Hold the guided practice until they hit 80%

The riskiest moment in explicit teaching is the release: the jump from working together to working alone. Let go too early and students practise mistakes fluently for twenty minutes, and next lesson you are reteaching against a rehearsed error. Rosenshine (2012) reports that the most effective teachers kept students at success rates around 80 percent during guided practice before moving them to independent work. That number is checkable in the room, mid-lesson. (Manning's explicit-instruction-sequence-builder skill treats the release as a checked transition rather than a timed one.)

In practice

• Before releasing, run one quick all-class check: thumbs up for ready, sideways for one more example. A forest of sideways thumbs means you model again, together.
• Make the first independent problems near-clones of the worked example, then vary them gradually; early success is the design, not a giveaway.
• Circulate hard in the first five minutes of independent work; an error caught on problem one never gets rehearsed on problems two to ten.