Intentional teaching enables teachers to be highly effective, requiring them to have many instructional strategies at their fingertips and strategies to meet the needs of individual children. Conversations and personal interactions are at the core of intentional teaching, and this allows the teacher to get to know the strengths and weaknesses of each child. Even when the teacher is instructing the entire group, she can be cognizant of what each child needs to hear and understand.
Good preschool teachers often use intentional teaching without planning. When a teacher says, “Please give me the big red ball,” instead of “give me the ball,” she is intentionally teaching manners, color and size. Intentional teaching builds on a child's experiences to advance the child's knowledge. This often occurs in response to what the student is doing by recognizing a teachable moment. The teacher sometimes intentionally conveys knowledge and at other times intentionally supports the child’s exploration and control of his own experiences.
Play is an important time for intentional teaching. Play activities can improve such things as self-regulatory behavior, imaginative thinking, cooperation, memory, and discovery, according to researchers Shannon Ayers and Ellen Frede. Intentional teaching during play can ensure children are engaged, understand the rules of various games and have successes pointed out them, such as when a teacher says, "You did a great job waiting your turn."
Intentional teaching is a balance between adult-guided and child-guided activities because children are not passive during adult-guided activities and teachers are not passive during child-guided activities. In a developmentally appropriate classroom, teachers are continuously interacting with the children by conveying, guiding, or supporting learning. According to Epstein, “When adults act with the intention of teaching, children can act with the intention of learning."