At Exploros, we believe that great learning happens when structured design meets professional expertise. That’s why every Exploros experience is built on the 5E instructional model and designed for a teacher-led, student-centered, device-enabled classroom. Students interact, share, reflect, and apply their learning through scenes that gradually build depth and understanding. But as powerful as that structure is, it’s only the beginning. We set the stage, and then you’re able to come in and use your expertise and teacher moves to bring it to life.
This article offers guidance for what those teacher moves might look like inside an Exploros experience. It includes scene-specific strategies for each of the 5Es and a final section highlighting instructional moves that can raise the level of engagement and thinking across any part of the lesson.
Engage: Building Curiosity and Connection
The Engage scene is often the first invitation for students to enter the learning experience. Exploros provides activities like word clouds, polls, and image prompts to help students activate prior knowledge and make a personal connection to the topic. This is also the opportunity to build interest, excitement, or wonder. Your energy and curiosity as the teacher can set the tone for the lesson. When you show that you're curious about the topic, students are more likely to engage with an open mind.
It’s important to remember that this scene is not the time to correct every misconception. Students may post ideas that are incomplete or inaccurate, but that’s okay. The rest of the lesson is designed to guide them toward deeper and more accurate understanding. There’s no need to overteach in this phase. The goal is to draw students in and make them feel like their thoughts and ideas belong in the learning space.
To build on the Engage scene effectively, consider adding a moment of think time before students post. Allowing 20 to 30 seconds of silent reflection, or asking students to quietly jot down or whisper an idea to a partner, can help all learners feel ready to share. Encouraging students to pair up and share their ideas before posting to a word cloud or poll builds confidence and sets the tone for classroom discourse.
To deepen the experience, try these quick teacher moves:
Use the word cloud as a whole-class discussion tool by noticing patterns.
Ask students to explain or defend a peer's idea in their own words.
Prompt students to generate their own questions about the topic before proceeding.
These steps transform a simple warm-up into a moment of authentic intellectual engagement, while keeping the focus on curiosity rather than correction.
Explore: Supporting Access and Active Processing
In the Explore scene, students encounter curated content including articles, videos, and comprehension checks. Exploros provides scaffolds like note-taking prompts and summaries to support learners. As a teacher, you can enhance this by modeling how to approach challenging text or multimedia. Consider reading a paragraph aloud while thinking aloud, pausing to define vocabulary, make a connection, or pose a clarifying question. This helps students understand how skilled readers approach text.
You can also:
Pause mid-video to ask students to predict what’s next or summarize a key idea.
Use reciprocal teaching roles digitally by assigning roles such as summarizer or clarifier.
Offer sentence starters for written reflections, such as “One key idea I learned is…”
Invite students to talk with a partner before completing a graphic organizer or adding to a wall.
Encourage students to jot down brief notes or highlight important ideas before answering questions.
These moves help students, especially those who need processing time or language support, stay engaged and build deeper understanding.
Explain: Making Thinking Visible
The Explain scene focuses on helping students synthesize and reflect on what they’ve learned. Activities often include discussion walls, open-ended responses, or graphic organizers. While Exploros structures these elements to support critical thinking, the teacher’s role in facilitating the process remains essential. Before students write or post, give them time to talk. Structured partner talk or small group conversation helps students rehearse their ideas and build confidence.
To deepen thinking:
Display sentence stems such as “I believe this because…” or “Another perspective might be…”
Choose a few student responses to highlight and analyze together.
Invite students to comment on or extend a peer’s thinking in the discussion wall.
These techniques help make thinking visible and foster a classroom culture of listening, reasoning, and respectful dialogue.
Elaborate: Extending and Applying Understanding
The Elaborate scene is a chance for students to connect, apply, and deepen their learning in creative or analytical ways. Exploros provides prompts that guide students to draw conclusions, make connections, or create products. You can take this further by offering choice and student voice in how they respond. For example, students might respond through a poster, video, skit, or audio recording.
Other effective teacher moves include:
Asking students to connect the topic to a current event or community issue.
Prompting historical or disciplinary thinking, such as “Whose voice is missing from this account?”
Facilitating small group dialogue where students build on each other’s ideas before submitting a response.
This is the moment to let students take what they’ve learned and do something meaningful with it.
Evaluate: Assessing and Responding to Learning
Each Exploros experience ends with a quiz that provides a snapshot of student understanding. This scene is not just about assessment. It’s also a moment for timely feedback and instructional decisions. Teachers can use quiz results to reflect with the class and reteach as needed. Consider displaying anonymized quiz results to the class and asking students what made particular questions challenging. Invite discussion about strategies that helped or hindered understanding.
You can also:
Use quiz performance to form temporary reteach or enrichment groups.
Ask students to write their own quiz question based on what they learned.
Offer students a chance to retake the quiz after a feedback conversation.
If multiple students struggle on the same item, use it as a springboard for reteaching that concept. Revisit the material, model the thinking process, and then invite students to re-answer in a new format.
The Evaluate scene is a valuable source of formative data. Use it to close gaps, reinforce learning, and guide what comes next.
Instructional Moves That Elevate Learning Throughout
In addition to scene-specific strategies, there are high-leverage instructional moves that apply across the entire Exploros experience. These reflect how students learn best in social, digital environments and can be layered into any scene.
Providing think time: Think time is one of the most effective and simple tools in a teacher’s toolkit. After asking a question or before assigning a response task, pause for 5 to 10 seconds. Students may also benefit from silently jotting a few notes or sketching an idea before posting.
Encouraging verbal rehearsal: Before students post to a wall or complete a task, give them a chance to talk about their ideas. Partner discussions, small group chat, or even a quick turn-and-talk builds clarity and confidence before sharing.
Using the gate strategically: Gates are built-in pause points in each scene. Rather than unlocking them automatically, use this time to discuss responses, reteach key ideas, or clarify instructions. This pacing control helps all students stay on track and ensures readiness before moving forward.
Prompting student interaction with peer posts: Encourage students to interact with each other’s posts when appropriate. For example, prompt them to:
Ask a question to a classmate that builds on their idea.
Add a piece of evidence that supports a peer’s thinking.
Offer a point of agreement or an alternative perspective.
Building sentence stems and academic language: Use sentence frames to support productive discussion and writing. Prompts like “I noticed…” or “This connects to…” help students engage in meaningful conversation and deepen their written responses.
Using data to inform instruction: Use real-time student data, including open-ended responses in scenes 1, 2, and 3 and quiz results, to inform your next steps. If several students misunderstand a concept, pause the experience and reteach it. If students are ready, accelerate the pace or add an extension activity.
Working with student questions: When students generate their own questions, through a See-Think-Wonder prompt, during an image analysis, or in response to a reading, treat these as entry points for exploration. Write down strong questions, refer back to them later in the lesson, or group similar questions for whole-class discussion. You can even ask students to identify which of their questions were answered by the end and which remain open. This reinforces that their thinking matters and models how inquiry drives learning.
Exploros lessons are designed to make high-quality teaching easier and more engaging. But it is the thoughtful use of teacher moves, grounded in how students learn, that turns a digital experience into a rich, human, and interactive classroom moment. With small shifts in facilitation, you can take your students further, helping them not just complete the lesson, but truly connect with it.