High leverage practices (HLPs) are specific teaching techniques that research has shown to be most effective at improving student learning when used consistently. They represent the core skills every teacher needs, regardless of subject area or grade level. Two major frameworks define these practices: one developed by TeachingWorks for general education and another developed through a collaboration between the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and the CEEDAR Center specifically for special education. Both frameworks overlap significantly and focus on the same goal: giving teachers a concrete, manageable set of methods that produce the biggest impact in the classroom.
Where the Frameworks Come From
TeachingWorks, based at the University of Michigan, identifies high leverage practices as “the fundamentals of teaching” that work across subject areas, grade levels, and contexts. Their framework is aimed at all teachers and focuses on practices like leading discussions, explaining content, and checking for understanding.
The CEC/CEEDAR framework organizes 22 high leverage practices into four domains designed for special education: Collaboration, Data-Driven Planning, Instruction in Behavior and Academics, and Intensify and Intervene as Needed. Many of these practices are useful for any teacher, but they place extra emphasis on individualized support, assessment-driven decisions, and working with families and specialists.
The Four Domains of Special Education HLPs
The 22 practices in the CEC/CEEDAR framework are grouped by purpose. Understanding the domains helps you see how the practices connect to each other and to a student’s full experience in school.
Collaboration covers the practices that keep teachers, specialists, and families working together. This includes organizing and facilitating effective meetings with professionals and families (HLP 2) and collaborating with families to support student learning and secure needed services (HLP 3). These aren’t afterthoughts. Strong collaboration determines whether instructional plans actually get carried out consistently across settings.
Data-Driven Planning focuses on using information to shape instruction. Teachers use multiple sources of information to develop a comprehensive understanding of a student’s strengths and needs (HLP 4), interpret and communicate assessment results to collaboratively design educational programs (HLP 5), and analyze instructional practices to make adjustments that improve outcomes (HLP 6). In practice, this means looking at formal test scores, classroom observations, work samples, and student behavior together rather than relying on any single measure.
Instruction in Behavior and Academics is the largest domain and includes the day-to-day teaching practices. Establishing a consistent, organized, and responsive learning environment (HLP 7), identifying and prioritizing learning goals (HLP 11), systematically designing instruction toward specific goals (HLP 12), and promoting active student engagement (HLP 18) all fall here. This domain is where most of the visible classroom work happens.
Intensify and Intervene as Needed addresses what teachers do when standard instruction isn’t enough. Providing intensive instruction for academics and behavior (HLP 20) is the central practice in this domain. It involves increasing the frequency, duration, or focus of instruction for students who need more support, often through smaller groups or one-on-one sessions.
Key Instructional Practices in Detail
Several of the instructional HLPs deserve a closer look because they show up in virtually every effective classroom.
Explicit instruction (HLP 16) means making content, skills, and concepts clear by showing and telling students what to do or think while solving problems. Teachers strategically choose examples and non-examples to build understanding, then model each step students need to complete a task independently. If you’re teaching students how to find the main idea of a paragraph, for instance, you wouldn’t just assign the task. You’d read a paragraph aloud, talk through your thinking as you identify the main idea, show a paragraph where you might confuse a supporting detail for the main idea, and then let students try with guidance.
Scaffolded supports (HLP 15) involve selecting visual, verbal, and written aids calibrated to where a student currently is. A graphic organizer for essay writing, sentence starters for discussion, or a number line for addition are all scaffolds. The key is that teachers gradually remove these supports as students demonstrate they no longer need them, rather than keeping them in place permanently or pulling them away too quickly.
Flexible grouping (HLP 17) means assigning students to groups based on explicit learning goals rather than using the same groups for everything. Sometimes students benefit from working with peers at a similar skill level (homogeneous groups) so the teacher can target instruction precisely. Other times, mixed-ability groups (heterogeneous) let students learn from each other. Teachers monitor how peers interact within groups and provide feedback to keep the work productive.
Active student engagement (HLP 18) goes beyond keeping students busy. Teachers connect learning to students’ lives and use a mix of strategies: teacher-led techniques like choral responding (where the whole class answers together), peer-assisted approaches like cooperative learning structures, and student-regulated strategies where learners monitor their own progress. The variety matters because no single engagement technique works for every student or every lesson.
General Education High Leverage Practices
The TeachingWorks framework covers similar ground but frames the practices for all teachers, not just those in special education roles. Some of the most widely referenced practices include:
- Leading a discussion: The teacher and students work on specific content together, using one another’s ideas as resources rather than the teacher simply asking questions and evaluating answers.
- Explaining and modeling content: Making academic practices and strategies visible to students through demonstration and clear verbal explanation.
- Eliciting and interpreting student thinking: Posing questions that create openings for students to share their reasoning about academic content, then using those responses to guide next steps.
- Checking student understanding: Using deliberate methods during and between lessons to assess what students are actually learning, not just whether they completed the work.
- Setting up and managing small group work: Using group work when learning goals benefit from interaction and collaboration, not as a default structure.
- Building respectful relationships: Intentionally creating and sustaining relationships with students that support their dignity and autonomy in the classroom.
- Communicating with families: Maintaining careful, sensitive communication that directly supports what students are learning.
Other practices in this framework address designing lesson sequences, setting learning goals referenced to external standards, implementing organizational routines for time and materials, attending to common patterns in student thinking, and establishing expectations that create a productive and safe classroom community.
How the Two Frameworks Connect
The overlap between the general and special education frameworks is substantial. Both emphasize collaboration with families, using assessment to guide instruction, setting clear learning goals, and creating structured classroom environments. The special education framework adds more specificity around intensive intervention, functional behavior support, and the kind of multi-source assessment planning required for students with disabilities. A general education teacher working in an inclusive classroom would benefit from familiarity with both sets of practices.
Why HLPs Matter for Teacher Preparation
High leverage practices were developed in large part to improve how new teachers are trained. Before these frameworks existed, teacher preparation programs often covered broad theory without giving student teachers a clear, prioritized list of what to actually practice. HLPs give education programs a shared language and a set of skills that can be rehearsed, observed, and refined during student teaching. They also give experienced teachers a useful lens for professional development, turning vague goals like “improve instruction” into specific, observable behaviors like “use scaffolded supports calibrated to student performance and gradually remove them.”
For teachers already in the classroom, HLPs function as a self-assessment tool. If your students aren’t making progress, the framework helps you ask targeted questions: Are you using multiple data sources to understand student needs? Is your instruction explicitly modeled? Are you adjusting grouping based on learning goals? Each practice points to a concrete change you can make rather than a general aspiration.