INTASC Standard #4

Multiple Instructional Strategies


The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage students' development of critical thinking, problem solving, and performance skills.

[Headings for INTASC standards are taken from - Campbell, D.M. et al.  (1997).  How to develop a professional portfolio:  A manual for teachers.  Boston: Allyn and Bacon.]

This standard pertains to my understanding of teaching strategies and different ways to encourage students to learn to think critically, solve problems, and be active learners. Some of the teaching methods that I have learned include expository vs. interactive, questioning, whole-part-whole, and the 5-step method. Also, to be an effective teacher, I need to be able to understand and recognize in the students their different learning methods - kinetic, aural, and visual, for example. Other ideas that I can use are discovery learning, group work, and problem posing.

Students need to be able to think critically in order to process information. Not only will they have to take information given to them and use it in a variety of ways, they should be able to decide what they think about the information. Do they agree with it? Understand it? Choose to ignore it? These are all possibilities for the students when they are presented with information. When a student is confronted with a problem, they ought to be equipped with the tools they need to solve it. In a classroom setting, this means that they will not always be expected to arrive at a specific answer, but rather a solution. In other words, these kinds of ill-defined questions do not have one right answer; the process of learning and discovering an answer is much more important than the actual end result. It will be my job, as a teacher, to make available all these aspects of learning.

Both of the following artifacts show practice of some of the teaching techniques that I have learned. As multiple teaching strategies are imperative to a well-run classroom, these two artifacts demonstrate several different strategies (even to the end that one of them is a group-teaching lesson and the other is a lesson that I taught by myself).

Microteaching #1: Tideo (October 21, 2004) from MusEd 100

Group Listening Lesson from MusEd 351

LAMP Project from Student Teaching

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