Module 5
Reflection
Classroom Instruction That Works
I completely agree with the author’s theories and strategies that need to be applied in order to successfully teach children. Their concept of Instructional Strategies is very similar to an instructor I had who said, “Student’s need to hear it, see it, say it, and then do it!”, in order to fully comprehend and commit it to long term memory. The over all concept of Using:
- Vocabulary term and phrases
- Detail
- Organizing ideas
- Skills and tactic
- Process
walk hand in hand with my own teaching philosophy. I feel that students need to be a part of the learning process. Instead of teaching at them, I plan to teach to them. This can happen with the above. By introducing the vocabulary it’s giving the students a basic road map to help them better navigate through the new information and material. This transitions into using details to help dissect the new information that the students can in turn put into organizing ideas such as KWL charts and webs. From there the student can physically see how all the parts work and how they are connected. This begins the process of applying skills and using hands on tactics to solidify the learning process. This allows the student’s to come to a conclusion, which is for them to see the process as a whole concept.
The article also introduces the concept of strategies to be used at the beginning of a unit, strategies to be used during the units and finally strategies to be used at the end of the unit. This approach seems very common sense to be. Everything has to have a beginning, middle and end, so why wouldn’t the transitions of teaching have the same as well. I think as teachers, we are always too focused on “what” we are teaching, when really equal time needs to be placed on “how” we are teaching. By offering our students a sense of purpose or an objective to a unit it sets them up for learning. By engaging them continually at the three different levels the students are gaining multiple exposure, which in turn solidifies what the teacher want to get across. Finally having some sort of ending strategy allows those students to have a sense of accomplishment. This was an excellent article. I found much of it to be a collective review of several articles and class instructors points of view, but repetition is the true way to remember things and I enjoyed the path of learning this article walked me through.