Robert Moses’ 5-Step Approach

Robert Moses’ 5-Step Approach is a student-centered pedagogical framework that enables students to own their learning.  It provides concrete, step-by-step scaffolding in which students experience abstract concepts before explicitly learning about them with the academic vocabulary.  This powerful framework is foundational to teaching diverse populations:

  1. Students participate in a common physical experience.

  2. Students draw pictorial representations of what they have experienced.

  3. Students discuss and write about the event in their everyday language or “People Talk.”

  4. Students learn the academic jargon or "Feature Talk."

  5. Finally, students develop symbolic representations that describe what they have learned.

Strengths of Moses’ framework include the following:

  • It integrates students’ previous experience and knowledge.

  • It provides multi-layered scaffolding.

  • It enables rich use of informal and formal languages, especially helpful in teaching underserved populations who need extra scaffolding to make their learning meaningful.

  • The most powerful element of this framework lies in its adaptability for application across different levels (K-20) and academic disciplines (math, biology, English, history, etc.).

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