Teacher Quality Standard III Plans and delivers effective instruction and creates an environment that facilitates learning for students.
Element A: Teachers demonstrate knowledge about the ways in which learning takes place, including the levels of intellectual, physical, social, and emotional development of their students. Element B: Teachers use formal and informal methods to assess student teaching, provide feedback, and use results to inform planning and instruction. Element C: Teachers integrate and utilize appropriate available technology to engage students in authentic learning experiences. Element D: Teachers establish and communicate high expectations and use processes to support the development of critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Element E: Teachers provide students with opportunities to work in teams and develop leadership. Element F: Teachers model and promote effective communication.
I am developing in this standard. Although I feel that I can effectively plan and deliver effective instruction in most cases, I am still working out some kinks in how to make my lessons more clear and relatable for students. I feel that my content knowledge allows me to understand the learning objectives that should be attained by students, but I still am learning how to scaffold instruction towards these objectives. My experience in Mr. Crawford's 2D design class has helped me to see how to design lessons and activities that help students build their technical artistic skills gradually with our facilitation and I would like to carry this on in my future lesson planning. One thing I do well when it comes to effective instruction is to plan my lessons with many different learning styles in mind. In each lesson I try to incorporate visual, auditory, written, and tactile elements for students who learn in different ways. I also attempt to plan for students who may be already exceeding learning objectives or those who may not be close to the baseline of the average student through differentiation of instruction. A lot of this differentiation is on an individual student basis as I assist throughout drawing activities. For example, I have some students who struggle to even begin a drawing and for them I encourage free-sketching activities that get their mind and body into a mindset appropriate for drawing. I have other students who don’t feel challenged by the basic skill activities and for them I develop ways to challenge them such as adding color or choosing more challenging subjects. An example of a lesson that incorporates many different learning modalities can be observed in the link below. This is the power point presentation that accompanied my contour portrait lesson which showed two different videos of practicing contemporary artists, drawings by another contour artist, and a comprehensive list of the learning objectives for the day. The lesson also included a blind-contour practice to get students in “drawing mode.” In this way the lesson appealed to those who learn by seeing, hearing, reading, and doing.