3-3 Instructional Strategies

The candidate understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to
develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply
knowledge in relevant ways.

As a teacher, it is important to have a variety of instructional strategies under your belt because it
helps maintain student interest and certain strategies can encourage learners to develop a deeper
understanding of the content. Through the use of multiple different strategies, students are able to
make connections which then allows them to build skills by applying this new-found knowledge
in relevant ways. These strategies vary greatly and can include: gestures and movement,
metaphors, visual imagery, modelling, singing, audiation, self-evaluation (listening to own
recordings), and discussion (think, pair, share and others). With any of these strategies, the goal
is to create student-centered learning in that the students develop their own questions and
through these strategies reach an understanding that they can then apply. Effective strategies
include multiple modes of instruction between audio, visual, and kinesthetic.

During my student teaching experience, I was able to experiment with a variety of different
instructional strategies. My goal with each of these strategies was to ensure that the learning was
student-centered. One of the strategies that was successful in this was through student discussion.
I utilized various Kagan strategies with my third grad classes as they learned about the different
instrument families. Students would have to listen to their peers read a passage then respond with
something they learned and an inquiry they had.

In the first artifact below you will see a lesson plan I have made for special chorus. This group is
made up of 4th and 5th grade boys and girls. During this class I would help my cooperating
teacher teach the students the songs they would be singing on their spring concert. One strategy
that was used heavily to help students learn the rhythms, pitches, words, and how to shape them
was modeling. I would model for the students on my voice. The next artifact highlights the
strategy of self-assessment (12:30 mark). In this artifact students from Concert Band listen to the
ensemble as they play to determine why I cut-off. This helped develop students ears and opened
up the conversation for discussion on how we could address the reason why we stopped. The
final artifact is an example of self-reflection on my end. Video reflections are very helpful in
allowing me to see how well I model what it is I want my students to be doing musically with my
conducting.