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University Park Campus School (UPCS) implements a common instructional framework consisting of five instructional strategies.

These strategies create classrooms that allow for powerful learning and powerful teaching and form the basis of a coherent college-preparatory curriculum.

Informed by Universal Design for Learning (UDL), they give all students of all skill levels access to the complex information needed to meet state and college-ready standards through the careful scaffolding of prior knowledge that builds up to manipulating new information in ways that demonstrate understanding.

These instructional strategies succeed because they engage all students in learning and require them to take an active role in their education.

Collaborative group work involves bringing students together in small groups for the common purpose of engaging in learning. Effective group work is well planned and strategic. Students are grouped intentionally with each student held accountable for contributing to the group work. Activities are designed so that students with diverse skill levels are supported as well as challenged by their peers. Collaborative group work uses questioning, scaffolding and classroom talk and centers literacy groups.

Writing to learn is a strategy through which students can develop their ideas, their critical thinking abilities and their writing skills. Writing to learn enables students to experiment every day with written language and increase their fluency and mastery of written conventions. Writing to learn can also be used as formative assessment and as a way to scaffold mid- and high-stakes writing assignments and tests. 

Questioning challenges students and teachers to use good questions as a way to open conversations and further their intellectual inquiry. Teachers using essential questions as a starting point for their own curriculum planning, having students address connections between course content and their own lives, and students developing their own questions for individual or class investigation are all examples of how effective questioning can deepen classroom discourse and student work. Teachers use this strategy to create opportunities for students to investigate and analyze their thinking as well as the thinking of their peers and the authors that they read.

Classroom talk creates the space for students to articulate their thinking and strengthen their voice. Classroom talk takes place in pairs, in collaborative group work and as a whole class. As students become accustomed to talking in class, the teacher serves as a facilitator to engage students in higher levels of discourse. Classroom talk opens the space for questioning, effective scaffolding and successful collaborative group work and literacy groups.

Students who are able to show the evolution of their thinking deeply engage with classroom content and develop good academic habits. Teaching students how to annotate a passage of text in English or History class, or drawing diagrams and making models in Science and Math, are all examples of students making a normally internal process external and demonstrate the value of seeing thinking as a collaborative effort between students and/or between the students and the teacher. In a classroom that makes thinking visible, all students are provided opportunities to show how they solve a problem, work through a text, or grapple with a new concept.