Instructional_Strategies

For my lesson plan entitled “classifying the five senses”, the three instructional strategies that would best fit the lesson would be scaffolding, cooperative learning, and simulations. Because I believe children learn best through hands on experience, I would also attempt to engage them in a field trip that would allow us to explore the use of our senses in an outdoor setting, such as a museum, a garden, the park, etc. prior to going in depth into the lesson. In order to integrate technology into my lesson, I would create and use a webquest (on the five senses) as one of ways of assessing each student. Scaffolding is an instructional strategy that allows me to model the given task (classifying the five senses), and after gradually shifting the responsibility to the students. By providing a task definition, modeling performance while thinking out loud (either direct or indirect), specifying and sequencing activities, providing prompts, cues, hints, links, partial solutions, guides and structures, and eventually fading when appropriate, my students would be able to understand that what I want them to do is to match the senses with a picture card. Cooperative learning is an instructional strategy that simultaneously addresses academic and social skill learning by students. Cooperative learning is one way of proving students with the opportunity to learn from one another. Because this lesson is a class activity and requires all students to participate, they would be learning from each other in terms why they chose to match a particular sense with a specific picture. It would be a team approach where the success of the group depends upon everyone’s individual efforts. The five basic elements of cooperative learning are positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual accountability, social skills, and group processing. The benefit gained from this strategy is that it allows me to effectively assess your students’ work and understanding of a topic/subject area, in this case the five senses. Lastly, this instructional strategy also offers a unique opportunity for feedback from peers and for self-reflection through the required group work, class participation, and discussions. The third instructional strategy I would use for my lesson would be simulation. Simulation is an instructional strategy that comes in the form of experiential learning. It is an instructional scenario where the students/learners are placed in a “world” defined by the teacher. This “world” represents a reality within which students interact. As the teacher, I would control the parameters of this “world” and use it to achieve the desired instructional results. Simulations can be compared in a way to a lab experiment, where the students themselves are test subjects. Students/learners gather meaning from experiencing the reality of the scenario. This particular instructional strategy also promotes the use of critical and evaluative thinking, for the ambiguous nature of a simulation encourages students to think critically about the implications of the given scenario. The situation feels real and therefore leads to more engaging interaction by the students/learners. In this lesson, I play a villain called Dr. Hungry, who is going around eating everything that I come into contact with because I think that everything in the classroom only requires using the sense of taste. In order to stop me from eating everything in the classroom, the students must all place their labeled index cards next to the objects that require the use of a specific sense before I get to that object.