Teaching Playbook¶

Everything that stays the same from week to week. Read this once in August; skim it again in January.

The central problem¶

You have grades 5 through 10 in one room for 45 minutes. An 11-year-old and a 16-year-old, same activity, same clock.

The instinct is to teach to the middle. Don't. Teaching to the middle bores the top third and loses the bottom third, and you find out in November when half the room stops showing up mentally.

The strategy in this curriculum is different:

Same activity. Same room. Different depth.

Everyone builds the same thing. What varies is how deep they go, how much scaffolding they get, and what question you ask them while they're doing it. Nobody is sent to a different worksheet. Nobody is publicly labelled.

The five mechanisms¶

1. Tiered challenges — 🟢 🟡 🔴¶

Every activity has three levels:

Tier	Roughly	Looks like
🟢 Starter	Grades 5–6	Modify working code. Never a blank page. Step-by-step visible.
🟡 Builder	Grades 7–8	A template with gaps. Hints available if asked.
🔴 Extender	Grades 9–10	Open-ended, plus: explain your reasoning to your partner.

Students self-select. Put the tiers on the table as a printed card, not on the board with grade levels attached. A confident 6th grader who reaches for 🔴 should be allowed to. A nervous 9th grader who wants 🟢 for a week should be allowed to, quietly.

Never say the grade levels out loud

The tiers are labelled by colour and name, never by grade. The moment a 5th grader hears "green is for the little kids," the system dies.

2. The Blocks → JavaScript toggle¶

This is the single most useful structural feature in the whole year, and it's why Unit 1 uses MakeCode Arcade.

The same project can be viewed as blocks, as JavaScript, or as Python — one dropdown at the top of the editor. So:

A 5th grader drags blocks.
A 10th grader flips to JavaScript and edits real code.
They are in the same project, on the same task, sitting next to each other.

Neither one is on a "special" activity. The differentiation is invisible. Use this constantly — and tell fast finishers about the toggle explicitly, because most won't find it themselves.

Unit 3 reverses the trick: when a student is drowning in Python syntax, flip back to blocks to see what the code was supposed to say.

3. Cross-age pair programming¶

Driver / Navigator. The Driver types. The Navigator reads, directs, and catches mistakes. Swap at the 20-minute mark — set a timer, out loud, every week.

Pair an older student with a younger one deliberately. The rules for the older student:

"You are not allowed to touch the keyboard. You can point. You can ask questions. If you take the mouse, you've made it your project instead of theirs."

This constraint is what makes cross-age pairing work instead of turning into the older kid doing everything.

Rotate pairs every 2–3 weeks. Long enough to build rapport, short enough that a bad match isn't a sentence.

Pick for patience, not skill

The best partner for a struggling 5th grader is a patient 8th grader, not your strongest 10th grader. The Week 1 skills survey asks about this indirectly — use it.

4. The same question, harder¶

The cheapest differentiation you have costs nothing and requires no printing: ask different students different questions while you circulate.

Same binary card activity:

🟢 "Show me the number 5."
🟡 "Show me 21 without counting up to it."
🔴 "How many cards would you need for all 26 letters of the alphabet?"

One activity. Three levels of thinking. Nobody knows it's happening.

5. Near-peer experts¶

Rotate a "expert of the week" role among students who've mastered something. Their job isn't to race ahead — it's to circulate and help.

This is the TEALS near-peer model, and it does three things at once: it frees you up, it deepens the expert's understanding (teaching forces it), and it gives strong students a reason to stay engaged that isn't just "more worksheets."

The 45-minute structure¶

Same shape every week. Predictability is a feature — students who know the rhythm spend zero energy figuring out what's happening.

Time	Segment	What it's for
0:00–0:04	Anchor	"Last Friday we…" + a 60-second warm-up
0:04–0:12	Mini-lesson	ONE concept. Teacher thinks aloud. Demo it live
0:12–0:36	Paired build	Students work. You circulate and ask questions
0:36–0:42	Share-out	1–2 pairs demo. Class gives one glow, one grow
0:42–0:45	Teaser + prompt	Next week's hook + this week's Think About This

Rules for each segment¶

Anchor (4 min). Always name specific students from last week: "Last Friday Mia and Jordan figured out how to make their character jump." Naming people does more for continuity than naming concepts.

