Standard 4: The practitioner understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage students' development of critical thinking problem solving, and performance skills.
In science, the students took a practice quiz to classify 25 different materials as conductors or insulators. Afterwards, we played a game using the Promethean board. The students got to come up to the board, one at a time, and match the images with their respective energy. The students had fun with this game. 3rd hour was very energetic, it was hard to control the energy. We would have the students volunteer to answer a question. The student would come up to the board and use the pen to drag the image to the specific type of energy it displayed. If the student got the correct answer a specific ring tone would make noise. The students found the sounds amusing which encouraged more students to volunteer. Some students wanted to do it a second time but once you answered a question you couldn't return to the board. After answering a question the student would return to their seat and pick another volunteer. Some students didn't want to volunteer and that made the student's who wanted a second chance upset because they would have chosen differently. Kyler pulled me aside and asked why we weren't letting the motivated students go up to the board. "Why wouldn't you want us to go up to the board? We really want to go and these other students look as if they are being forced to go up." Kyler is an active participant in class when he chooses. He found this review game fun and chose to be actively involved. If he isn't interested he doesn't apply himself to the lesson, instead he will zone out and copy notes from his partner. With this review activity everyone could be involved, we didn't have the chance to loose any students from being involved, unless we gave all of the questions to the students raising their hands high in the air. This situation represents a catch-22, "Let only the excited students answer all the questions and loose the attention of the other students, but make the volunteers happy. Or involve everyone and aggravate the excited students by denying them the chance to answer another question." Either way someone is unhappy, but I would rather have everyone involved. Therefore my response to Kyler was, "I would rather have everyone involved. You are a pretty outgoing student where some may be intimidated. They could use some support going up to that board in front of the class. Maybe you could cheer them on? Show them some support?" Kyler said, "okay, I just really enjoyed going up there, it was fun to answer those question." I replied, "I know, give them a chance and let them see how much fun it is." After my conversation with Kyler, I started thinking about the reading strategies I do with my 1st hour class. As a class we read passages and answer questions to prepare the students for the district/state assessment. Each student reads a paragraph in the order they are seated. The students are not allowed to pass unless they have a 504 or IEP that specifically addresses reading out loud. We haven't had any problems but in this situation, students who would enjoy reading out loud are limited to a certain number of paragraph during class where the other students who do not enjoy reading out loud are forced to, most of these students complain throughout the class. In this situation it may be better to give the students class participation points for reading out loud, to prevent complaining/poor attitudes. The students would be motivated by the point system to read out-loud which would hopefully decrease their poor attitude in class.
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