The Instructional Strategies standard emphasizes the importance of utilizing various pedagogical methods and strategies to reach learners  of various skills and abilities and ensure meaningful retention of the content. The following strategies will render instruction dynamic, facilitate differentiating content and focus on students’ developing their meta cognition through reaching higher Bloom’s Taxonomy levels: lecturing accompanied by class discussions, having students work in groups and including individual work and time for personal reflection.

In order to smoothly transition from one strategy to another, the teacher will display the agenda of the day so students can clearly see how the class will be structured as well as the objective so that students can also follow how the different strategies will help build up to reaching the class objective.

Lectures, while considered “old fashioned” in theory, in practice can incorporate a plethora of new approaches and teaching styles which will successfully engage students. Incorporating visuals and movie clips as well as speeches, political cartoons and museum walk through exhibits will provide a deeper exploration of material parallel to the lecture presented by the teacher.

While lecturing, it is essential to engage students and open up ideas and themes for class discussion. For example, to introduce a new unit, the teacher could show a cartoon and ask students to discuss how it might relate to the new unit. It will give a teacher a clearer understanding about student prior knowledge as well as introduce the lesson in a way that catches students’ attention. The same cartoon activity can also be used as a closing activity where students can write a short reflection on the cartoon, now having had more information on the unit introduction material.

Utilizing pair or group work is a strategy which will build interpersonal skills and allow

students to voice their opinions in smaller groups. Introducing a Carousel Activity where students can walk around analyzing and answering questions about political cartoons or propaganda posters is a great way to encourage development of interpersonal skills and engage bodily/kinesthetic intelligence. Asking students to work in pairs on a joint technology project will tap into their interpersonal and visual spatial intelligence.

Break out group work is also a good strategy to compliment a lecture. Having students do a short research on topics covered during lecture will help keep them engaged and focused on the topics covered.

Incorporating technology through using Kahoot is a good strategy to provide a dynamic, comprehensive review that most students find engaging.

Assigning individual work is an excellent strategy to be able to differentiate instruction and also to allow students space for personal reflection. They will be able to incorporate higher level Bloom’s Taxonomy questions where they make connections between trends and issues of the past and today’s issues. The assessment of the reflective assignment proves that student are able to draw inferences between former trends of apathy and indifference with some recently witnessed apathy when talking about serious socio/political issues.

Varying instructional strategies will render Madeline Hunter Lesson Plan successful. Introducing various activities, using technology and  alternating between lecture, class discussion, group work and individual work will make the teaching and learning process engaging and meaningful. For more information on how to implement various instructional strategies, please see my reflections on “ Instructional Strategies.“