In planning for instruction, the educator should look to content standards and curriculum goals for guidance. The instructional practices should include appropriate sequencing of knowledge and skill building, with plenty of opportunities for students to demonstrate their progress. As the educator delivers the instruction, she should constantly evaluate the successes and failures of the instruction and apply those learnings to modifications of plans for future instruction.
I demonstrate my understanding of this professional standard through the Student Interest Survey. Even though I had spent a few weeks with my students prior to starting my unit, I had not had many opportunities to get to know them individually. So, on the first day of my unit, I passed out this survey and gave my students a few minutes to answer some basic questions about themselves. I filled out the survey myself and posted my answers on the projector for the students to get to know me and use my answers as a model. Through this survey, I started my unit by asking my students to describe how they see themselves personally and as learners.
One technique I enjoy using in the English classroom to plan for instruction is activities that reveal individual student interests and needs like vocabulary self-selection. In vocabulary self-selection, students read a new text, pick out the words they do not recognize, and then try to define those words. Then, the teacher may use those selected words to generate a class vocabulary list for the unit of study. KWL charts are also a fantastic tool where students designate what they already know about a topic, what they want to learn about it, and what they eventually have learned about that topic. Teachers can use the “want to learn” section on the activity to guide their instruction to suit student interests.
I also exhibit this standard through the construction and implementation of my Transcendentalism Unit Spreadsheet. I created this document to create my lesson plans for the unit. The document has various tabs containing information needed to effectively plan, such as student scores on exams, InTASC standards, SOLs, school schedule, and more. All of this information is important for teachers to consider while planning lessons that effectively teach each student the necessary content and skills.
For more information about my perspective on this professional standard, please see my reflections on planning for instruction.