Mini-lesson (8 min). One concept. Not two. If you're tempted to add a second, that's next week's lesson. Think aloud while you demo — narrate your own mistakes and backtracking. Students almost never see an expert be confused, and it's one of the most useful things you can show them.

Paired build (24 min). Your job is not to teach here. It's to circulate and ask questions:

"What did you expect to happen?"
"Show me the line that does that."
"What's the smallest change you could make to test that idea?"

Never take the mouse. If you touch it, it becomes your project.

Share-out (6 min). Pick the interesting failure, not the polished success. Say: "This is the best thing that happened all class — tell us what it's doing wrong." One "glow" and one "grow" from the class.

Teaser (3 min). End with a cliffhanger and the week's noticing prompt. Never end with cleanup instructions as the last words they hear.

Fighting the seven-day gap¶

A week is a long time for an 11-year-old. Five rituals do most of the work:

The anchor board. A poster or slide that stays up: what we've done, what we're building toward, this unit's vocabulary. Students orient themselves in five seconds on the way in.
"Last Friday we…" — the first 90 seconds, every single week, naming actual students.
Multi-week projects. Students returning to something they own re-engage far faster than students starting something new. This is why Unit 1 builds toward one game rather than doing eight disconnected activities.
Save and explain. Last two minutes: each pair writes one sentence — "Today we made , next we want to ." Reading it back next Friday costs 30 seconds and recovers five minutes of re-orientation.
The Think About This prompt. Not homework. A thing to notice during the week. It keeps the class alive in their head between Fridays at zero cost.

Assessment without homework or grades¶

There is nothing to turn in and nothing to grade. You still need to know who's learning.

Method	How	When
Verbal exit ticket	"Tell your partner one thing you built and one thing you're still wondering about." You listen while circulating	Weekly
Screenshot portfolio	Students drop a screenshot in a class folder	Weekly, 60 seconds
"I can…" self-check	Students rate themselves on 3 skills at the end of each unit	4× a year
Observation log	You note who demonstrated what. A phone note is fine	Ongoing
Showcase demo	Students walk someone through their project for 2 minutes	Twice a year

If administration asks for evidence of learning

The screenshot portfolio plus the standards map is your answer. A folder of dated student work showing visible progression, mapped to CSTA 2026 concept areas, is stronger evidence than a gradebook — and you built it without assigning a single thing.

Classroom norms¶

Establish these in Week 1 and repeat them until they're boring.

Being stuck is normal. It's the actual job.

Ask your partner first, then me.

Broken is interesting. We look at things that don't work on purpose.

Don't touch someone else's keyboard. Point, ask, suggest. Never take over.

The third one matters most. A room where students hide their broken work is a room where nobody learns anything. Celebrate the interesting failure publicly and often — especially in the first month, and especially your own.

When things go wrong¶

Situation	Move
Wi-Fi is down	Every lesson has a full unplugged Plan B. Keep printed copies and a bag of plastic cups in the closet. Not a fallback — a teaching tool
A site is blocked	Send IT the whitelist sheet. Run Plan B today
Half the class finishes early	Your mini-lesson was too long or the task too small. Push everyone up a tier; add the "make it impossible to lose, now make it impossible to win" challenge
Half the class is lost	Stop. Put it on the projector. Do the next two steps together. Losing 4 minutes beats losing 8 students
A student shuts down	Sit down next to them. Take the mouse and break something on purpose: "Watch, I do this constantly." Hand it back
Two students won't work together	Re-pair immediately and without comment. Don't make it a lesson about cooperation
You lose a week to an assembly	Spend a flex week. That's what they're for
A student is far beyond the others	Make them the expert of the week. Then point them at the extension links in platforms — but never as an assignment

The one thing to remember¶

This class has no grades, no homework, and no test. That means the only thing holding students is whether they want to be there.

Optimize for that. A student who leaves curious will learn more between Fridays than any assignment you could have given them.