Weekly Investment: Effective Teaching and Language in Instruction

Weekly Investment: Effective Teaching and Language in Instruction

This week we are going to be talking about language in instructions and its effect on teaching.  Thinking back to my internships with extension I new that if I didn't give clear instructions in an activity my students would be 100 % confused and they don't want to learn. So instead I look at blooms taxonomy to create segue questions that I will ask during my lessons.

I like the idea of in a unit you ask simple questions first and then scaffold the learning by asking more complex questions later.  To me this works also during a lesson because it helps students build up what they can learn. I know thinking about classes in high school I enjoyed learning progressively.

To me to be an effective teacher you have to be willing to alter the questions you ask. You have to change up the style and types.  I really liked the University of Florida Article we read this weekend.  It reminded me that depending on the style of question students will get a different response to it.

Create Segue Questions is more than just Bloom's Taxonomy.  Its also how you handle student responses.  There are four different responses:

Student gives an unanticipated answer

Student gives an expected response

Students ask a question to the instructor

Students do not answer question

The bottom line is with these four questions responses I need to accurately react to each.  There are different ways I can approach all of these.  I can reinforce behavior, I can probe the students to explain further, I can adjust or refocus a question, I can redirect the question to another student, and I can rephrase.

How I deal with asking questions is good and all but their is another thing I also need to think about:
Why do I want my students to learn this?

Students need to buy into their own education.  This is easy for me as an ag teacher because often, students signed up for my class. But other times they are placed into my class because it fits into their schedule.  The WHY for a student is important. If they don't want to learn then why would they. Sure I could ask good questions, but in reality if I'm not interested in the activity, why would I learn?

I think that was the point with those two ted talks. In my classroom I believe that a student should want to learn.  That is where a syllabus come in handy, on my syllabus I will have the essential topics that we will cover in each unit.  Then, I'll have my students have a free question Friday where they can tell me can we rediscovers a topic, ask can we explore more of a topic, it truly is their choice.  Every weekend I want to look at these questions and if I can I'll add to next week topics to re-explore, dive-deeper, or we look at something different.  There are some things that we need to cover, but if the students want to learn more about a topic I should try to find sometime to let them learn more.

Some of the big questions I have this week are:

• I understand how to get students interested in a lesson but how do I get students to better buy into the lessons I'm teaching? 
• What are some other cool techniques I can use in classroom management that work for other teachers?
• What are some styles of questions that are used based upon ag group (9th graders vs 12th graders)

I am excited to see what this week brings in, I'm sure I'll have lots of questions.

To Be Continued . . .