Being that this has been my first experience with teaching lessons in the classroom setting, I have been through a ton of experiential learning this semester in regards to instructional strategies and techniques, and I am definitely still learning and hope to continue growing. I have learned what ways my students respond the easiest, or seem to engage better through, and I have also learned a lot more about myself as an educator and what I think I do best as well!
Direct Instruction/Full Group Instruction
Of all, I did a lot of direct instruction throughout my pre-internship, as this is a quite common way to instruct. An example of this would be speaking in front of my class as I introduce a new topic, like I did today when I introduced Indigenous storytelling history. I did this by creating a presentation for my students to follow on the board while I spoke to them about this history, while still including them in the conversation by asking them questions about the things I am teaching before introducing them, or pulling ideas from them, while ultimately I am in the control of the lesson and the learning.
Indirect Instruction
This type of strategy I got the chance to witness every morning as my students came into my classroom and got to work on their bellwork, which always consisted of a “number of the week” or a word problem for them to work on on their white boards. My co-op would not tell my students what she wanted to see from them, just a way to represent that number to her. I myself also got to engage in this type of instruction when teaching my lessons, as a lot of the time we would begin with an activity where the students had to work and figure out what something meant before I fully told them what it was, as exploration before full knowledge is key to deeper learning.
Hands On Learning
In my classroom, hands on learning is unfortunately not very common, and I only got the chance to witness and participate in it a number of times. One of these times would be when my students were lucky enough to have an older Metis man come into our room and share about his culture with us, bringing many different items to share with the children and let them touch, feel and learn about! These included things like a Metis scarf, mukluks, baby clothing made of buffalo hide, and many others! The students absolutely loved this experience and I even felt I learned so much from getting to see and hold these items!
Scaffolding
Scaffolding was definitely quite prominent in my classroom, as we did a lot of leading up to and prompting with the students as they worked to learn new strategies. An example of this would be when I was teaching a lesson on storytelling where each student had to create their own short “story” of one or two sentences to tell the person next to them and keep passing it on like a game of telephone, as I had written on the board some simple statements for them to build off of such as “I was really happy when…” “I was really spooked when…” “One time my family travelled to ____ and it was so fun!” These prompts helped my students to build a sentence to share when they were struggling, and helped build the idea of how to word a proper sentence as well, as we are always working on that.