Core Teaching Practices (CTPs) are key elements crucial to effective teaching, which educators use to enhance student learning. These practices encompass a range of general and content-specific strategies, routines, and techniques that teachers should develop and refine over the course of their careers. While the Michigan Department of Education has outlined 19 CTPs, the Secondary Education Department at the School of Education and Human Services at Oakland University has chosen to focus on five specific areas.

​Below are direct quotes from the Department of Education used to describe each of the five Core Teaching Practices:

Explaining and Modeling Content:   “Explaining and modeling are practices for making a wide variety of content, academic practices, and strategies explicit to students. Depending on the topic and the instructional purpose, teachers might rely on simple verbal explanations, sometimes with accompanying examples or representations. In teaching more complex academic practices and strategies, such as an algorithm for carrying out a mathematical operation or the use of metacognition to improve reading comprehension, teachers might choose a more elaborate kind of explanation that we are calling ‘modeling.’ Modeling includes verbal explanations, but also thinking aloud and demonstrating.”	Modifying Tasks/Texts for a Specific Learning Goal: ​”Teachers appraise and modify curriculum materials to determine their appropriateness for helping particular students work toward specific learning goals. This involves considering students’ needs and assessing what questions and ideas particular materials will raise and the ways in which they are likely to challenge students. Teachers choose and modify material accordingly, sometimes deciding to use parts of a text or activity and not others, for example, or to combine material from more than one source.”
​Eliciting and Interpreting Individual Students’ Thinking: “Teachers pose questions or tasks that provoke or allow students to share their thinking about specific academic content in order to understand student thinking, including novel points of view, new ideas, or misconceptions; guide instructional decisions; and surface ideas that will benefit other students. To do this effectively, a teacher draws out a student’s thinking through carefully-chosen questions and tasks and considers and checks alternative interpretations of the student’s ideas and methods.”	​Formative Assessment:  ​”Teachers use a variety of informal but deliberate methods to assess what students are learning during and between lessons. These frequent checks provide information about students’ current level of competence and help the teacher adjust instruction during a single lesson or from one lesson to the next. They may include, for example, simple questioning, short performance tasks, or journal or notebook entries.”
Leading a Group Discussion:  ​”In a group discussion, the teacher and all of the students work on specific content together, using one another’s ideas as resources. The purposes of a discussion are to build collective knowledge and capability in relation to specific instructional goals and to allow students to practice listening, speaking, and interpreting. The teacher and a wide range of students contribute orally, listen actively, and respond to and learn from others’ contributions.”	Link to the Core Teaching Practices published by Michigan’s Department of Education: Core Teaching Practices (MDE)