InTASC Standard: Standard #8: Instructional Strategies: The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop a deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways (InTASC, 2013).

 

Brief Description of Evidence:

During the spring semester of 2019 as part of my EDUC 233 - Literacy Development Through Children’s Literature, I had the opportunity to co-teach a lesson on the book Goodnight, Ocean at the YMCA. To prepare us to teach, we were given the assignment of making a lesson plan for the book of our choosing. Our lesson plan helped ensure that we use a variety of instructional strategies while teaching at the YMCA.

We chose the Indiana Academic Standards that went along with our topic and objective. From there we decided on key vocabulary, activities, and assessment strategies. To ensure everything went as smoothly as possible, we made a list of anticipated challenges. We also made a plan for modifications for exceptional needs and extension ideas in case we went through our lesson faster than planned. From there we mapped out the lesson from beginning to end. We included transitions and attention grabbers such as saying, “Shark Bait!” for them to say, “ooooh haha.” To further build skills to apply knowledge, we played an array of activities to ensure that the learners developed a deeper understanding of the content areas we were covering in the book we had chosen. One of the activities was a game we invented, where the children would see pictures of animals from our book on a foam board. They would read the animal name that was written out and match it to the correct picture. Our intent for this game was to encourage the learners to make connections of the animals they saw in the book and the written word of the animals' names.  

 

​Analysis of What I Learned:

Through the process of creating, preparing, and implementing the lesson plan, I learned the elements of effectively constructing a lesson. I learned how important these elements are to have while teaching. I learned how to create a lesson plan that ensured that the learners were not only in an environment conducive to learning, but it also helped to stay on task with the goal of the learners developing a deeper understanding of the content area.

Through creating this lesson plan, my group and I incorporated appropriate instructional strategies to differentiate instruction and to engage all learners in complex thinking and meaningful tasks. A few of those instructional strategies included setting goals and expectations, asking effective higher-level questions, using a variety of technologies, allowing the learners to read words and names for themselves, and interviewing learners after the lesson.  

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Through the experience of teaching this lesson plan to the learners at the YMCA, I learned how to value flexibility and reciprocity while teaching and adapted instructions to learners’ responses, ideas, and needs. I learned how to better engage learners in using a range of learning skills and technology tools to access, interpret, evaluate, and apply information. 

Vygotsky’s theory exposed me to recognizing children’s zones of proximal development. Through this learning experience, I realized how to work with learners’ differing zones of proximal development. This helped me when we got an older learner in our group, and it was obvious that his zone of proximal development was bigger than the other learners in the group.

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How This Artifact Demonstrates my Competence on the InTASC Standard:

I demonstrated my competence in Standard 8-Instruction Strategies through making and implementing a lesson plan with three of my peers for a group of learners at the YMCA. By creating and implementing the lesson plan, I was able to understand and use a variety of instructional strategies as well as understand the cognitive processes associated with various kinds of leaning and how these processes can be stimulated.

By critically choosing certain activities and using a wide variety of resources, we encouraged making connections and building skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways. As well as providing multiple models and representation of concepts and skills with the opportunity for the learners to demonstrate their knowledge through the variety of products and performances. Through the reading of the book and working through the activities, we allowed the learner to develop a deeper understanding of content areas as well as engaging all the learners in developing higher-order questions skills and metacognitive processes. 

We ensured that our lesson plan and teaching lined up with the Indiana Academic Standards and used a variety of appropriate strategies and resources to adapt instructions to the needs of individuals and groups of learners. I can verify that I am deliberate in my teaching and therefore able to make meaningful experiences for my learners.