacognition moments, independent practice, and purposeful homework.
As we began this work, there were many instructional design tools and frameworks that we explored, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Understanding by Design (UBD), and the Danielson Framework. In 2022, Gene published Teach Fast: Focused, Adaptable, Structured Teaching, which embeds the science of learning into eight lesson components. The framework became a guiding structure for public and charter schools, providing a place for strategies in retrieval, maintaining attention, presentation, explanation, and modeling within a coherent lesson design. This would help push against what one teacher, who Gene coaches, calls “Frankenstein lessons” that stitch together a series of techniques, but in the end, there was not much of a coherent lesson.
Many teachers view a structured lesson plan as reducing their agency and creativity. In the lesson structures suggested by The CTTL and the FAST Framework, the exact opposite is true. Both structures acknowledge that the science of learning identifies limitations in working memory and attention spans, which necessitate that lesson plans for an instructional period be more creative rather than less. Limited resources, such as memory, attention, and time, are what create urgency in lessons and make it necessary to create focused lessons. Necessity being the mother of invention. This coherent structure is in sharp contrast to what is seen by many as an à la carte menu of strategies to include during instruction. On their own, these strategies may provide some added value to student learning, but lack the more powerful impacts that can be derived from the science of learning and evidence-informed strategies. It begins with students retrieving experiences from long-term memory, then, through careful lesson-building on that knowledge, culminates in successful practice and the encoding of new skills and content.
Planning instruction using a framework that guides teachers through lesson phases is new to many teachers, who have been taught to think of lesson planning as merely a list of activities and materials. The only thing missing from these types of plans is how the skills and concepts will actually be taught, practiced, experienced, and remembered.
Without a framework that provides teachers with guidance, lessons can easily lose focus, explanations can become vague, and content can extend beyond what is necessary. Students then struggle more than necessary to grasp concepts, resulting in less time to practice in class. Less practice means less formative assessment data for teachers and fewer opportunities to encode new content.
Barak Rosenshine, an educational psychologist, went beyond just the research that underpins the science of learning; he observed effective teachers in their classrooms. In his observations, he found that teachers were implementing elements from the science of learning into coherent structures. Synthesizing his knowledge from cognitive science and observations of effective instruction, he distilled this knowledge and observation to develop a list of 10 components that should be in effective lessons. Rosenshine’s American Educator article (2012) remains a popular read for teachers seeking to deepen their understanding of the science of learning.
Although the number of educators familiar with Rosenshine’s principles is growing, the description of how to create lessons that are replicable is still lacking. Rosenshine brought us what, but did not specify how. The how was the missing element in developing an effective, generalizable lesson framework that is actually helpful for teachers. So let’s talk more about the “how”.
Designing and planning lessons that embed the science of learning, Rosenshine’s Principles, and the growing body of research and strategies that are being shared at educator gatherings does not need to take an extraordinary amount of time. This is especially true for experienced teachers in lesson design. In fact, teachers who use a structured lesson framework report spending less time designing lessons because they only need to determine content, not structure or flow. For very busy teachers, a framework can reduce their cognitive load and that of their students, who recognize the intentional design of their class periods to create predictable learning experiences. In a sense, the predictability of the lessons allows students to become meta-learners.
The lesson framework provides a decision-making filter that eliminates many of the necessary iterative decisions. A framework should provide a structure for teachers, whether they plan lessons and then use it to guide the delivery or flow, design lessons with the end in mind, or use it to ensure lesson coherence. A good framework can also serve as an organizational tool to help teachers evaluate lessons from publishers, colleagues, or even AI-generated lessons, allowing teachers to dissect them and measure their effectiveness against different planned elements and learning goals.
We love teaching and working with teachers. The instructional decisions they make each day can significantly impact each student’s learning and life trajectory. We also know first-hand that a teacher’s job is challenging, and we have observed the excitement they feel when learning about promising research in the science of learning, which they see as a way to improve student outcomes. But such excitement can quickly turn into frustration as they wonder, “How do I responsibly and effectively activate _____________ (you choose a promising science of learning strategy) into a class at the right time to have an impact on student learning?” A research-informed instructional design framework and tool can help. So, let’s start talking more about it.
