In this module Michael Horn and several Navigator school teachers explain the four core pillars of the Navigator teaching model. First, teachers use daily formative assessments—quick quizzes or prove‑disprove questions—to instantly gauge each student’s mastery and then regroup students dynamically for targeted small‑group or individualized work. Second, the curriculum is codified in collaborative, six‑week PowerPoint slide decks that present open‑ended questions, visuals, and sentence frames, allowing teachers to teach from a shared, evolving resource that saves planning time and supports visual learning. Third, teachers specialize by subject (e.g., math‑science or ELA‑humanities) so they can deepen expertise, reduce the breadth of responsibilities, and provide more focused instruction; students rotate among specialists throughout the day, building varied adult relationships while still receiving consistent support. Fourth, the schools employ “whole‑brain teaching,” a high‑energy, call‑and‑response, choral approach that engages multiple brain regions, boosts language production, and creates a lively classroom atmosphere. Throughout, teachers share concrete classroom anecdotes—using blended‑learning software to let students work at their own pace, leveraging immediate data from response devices, and observing the benefits of specialization and whole‑brain techniques—illustrating how these elements combine to keep all learners on track and increase engagement.
Chapters
As we shift to navigator schools, we want to focus on four of the elements that drive their teaching model.
The first big idea is the embracing of daily assessment that leads to dynamic grouping of students.
The second is this notion of facilitating a codified curriculum that they jointly created.
Next is the idea of specialization that at the elementary school level teachers either do math and science or, or ELA and humanities.
The last one is that they're really champions of this notion of whole brain teaching.
So on that first big idea, this daily assessment leading to dynamic grouping, you have to understand that the teachers see their role as instruct, assess and then regroup. And this happens on a daily basis. The students get a set of quiz questions and if they know it, they're allowed to go off and work online. And if they don't, the teacher goes deep into small group role and that's their job. Make sure everybody at the end of every day knows the assessment.
I think that the blended learning gives me the opportunity to be able to pull small groups because the computer programs we use in class is a really great way of letting the kids work at their own pace. And then while they're doing that, I can pull the kids who are struggling on the actual stage standards and the common core that we're moving towards, I can pull them at that time and really focus in on each of those kids needs right then and there. And we do it on a daily basis on the actual standard I'm doing that day. So no one is going to fall behind.
As soon as I give a prove disprove question, I immediately have my data from my responders and from my MOBI about who got that day's lesson, who didn't. The ones that didn't and still need that guided practice are going to stay behind with me. The ones that got it, they're going to go on, they're going to go into a computer program which is also at an individual level for them. The factor I've seen from my data, the immediate data from my responders, that a kid doesn't get it yet. I get the luxury of keeping them in class with me while my paraprofessional takes the rest of the students during that time, it's just more guided practice. Or maybe we need to come up with a new strategy for that student. Sometimes it's three students, sometimes it's four students. The max would ever be six. But sometimes I just get to work with one student. And that's where I really get to figure out where things are going wrong in their thought process and how I can correct that.
So at Navigator, rather than have every single teacher constantly designing lesson plans for the next day in class, what they do is that they have a master teacher coordinate a process of designing lessons in six week cycles with the rest of the teachers on the team.
And the beauty of this is once they know what their goals are, their objectives for this unit, they then create these PowerPoint slides that are essentially open ended questions and visuals that they get at the big idea they're going after. So if they're trying to teach kids currency, they build a slide with 10 pennies, 10 nickels, 10 dimes, 10 quarters, and then a bunch of sentence frames. So the teacher on the fly can be circling different things and have essentially endless options to have students understand the concept. And then they all teach off these PowerPoint slides and the next year they refine them and make them a little bit better.
Our model of having a curriculum that's on our PowerPoints benefits me as a teacher because first of all, it saves me time. Also it is visual for the kids, so it keeps them engaged and also it allows me to do as many examples as I need. Maybe it's one, maybe it's two, maybe it's five.
Navigator also made a very specific decision which was to allow its teachers to specialize so that students would see multiple teachers in the course of a day, be that in a learning lab when they would work with one set of teachers or some teachers specialized in humanities, whereas others specialized in science and math. And the big idea here was that to give teachers an opportunity to really hone your craft at what you're good at and not be responsible for everything. Now we acknowledge that not every school is going to make this decision, but the point is that it was a concerted decision to drive this specialization to improve student learning for their model.
I really like being a single subject here, working just on math because when in, when I was at a traditional school, you had to focus on everything and you had to focus on the interventions for reading, you had to focus on the interventions for this and tracking this and really trying to find out, like everything and you couldn't find, you know, everything would fall through the cracks because you had so much going on. And here I'm solely math, you know, the ins and outs of your curriculum. You learn those standards inside and out, what manipulatives you need for the students, how to gauge their performance, what really gets them motivated. And it's so neat to see that just a single subject can just excel so much more. By being one single teacher in that grade.
Having the kids rotate to other teachers, I think is a good practice for them because it helps them learn to have different relationships and foster different relationships with different types of adults. But at the same time, it still gives me plenty of time to build a rapport with all of my students. And for me, it also gives me practice. In the morning, if it didn't go so well, I get to change it up, and in the afternoon, I get to make it better.
The last thing you have to know about Navigator schools is when you walk on that campus, you are flooded with song and energy and movement. And they have this approach which they call whole brain teaching. And I would essentially sum it up as a call and response choral type approach that gets students very active in their learning. So if you want to learn more about this, which I highly recommend, we'll put a link in the resources section so you can do a little background. But the best way to explain this to you is to just show it to you. So watch these clips, look at how active students are in their learning, look at how much language production they have, and think about that for an English language learner or someone who's struggling to acquire language skills, and then, frankly, just enjoy how cute these kids are in action.
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They're responding chorally. They're speaking in partners. They're singing chants, they're cheering each other on. And it is. When you go into a whole brain teaching classroom, it's unlike anything you've ever seen, especially the first time you see it. And you just say to yourself, this is incredible. And it's actually quite replicable. Although it creates what could be considered a boisterous classroom, it really increases the amount of learning. I mean, the research that went into these different techniques, they've tried to tap into all of the different brain areas and stimulate them during the school day.
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