Thomas Craggs Ward

About

What is Open Frames?

Open Frames is a set of classroom routines for reading, thinking, discussing, and writing. It was built by a classroom teacher, in a real classroom, one routine at a time.

Every routine gives students a frame: a small number of named steps that stay the same every time. The frame is open on purpose. It tells students where to put their thinking, never what to think. Students do the noticing, the reasoning, and the writing. The routine just clears the path.

The idea behind it

The whole project rests on one belief: make it easy for students to think hard.

Hard thinking is the goal. Confusion about what to do next is not. When a task is a maze of instructions, students spend their working memory finding their way instead of thinking about the text in front of them, and any one of those obstacles can undermine the learning (Sweller, 2023; Chew & Cerbin, 2021). So every Open Frames routine is built to remove that friction:

  • Few steps, always named, always the same. A routine has two to four steps with simple names. Young working memories hold only a few new things at once (Cowan, 2022; Chen, Paas & Sweller, 2023), so students learn a routine once and use it all year, and their attention goes to the book, not the directions.
  • Simple enough to repeat, deep enough to grow. The steps stay small, but the thinking inside them can grow for years. Named, repeatable strategy routines are among the best-evidenced tools in reading and writing instruction (Filderman et al., 2022; Kiuhara et al., 2025).
  • Students see what good looks like. Every routine comes with a worked model and success criteria written in student language, so learners can check their own work and know their next step without waiting to be told (Almarode, Fisher, Thunder & Frey, 2021; Peters, Prediger & Weiss, 2025).
  • Explicit first, independent after. New thinking is always modeled by the teacher before students run it on their own, because at this age, unscaffolded discovery tends to backfire (Sinha & Kapur, 2021), and analyses of materials show that the modeling step is routinely missing from published workbooks, leaving the scaffolding to the teacher (Sibanda, 2026). We are aiming for a gradual release of responsibility.
  • Built with the class, not just for it. Students help build the tools they use. They propose names for the author moves they discover, and the class decides together; instruction that builds on students’ own ideas is a marker of the designs that work best (Sinha & Kapur, 2021).
  • Honest feedback against clear criteria. Feedback lands when students understand it and can act on it (Mandouit & Hattie, 2023), so assessment in Open Frames uses single-point rubrics: expectations and the next move, no scores, no ranks (Almarode et al., 2021).

What it hopes to achieve

For students: readers who notice what authors do and can say why it matters, with evidence. Writers who borrow those moves for their own work. Thinkers who own a set of tools that still work when the teacher isn’t standing next to them. A toolkit they can use to decrease extraneous cognitive load and put their efforts where it counts. Students can choose which strategy to apply to which task.

For teachers: classroom-ready materials that don’t need to be built from scratch. Slides, student pages, and one-page guides that explain not just what each routine is, but how to introduce it and run it. Take them, use them, and change them to fit your class.

That’s the whole aim, and the reason Open Frames is shared: make excellent teaching easier.

Thomas Craggs-Ward · Open Frames

References

  • Almarode, J., Fisher, D., Thunder, K., & Frey, N. (2021). The success criteria playbook: A hands-on guide to making learning visible and measurable. Corwin.
  • Chen, O., Paas, F., & Sweller, J. (2023). A cognitive load theory approach to defining and measuring task complexity through element interactivity. Educational Psychology Review, 35, Article 63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09782-w
  • Chew, S. L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2021). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The Journal of Economic Education, 52(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2020.1845266
  • Cowan, N. (2022). Working memory development: A 50-year assessment of research and underlying theories. Cognition, 224, Article 105075. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105075
  • Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12th grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860
  • Kiuhara, S. A., Harris, K. R., Graham, S., Hacker, D. J., Story, M. E., & McKeown, D. (2025). An RCT of PD and expert support for classwide SRSD instruction on timed narrative writing at 4th grade. Reading and Writing, 38, 447–480. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10507-2
  • Mandouit, L., & Hattie, J. (2023). Revisiting “The Power of Feedback” from the perspective of the learner. Learning and Instruction, 84, Article 101718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2022.101718
  • Peters, N., Prediger, S., & Weiss, J. (2025). Fostering students’ measurement estimation skills in a digital teaching-learning environment: A class-wise randomized controlled trial in Grade 5. Education Sciences, 15(2), 238. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15020238
  • Sibanda, L. (2026). Reflecting on South Africa’s Grade 4 English workbook: Applying a gradual release of responsibility model. Issues in Educational Research, 36(2), 767–784.
  • Sinha, T., & Kapur, M. (2021). When problem solving followed by instruction works: Evidence for productive failure. Review of Educational Research, 91(5), 761–798. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211019105
  • Sweller, J. (2023). The development of cognitive load theory: Replication crises and incorporation of other theories can lead to theory expansion. Educational Psychology Review, 35, Article 95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09817-2