New Teacher Skills Downloaded!

 Update: New Teacher Skills Now Available!

Above is a poster that my professor had my class discuss this week! When I look at this poster, I'm reminded about the generational gap there is in regards to technology. While teachers need to modernize their lessons to incorporate technology, students also need to learn how to put the technology aside and work with paper when needed.

Models And Strategies And Methods, Oh My!

Models are the broadest level of instructional practices and present a philosophical orientation to instruction. Models are used to select and to structure teaching strategies, methods, skills, and student activities for a particular instructional emphasis. The four types of models are information processing, behavioral, social interactive, and personal.

Strategies determine the approach a teacher may take to achieve learning objectives. Strategies can be classified as direct, indirect, interactive, experiential, or independent.
Methods are the most specific ways of creating learning environments and specifying nature of the activity in which the teacher and learner will be involved during the lesson to achieve the educational goal.

How Are These Three Concepts Connected?

Models, strategies, and methods all build upon one another. 
For example, if I want to incorporate the social interaction model in my classroom, I would need to enlist a strategy, such as the indirect strategy, which could allow students to work in small groups and design an experiment. 
The strategy states how the model selected will be enacted in the classroom. The method is a specific way that you'll implement that strategy. 
If you think of the example, a method that could be used could be inquiry, where student could work in those small groups and learn from each other about how they should conduct an experiment and what the results of the experiment mean. 
All three of these concepts are intertwined so that teachers have ways to execute the ideology they believe in their classroom. They're different because they are all separate components, as listed above, that work together to achieve the same goal.

Bloom's Taxonomy

Creating: designing, constructing, planning, producing, & inventing
Evaluating: checking, hypothesizing, critiquing, experimenting, & judging
Analyzing: comparing, organizing, deconstructing, interrogating, & finding
Applying: executing, implementing, using, operating, & demonstrating
Understanding: interpreting, summarizing, paraphrasing, classifying, & explaining
Remembering: recognizing, listing, describing, retrieving, naming, & finding.

This week, we put those verbs to the test and took a quiz on Bloom's Taxonomy. I found this quiz to be a bit tricky, since may of the verbs were close in meaning. However, this quiz showed me how important it is to incorporate Bloom's taxonomy in my lesson and unit plans because it gives clear verbs that say what is expected of students. This clear language will help both me and the students to see where they're at in the learning process and if any adjustments need to be made before we're ready to move on. 

Check Out This Project I Completed On the Information Processing Model!

I had a lot of fun creating this project! It was my first time using Screencast-o-matic and I found it really simple to use! I was already familiar with the information processing model, but I never connected it to teaching until this project. This project reminded me that teachers give students so much practice with concepts that they want students to learn because it takes multiple times of exposure for information to transfer into long-term memory. This insight gave me a different perspective into teaching that I hadn't thought of before.

Wow, What a Week!

This week was very important in developing my teaching skills! I mentioned that I found it very insightful that teachers give students repeated practice with skills and concepts so that students will be able to store the information in their long-term memory. I also was reminded that the upcoming generation of students is going to be more technologically advanced than ever, so as a teacher, I need to be prepared to work many different technologies so that my students can stay engaged and savvy with all the new educational technology tools! This is going to be especially important when teaching social studies because history is constantly happening, so my students and I need to be prepared with anything new that comes our way! Many of the facts that they learn in my class in our social studies lessons will also be important as they further their education, so storing key concepts in their long-term memory will help them greatly as they get older. I hope you enjoyed this post and I look forward to updating you all next week!