Meeting Standard Four ~ Classroom Practice

The student teacher exhibits confident control over a variety of approaches to classroom pedagogy. In direct presentations, s/he demonstrates sensitivity to pacing, timing, amount and sequencing of material, and form of presentations, as well as inviting student contributions and interactions. Questioning strategies are thoughtful, considering a range and arc of questions that develop logically from simple to complex. Group work is used effectively and students are carefully coached on the purpose and strategies for collaboration. Work required of students clearly reinforces basic skills (reading, writing, note-taking, oral presentation, listening) and builds toward more complex mastery (critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis, and synthesis). Technology skills are incorporated into lessons as frequently as possible, with the student teacher modeling the use of technology whenever possible.

You can only do so much planning.  Once you start facilitating an activity, it really becomes about whether you are creating unique entry points for students to engage with content.  Some of these are in the lesson plan you created and some of these are not and it’s up to you to think on your feet about how to draw students in. 

Luckily for me, this summer I had a pretty solid foundation in planning activities were crafted pretty thoughtfully.  Before any activity we warmed students up to new ideas, often by getting them to think about how their own experiences relate to them.  To introduce our unit on social movements, we did a poster activity in which students thought about their own experiences with oppression and resistance (Artifact One).  To present new material I often used a variety of approaches in the classroom. Turn and talks, similar to think-pair-share, were widely used in class as a way to decenter direct instruction and get students engaged in content. In my presentations, I utilized many visuals including images and videos (I display such a presentation in Artifact Two), guided graphic organizers that we would fill out as a class, and questioning strategies that would provoke students’ ideas.  I became very accustomed to group work in the class and a strength I began developing this summer was the ability to make strategic groupings based on things like reading level and classroom personality (one such grouping activity is in Artifact Three).

All of our approaches in the classroom reinforced the skills of reading, writing, note-taking, oral presentation and listening.  Still we had to get really creative about reaching the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in terms of critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis and synthesis.  Allowing students to create visual representations of ideas was an approach suggested by my mentor that worked really well since our unit on social movements had a lot of vocabulary.  In the image above, I’m making sure this student will be able to explain how her portrayal of oppression differs from one of economic exploitation, since her image could portray both.