The purpose of InTASC Standard #8, Instructional Strategies, is to ensure that the teacher employs various instructional strategies to fully engage all students in achieving a deep understanding of the content and how the content area connects to both the real world and other content areas. The teacher also demonstrates understanding of this standard by using different instructional strategies to help students build skills to apply their content knowledge in ways that are meaningful to the students. The Instructional Strategies standard encourages teachers to use many different strategies in the classroom so that all students can find ways to connect to the content.
Warm-ups and Focus Activities
I demonstrate my understanding of this standard through the use of warm-up or focus activities to engage learners in the content and in connections they can make to the content. By starting the lesson in this way, students are given the opportunity to jump-start their thinking and prepare for the content they’ll be learning that day. I use warm-up questions as a way to activate background knowledge and encourage student-created definitions for experiments in my scientific method unit.
5E Model of Instruction
I also demonstrate my understanding of Instructional Strategies through my use of the 5E Model of Instruction when developing a unit. I use the model of Engage, Explore, Explain, Evaluate, and Expand to encourage all the learners in my class to fully interact with the content and to ensure that I integrate different levels of inquiry and multiple intelligences into my lessons.
Student-Centered Teaching
I further demonstrate my understanding of this standard by using student-centered approaches in my lessons to engage my students in using the information they are given to construct explanations for themselves. I use this method in my Evolution and Natural Selection Unit to encourage students to determine for themselves why certain pieces of evidence are used as support for evolution.