The Planning for Instruction Standard highlights the importance of incorporating a meticulous planning process when teaching the curriculum. The planning process ensures that the teacher utilizes her knowledge of her students, takes into consideration the pre-assessments and incorporates various instructional strategies to adequately support and challenge students’ learning development. Three meaningful ways to successfully incorporate the Planning for Instruction standard are: getting to know students and incorporating their interests and prior knowledge into our planning process, utilizing assessments to guide our planning process and including various instructional strategies to integrate different learning styles and student interests.

Working with students from the beginning of the year will allow the teacher to not only establish a relationship with them but also be aware of their learning styles and their interests. Having a student inventory will help the teacher in learning more about her students.  The teacher can also talk to students before or after the class, learning about their interests, extracurricular activities and backgrounds.

Utilizing a pre-assessment will give the teacher a general idea where students stand in terms of prior knowledge and using a KWL Chart  will help the teacher make the necessary adjustments in the lesson planning process.

Informal, game-like reviews, such as “true or false” statements on dry erase boards will aid in reviewing information from the class before as well as help the teacher see student progress.

Various instructional strategies will not only strive to engage students and take into consideration some of the different intelligences that they might favor but they will also ensure that various Bloom’s Taxonomy levels are being incorporated into our unit. For example, students will utilize learned material to create their own personalized reflections by reading the first hand account reflections of a Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel. By reading passages from Wiesel’s book, they will be more equipped to write their own journal entries and complete their reflective essay assignment.

Using pictures, visuals, movie clips is a must while teaching History, and students are able to challenge their critical thinking by analyzing pictures, drawing connections between how primary materials talk about the event they are studying about. Movie clips engage students and are able to stimulate lively discussions.

Another strategy is to embrace a cross disciplinary approach. Utilizing English SOLs and bringing in literature that speaks on the theme of the class proves to be a vital part of student all around academic development.

For more information on how to integrate various instructional strategies in order to strengthen the instructional planning process, please see my reflections in my paper “Instructional Strategies.”