Standard #8 – Instructional Strategies
Mini Lesson One
Classroom success is reliant on the variation of instructional strategies to open pathways for students to connect skills and content knowledge. My brainstorm mini lesson aligns with this standard because it models ways to generate ideas for a personal narrative through visual diagrams and drawing based on the learner’s preferences. The lesson was curated for this student, as she struggled to choose a topic based on the initial classroom brainstorm. I noticed during our first meeting that she enjoyed drawing. So, in the lesson, I included a chart to brainstorm, then we drew the chosen event, and finally sketched a beginning, middle, and end of her story. This lesson enabled the student to begin the writing process. These activities allowed her to view the prompt differently, and by varying the prewriting process, this student was successful. Outside of this lesson, I plan to differentiate instruction in my future classroom for students, since diverse strategies work for different students.
The mini lesson assignment expands my pedagogical knowledge on lesson planning, introducing different strategies into writing instruction, and understanding how students learn. This project allowed me to meaningfully consider the learner and their learning styles to develop a lesson suited to their needs. Practicing this skill with a student helped me shape my perspective on teaching in the classroom, as I consider how to introduce a variety of instructional strategies into a classroom full of students. This assignment improves my ability to differentiate instruction during lesson planning for learners, and thus helps me identify how to do so in my future classroom. Without variation, students are limited in their success, and this assignment reinforces that belief. A variety of instructional strategies can be implemented to aid learning in content areas through the recognition of students’ learning styles.
