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 access and appropriately apply information.
EDU 387 – (11/30/2021): During this course, we were assigned to a fourth-grader and tasked with helping them build their writing skills and further create a writing instructional plan for them based on the interactions we are able to have with them. After just one interaction with my fourth-grader, I was sure I would have to be creative in ways to keep them entertained while still making sure to spend time on writing and building these skills. Following our first in-person interactions, we had several online video meetings during which we were able to work on a narrative that the student was developing in class. At the end of these few sessions, we created a writing instructional plan in order to list out not only some of the strengths of the writer but also a few areas where they still have room to grow and how they might best go about doing this.
I chose to connect these artifacts to Standard #8 as we had to directly consider instructional strategies in order to find the best ways to help the students connect with their writing and learn and develop their writing skills. Not only did we have to demonstrate our understanding and ability to use instructional strategies in the instructional writing plan, but we also continued to have to consider these each week as we planned our lessons. In each of my writing sessions, I ran into one obstacle or another and found myself having to be a little more creative and flexible to keep the lesson relevant and applicable to each week’s situation. The skills that we worked on together during these writing sessions could be applied beyond our interactions. They were meant to help the students practice for future pieces of writing in order to strengthen their overall writing. However, if they were not delivered in an attainable way, the skills would not ‘stick’ and the learner would not have grasped a deeper understanding that would allow them to apply their knowledge in the future.
