The teacher must consider the diversity of the students and use multiple instructional strategies to encourage critical thinking and ensure meaningful mastery of the content.
In designing instruction that incorporates a variety of strategies and multiple modes of learning, the teacher can reinforce necessary communication skills, encourage a more comprehensive understanding of the content through critical thinking activities, and provide the student with a variety of skills applicable in the global workplace. By varying the instructional approaches for the content, the teacher offers students multiple opportunities to learn the content according to their own personal cognitive processes. In addition, a thorough knowledge of instructional strategies, including the use of appropriate technology, enables the teacher to be more flexible in the classroom as content and learner needs change. In my classroom, I plan on utilizing Bloom’s Taxonomy to help me guide students as they develop their critical thinking skills; ensuring that technology is accessible to my students; and modeling strategies to increase students’ understanding of concepts.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, the effective teacher should help students build on the Knowledge they have to develop the skills and abilities they need to Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. These skills are arranged in a hierarchy and progress from a basic recall of knowledge to the ability to critically think, problem solve, and create new ideas. The teacher with a wide knowledge of instructional strategies can identify those that will best fit the students in the classroom as they are guided through the development of the skills. Questioning throughout a lesson, for example, is an excellent strategy that I can structure from lower level thinking (“How many…” or “What is the name…”) to higher level thinking (“What can you infer” or “Design a project…”) to model the critical thinking process for students.
In my two-week Collaborative Multimedia Presentation unit, students are asked to create a multimedia project as a final assessment. To scaffold their progress toward that goal, I include multiple strategies in each lesson that build on students’ prior knowledge and gradually move them through the levels of Blooms Taxonomy to the final goal of creating a product with new thoughts and ideas.
Using Technology
In choosing instructional strategies that will increase student engagement, it is important to include technology that is current and relevant to real world applications and that can transform the content of the lesson. From gaming to virtual and augmented realities, there are many ways to incorporate technology into lessons, but the resources have little value to students if they do not know how to use them. In my Persuasive Advertising lesson, I introduced students to green screen technology through a station rotation. Students were able to use the technology to change the background of an advertisement and then analyze the differences they perceived in the persuasive power of the resulting ads. The unit included a final assessment that required the creation of a multimedia product. So that students could choose to use the technology in their assessment, I created a tutorial to teach students how to create their own green screen product.
Modeling
In addition to a wide repertoire of strategies and activities, one of the most significant approaches that I can utilize in my classroom is modeling. I tutored a high school senior in writing and each week we worked with a different format of writing, including Express and Reflect, Inform and Explain, Evaluate and Judge, Inquire and Explore, Analyze and Interpret, and Propose a Solution. For each lesson, I used three different strategies to guide the student through the concept and incorporated videos and a variety of mentor texts, including books, artwork, advertisements, and magazine articles. We both chose our own topics and, for one lesson, I allowed the student to choose between two activity options for the main part of the lesson. I completed the warmup activity as a demonstration, but each of the other strategies were completed alongside the student. When we discussed each strategy, we looked at my work next to the student’s work. He was able to see not only my final product, but the attempts I made to reach that point, and we were able to talk about the thought processes we both used.