Standard 5: Instructional Strategies

Standard 5: Instructional Strategies

Understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies and appropriate technologies.

Various and numerous instructional teaching strategies exist to transfer the knowledge of the educator to the student. Perhaps it should also be said that there are numerous learning strategies that students can employ to obtain that knowledge from the teacher in a more active way. Rather than passively sitting back and letting a teacher impart his or her wisdom and perhaps assimilating some of it, students should be encouraged to seek knowledge for themselves.

In my opinion, great teachers regard their students as musicians in a marvelous symphony of learning and sharing. Some students keep tempo, some carry the melody, some provide harmonic depth. The maestro does not play, but merely guides the symphony. However, even the most accomplished conductor requires their sheet music, or plan, to keep everyone playing the same song.

Field Trips

The purpose of a field trip is to provide a hands-on learning experience that cannot be duplicated in the classroom but should augment classroom learning. In the age of school budget cuts, field trips are often one of the first activities to be sacrificed but some students gain more from one hour's worth of experiential learning than they will in weeks in a classroom. Learning by doing is powerful instruction.

As part of a unit on animals, I arranged for my 2nd grade class to go to a horse rescue to see the horses and hear about the work of rescuing large animals first hand. For some of the students, it was the first time they had every patted a real horse. It was also a powerful opportunity for them to hear about why kindness is important. I was able to tie that field trip to several other lessons and even had the children journal about their experience at the farm. For some students, reading about horses on a farm would have meant very little, but actually going to see one was, in one student's words, "awesome!"

Before-during-after

With so many hundreds of instructional strategies available, how does a teacher know which ones to utilize. One of the best ways to encourage new learning is to connect the new content to something the student already knows, something of a "before-during-after" metacognitive approach.

For example, the Sitton Spelling series uses repetitions of words already studied, spiraling the words throughout the entire year's spelling curriculum. In a lesson that I prepared using this series, students were given a list of words for the weeks' spelling lesson, four of them having already appeared on previous spelling lists. Students are asked to complete a worksheet called "Finish It" in which they were required to finish an unfinished sentence using spelling words from that weeks' list. After the third week of utilizing the spelling series, most students understood that they would be responsible for learning the spelling of all of the cumulative spelling words and not just those on the list for that one week. Below is one of my lesson plans utilizing the Sitton approach to spelling and the work sheet that went with it.

Finish It!

Subject Area: English Language Arts

Topic: Spelling High-Frequency Words

Grade Level: 2^nd grade students

Instructional Goals:

Students will be able to:

1. Recognize the appropriate spelling and usage of high-frequency words including homophones;

2. Demonstrate the ability to construct full sentences utilizing a given word set;

3. Demonstrate the ability to arrange a given list in correct alphabetical order.

Instructional Objectives (Assessment procedures – summative evaluation):

1. Given a practice worksheet, students will be able to complete a partial sentence utilizing words from their spelling list, then construct additional full sentences to provide more details about the original sentence.

2. Given a practice worksheet, students will be able to arrange their spelling words into alphabetical order.

Instructional Strategies (formative evaluation):

Teacher Strategies:

· Present information using the dry-erase board

o Assess students’ pre-knowledge of the words on the current weeks’ spelling list by asking for recitation of the list

o Assess students’ understanding of the term ‘homophone’ by asking for a definition

o Identify the homophones in the current weeks’ spelling list and determine if students recognize the appropriate usage of each

· Present information using auditory cues

o As children listen, teacher pronounces each word on the current weeks’ spelling list and makes exaggerated mouth movements to demonstrate how the relevant sound (for example, the /ou/ sound in ‘out’).

o Teacher gives examples of each word in a sentence to provide meaningful context for the purposes of differentiating homophones.

Student Activities:

· Complete the “Finish It” worksheet, then provide feedback to the teacher orally when asked to read the sentences constructed on the worksheet.

· Complete the worksheet activity that requires students to correctly order this weeks’ spelling words alphabetically.

o Students will be asked to alphabetize the following words:

out, them, then, she, many, were, when, there, their, said

Assessment method during instruction (formative evaluation):

· Students will complete an unfinished sentence, then provide additional details about the topic provided by constructing more sentences utilizing current weeks’ spelling words.

· Students will be able to identify the correct spelling word when given a context to differentiate homophones.

· Students will orally provide evidence of the ability to alphabetize the current weeks’ spelling words.

Accommodations: Below-level learners can demonstrate conceptual understanding writing shorter, simple sentences when finishing the unfinished sentence and when constructing supporting sentences for the “Finish It” activity. Above-level learners can demonstrate conceptual understanding by writing longer, more complex sentences when finishing the unfinished sentence and when constructing supporting sentences for the “Finish It” activity.

Maine Learning Results:

English Language Arts

F. STANDARD ENGLISH CONVENTIONS

Students will write and speak correctly, using conventions of standard written and spoken English. Students will be able to:

Elementary Grades Pre-K-2

1. Edit their own written work for standard English spelling and usage, as evidenced by pieces that show and contain:

· complete sentences.

· initial understanding of the use of pronouns and adjectives.

· evidence of correct spelling of frequently used words.

· few significant errors in capitalization of proper nouns and of the words that begin sentences.

· few significant errors in the use of end stop punctuation (e.g., periods, questions marks

Jen Winchester

teacher2b@jenwinchester.com