Diving into Planning Instruction

        Week 3 is over already?! The semester sure is flying by! Despite my allergies acting up this week, I think it was one of the best weeks I have had as an undergraduate at Penn State! This week in classes, we really started to dig into planning effective instruction; pretty much the foundation of teaching! We started off the week by examining five research approaches to learning including Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe, Significant Learning by Fink, Depths of Knowledge by Webb, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Student Centered versus Teacher Centered approaches to learning.

            It was interesting to see how even though the five approaches to learning were distinct in their own ways, they seemed to overlap and all fit together. This proved to be good background information as the week progressed and we learned how to design a unit and lesson plan. We learned that there are three types of lesson plans: informational, which teach new content, operational which teach a demonstration, and managerial which teach how to make a decision or answer a question. Working hand in hand with the three types of lessons are the three domains of learning: cognitive, psychomotor, and affective.

          From a teacher perspective, I can see the relationship between an informational lesson targeting the cognitive domain of learning, an operational lesson targeting the psychomotor domain of learning, and a managerial lesson targeting the affective domain of learning. As a future educator, I feel that it is important to identify these relationships and how the ideas work together. As far as learning styles, this week we learned about three in particular: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. It is important to teach to all three learning styles as not all students learn the same. Also, it adds variety to your classroom!

         Speaking of variety, we learned about a variety of intelligences that our future students will possess. These eight multiple intelligences as identified by Dr. Howard Gardner include: spatial, linguistic, interpersonal, musical, naturalistic, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and logical-mathematical. As Dr. Gardner stated, students typically learn through multiple intelligences and this must be taken into consideration when teaching. An article by Anne Guignon in Education World suggests teachers approach and adapt to this idea through their lesson plans, student projects, and student assessments.

         I must admit that I feel like I “get it.” I feel like I see how everything I am learning is coming together. I am starting to view things from a different perspective. I observe my professors and their actions in class and think to myself, “how I can incorporate what they just did into my classroom?” “How can I modify this to make it work for me while I student teach?” I can sense some personal growth starting to occur and I honestly could not be more excited! I know I have a long way to go, and that’s okay, but everybody starts somewhere!

References: Guignon, A. (2010). Multiple Intelligences: A Theory for Everyone. Education World. Retrieved September 12, 2014, from http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr054.shtml