Standard #8: Instructional Strategies

The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.

CEC standard 5: Beginning special education professionals select, adapt, and use a repertoire of evidence-based instructional strategies to advance learning of individuals with exceptionalities.

The artifact I chose was my lesson plan with accommodations. Standard 8 says “uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners,” and all of my accommodations are an example of instructional strategies and they are mostly used to redirect students to pay attention and get them the most engaged with the topic as they can be. I use differentiation in my accommodations to allow students to dive deeper into the content with skills and strategies that benefit what skills and goals they are working to achieve. I can use differentiation and different accommodations based on what the students personal and educational goals are and based on what I observe in the classroom. This also connects to CEC standard 5 because standard 5 says ‘use a reportoire of evidence based instructional strategies to advance learning of individuals’ and the accommodations on my lesson plans are examples of evidence based strategies to keep them engaged with the content.

This will help me improve my skills when I get my first job because I won’t go into teaching creating boring and basic assignments, I can get creative right off the bat and already have a little knowledge of how to differentiate for students without making them feel singled out. Accommodations and differentiation also just benefits students learning and development of skills. This assignment helped me become a metacognitive teacher because if I observe a student doing an assignment and I see them getting frustrated I can use my data to try to alter the assignment, or parts of it, so that this student can get the most learning possible out of the assignment. It will help me use my pedagogical knowledge because I can use what I know from differentiation or accommodations, and what I know about the subject/topic/unit I will be teaching, and I can make assignments for every student that will allow them to get the most learning they can from it.