Coursework & Practice Reflection

Internship Performance Criteria 4 states “The teacher uses content area knowledge, learning standards, appropriate pedagogy and resources to design and deliver curricula and instruction to impact student learning.”  In other words, the teacher must plan and implement successful instructional methods and strategies. 

During this course, we walked through nine themes relating to content knowledge: 1) assessing prior knowledge 2) integrating student assets 3) teaching academic language 4) scaffolding 5) supporting 6) deepening 7) providing and responding to feedback 8) student reflection 9) teacher reflection. When I began the course, I believed I had a pretty good idea of how to assess prior knowledge, scaffold learning, and reflect on my own practices.  That said, the biggest areas of growth for me were in integrating student assets, supporting, deepening, feedback, and student reflection.  My classes definitely benefitted from my learning in this course as I provided more inquiry based instruction, meaningful feedback, and opportunities for student reflection.  One of the ways I implemented inquiry was by asking students to identify the weaknesses in their performance rather than pointing them out myself.  The students were able to practice academic language and classes consisted of more opportunities for student voice.  Students also felt more confident and competent when they were able to evaluate their own performance and they deepened their learning by thinking critically about how to improve our ensemble sound. 

Additionally providing more meaningful, specific, and timely verbal and written feedback for in class and on assignments students were given the support necessary to reflect on ways they could improve.  I also made a point to reinforce and support academic language when providing feedback.  For example, I may re-state a student’s comment using correct academic vocabulary or ask the student to restate his or her comment using academic language.  Though painful at first, this commitment to consistent use of academic language has made each student more active and confident participants in our classroom discourse.  

Finally, by differentiating elements of my lessons, I was able to support all the learners in my classroom.  For example, I had a student struggling with melodic dictation.  In order to support her, I worked would come by and sing her whatever melody  she had written on her staff measure-by-measure and then play the original melody again.  She was able to compare the two melodies and change the “wrong” notes by noticing whether the “right” note was higher or lower.  Eventually, after a few weeks she was able to sing the melody to herself and self-correct the wrong notes.

Clearly, it is important to incorporate all of these themes when planning and implementing instruction.