Amanda Gantt's Professional Portfolio




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Standard Four - Multiple Instructional Strategies


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


            Learning is a progressive process that evolves differently in each student.  By using a variety of instructional strategies, students will be afforded multiple ways to learn a subject.  Also, each subject has a variety of ways that it can be taught to best suit the varying learning styles of each student.  By creating many different opportunities to enable the student to grasp a subject, a teacher is developing the student’s realization that a topic can be learned in a variety of ways.  Through this realization by the students, a teacher will be able to encourage deeper knowledge that develops a student’s critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, and performance skills.
            These skills, gained by the use of a variety of instructional strategies, also meet the needs of each individual student.  When an educator knows how to adapt the instructional strategies to help students, and when an educator knows multiple strategies to help in this implementation, an effective teacher will be able to develop the critical thinking, the problem solving, and the performance skills that they need.  Thus, effective teachers must have a firm knowledge of INTASC Standard Three to fully implement INTASC Standard Four into their classroom.

Rationale for Artifact One

Artifact One

          Students all come from a variety of backgrounds and situations.  Thus, they grow up with differing learning styles.  As effective teachers, we must create opportunities for all of our students to succeed by using as many different approaches to learning as possible.  To show my understanding of how to reach these diverse learners, I have placed as my artifact my Preservices Teaching/Internship Observation/Conference Form for my lesson entitled “Coming to America” which will prove that I use a variety of learning strategies in my classroom to reach my diverse learners.

            In this Observation Form, my supervisors listed varying instructional strategies that I used during the launch and introduction of my lesson.  I engaged my students with music, SMART Board presentation, reflection, reading, and writing responses to help reach each student so they all could succeed which, as Ms. Bishop stated, “set students up for understanding and varied levels of thinking.”

            Through this Observation Form, I am able to show that I can produce differing learning strategies to meet my students’ needs as required by INTASC Standard Four.



Rationale for Artifact Two

Artifact Two

        Both Vygotsky and Piaget believed that students construct their knowledge, and I, also, believe that we should allow students this opportunity by starting their learning process from what they know to build critical thinking, problem solving, and performance skills.  I was able to demonstrate this belief through my lesson plan entitled, “The Risk of War,” where the students were allowed to use their own knowledge of the game of “Risk” to create knowledge about what happened in World War I.

            By creating “The Risk of War,” I was able to use a variety of instructional strategies to engage my students in the learning process.  I had the students develop their performance skills by actually performing the task of playing “Risk” with a partner.  The students were able to practice their problem solving skills by creating ways to defeat their partner at “Risk”, and the students were able to demonstrate their critical thinking skills through reflecting on what they did during the “Risk” game and connecting those actions to what happened during World War I.

            By engaging the students in an activity that they found engaging, the students were able to actively participate in the lesson, and I made sure every student was able to comprehend by using my differing instructional strategies.



The photo above is for decoration and is NOT the Artifact.

 
This text is a link to The Risk of War Lesson Plan.