This week, I noticed how clear directions must be with 4th graders. This sounds simple, but the amount of questions that are about WHAT to do instead of HOW to do something is amazing. Teachers need to probably provide directions orally and by writing them down. Also, implementing some sort of chain of command to finding out what to do would be beneficial for two reasons; placing responsibility on the student to figure things out, while also placing the responsibility on the students to demonstrate they are a source of knowledge. This will also cause the amount of questions and disruptions to the teacher and class to diminish greatly.
Additionally, I think that students need more variety in the lessons. Walsh always does model, guided, independent practices, except they are all the same activity, and usually occur day after day. Students need games once in a while that are conducive to concept learning, or just different types of activities for lessons to sustain their attention throughout the duration of the lesson.
When you talk about different types of activities as being important (an idea or statement you might want to include in your philosophy of teaching), make sure that you are thinking about why you are arguing for this. Part of it may have to do with student engagement (they get antsy and board with the same instructional routine day after day), but you should also focus on what type of learning and thinking is enabled by different instructional activities that might not be available through the modeling, guided, independent practice format. Also think about how you might a) experiment with these different instructional formats, as well as b) how you might document / gather evidence of how well it went. What kind of work / thinking do students produce through this new instructional strategy?
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