Tamara Griffith
Instructional Strategies
InTASC Standard #8: The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.
Introduction:
Simply put, there is no such thing as one size fits all in education; all of my students learn differently and come to me with different abilities, strengths, and preferred methods of learning. So, in order to engage all of my scholars with the 6th grade language arts content, I employ a variety of instructional strategies. Instructional strategies are the techniques used to help students learn how to autonomously apply and transfer their content knowledge and skills to a variety of contexts. In my classroom, some of these instructional strategies center around organizing content knowledge, activity-based learning, integrating technology, and reference materials. Including a variety of instructional practices such as these when lesson planning allows me to intentionally meet the needs of my diverse learners, thereby facilitating differentiation and whole-brain teaching practices.
By employing a variety of instructional strategies, students achieve greater mastery and more profound college and career readiness. In addition, I consider rigor when planning and implementing instructional strategies. By implementing instructional strategies that are appropriately rigorous, all of my students are challenged and deeply engaging with the content at high cognitive levels. Not only does this ensure deeper student mastery of material, but it also ensures that students will be able to communicate effectively, think critically and creatively in a variety of situations, and apply content knowledge in meaningful ways. Because I teach a large number of students who are significantly below grade level, many of the instructional strategies used scaffold the content and skills being taught. Doing so provides my students with the guidance they need in order to access the content knowledge and skills required to complete tasks at these more rigorous cognitive levels.
Often, many of these instructional strategies are utilized during assessment as well. Doing so allows students to demonstrate their key understandings in a variety of ways that mimic the ways they have previously interacted with the material. So, rather than merely assessing student understandings through a multiple-choice type of assessment, I provide students with performance tasks that allow them to demonstrate their content knowledge and skills authentically and in non-routine ways. This builds student investment by appealing to students' interests and strengths and facilitates critical and creative thinking by providing students with new ways to demonstrate their mastery of content knowledge and skills.
Click on the images below to explore how I employ a variety of instructional strategies within my classroom.
Table of Contents:
Conclusion:
All in all, the ultimate goal of my instruction is to facilitate and promote student learning. To this end, I spend much time planning and collaborating with my colleagues to ensure that the instructional strategies utilized in my lessons and assessments are intentional, rigorous, and also account for differentiation. Doing so allows me to maximize my instructional time; knowing how I will be assessing student mastery informs the types of instructional strategies utilized in order to propel students toward mastery and autonomous skill transfer. Using a variety of instructional strategies, such as interactive student notebooks, gallery walks, stations, integrating technology, and anchor charts, allows me to provide my students with many ways, and options, to access the content knowledge and skills and demonstrate their mastery.
In order for my students to be prepared to contribute meaningfully to our increasingly global world, they will need to be technologically literate, effective oral and written communicators, and critical and creative thinkers. Engaging my students in a variety of instructional strategies helps develop their content knowledge and skills for independent transfer to new contexts, thereby facilitating students' readiness to participate in and contribute to our more demanding, rigorous world.