Teaching Strategies
Strategies are the fundamentals to teaching lessons. An effective teaching style engages students in the learning process and helps them develop critical thinking skills. Traditional teaching styles have evolved with the advent of differentiated instruction, prompting teachers to adjust their styles toward students’ learning needs (Gill, 2015). Thus the teaching strategies that will be implemented to teach this unit will involve graphic organizers, cooperative/collaborative group discussions, project-based learning, some lecture, demonstrations, learning by teaching, and experiential learning. These strategies will help to address the different learning styles of students within my classroom who are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. Boundless Education version 4 July, 2015 provides a more detailed account of these teaching strategies for an accurate description of the strategies I will be incorporating to teach this unit and the learning styles of my students it will address.
Graphic organizers are visual representations of knowledge, concepts, thoughts, or ideas, they are also known as a teaching strategy. To show the relationships between the parts, the symbols are linked with each other; words can be used to further clarify meaning. By representing information spatially and with images, students are able to focus on meaning, reorganize and group similar ideas easily, make better use of their visual memory. This strategy will be utilized by way of a Venn diagram for students to identify commonalities and differences between the Chinese and Mexican culture. Lectures, on the other hand, are often geared more towards factual presentation than connective learning. Lectures will also be given to give students explanation of important historical events, and will be accompanied by visual aids such as photographs and other forms of graphic organizers like concept and idea webs to help prompt their thinking, as well as their verbal and written language.
Collaboration: this strategy allows for students to actively participate in the learning process by talking with each other and listening to other points of view. Collaboration establishes a personal connection between students and the topic of study and it helps students think in a less personally biased way. Group projects and discussions are examples of this teaching method. Teachers may employ collaboration to assess student's abilities to work as a team, leadership skills, or presentation abilities. Collaborative discussions can take a variety of forms, such as fishbowl discussions or group projects. Students will engage in these strategies these discussions about the Chinese and Mexican culture’s journey to America and how they settled into Chicago. After some preparation and with clearly defined roles, a discussion may constitute most of a lesson, with the teacher only giving short feedback at the end or in the following lesson. This strategy of teaching also address the auditory learner along with verbal direction and reinforcement, lectures, group activities, reading aloud which students will receive from selected literature and informational text to teach about the two cultures traditions, and putting this information into a rhythmic pattern such as a rap, poem, or song will also address the auditory learner. Students will create and listen to Chinese poems written by Du Fu such as “Song of the Wagons” and Mexican American poetry written by Jorge Lujan like “Con el Sol en los Ojos/With the Sun in My Eyes”.
Demonstrations are strategies that are similar to written storytelling and examples in that they allow students to personally relate to the presented information. Memorization of a list of facts is a detached and impersonal experience, whereas the same information, conveyed through demonstration, becomes personally relatable. Demonstrations help to raise student interest and reinforce memory retention because they provide connections between facts and real-world applications of those facts. This strategy will be employed through read alouds and shared projected readings of non-fiction text, one text being “Coming to America: The Story of Immigration” which is a non-fiction text but is written in a narrative style, and explains the traditions and locations of the Chinese and Mexican cultures in America and their history.
Learning by Teaching: in this teaching strategy, students assume the role of teacher and teach their peers. Students who teach others as a group or as individuals must study and understand a topic well enough to teach it to their peers. By having students participate in the teaching process, they gain self-confidence and strengthen their speaking and communication skills. Students will work within this teaching strategy when they map out areas on a Chicago map where the Chinese and Mexican neighborhoods are, and teach their map reading and mapping strategies to their peers within their groups.
Experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience, "learning from experience." Experiential learning focuses on the learning process for the individual. An example of experiential learning is going to the zoo and learning through observation and interaction with the zoo environment, as opposed to reading about animals from a book. Thus, one makes discoveries and experiments with knowledge firsthand, instead of hearing or reading about others' experiences. This strategy can and will be connected to project based learning where students will develop a hands-on project that they will explain connecting all of the information they have learned about the Chinese and Mexican cultures that they can report to the class. These interlinked methods of teaching will address the kinesthetic learners (also known as tactile learning) which is a learning style in which learning takes place by the student carrying out a physical activity, rather than listening to a lecture or watching a demonstration. These kind of learners can handle doing two or more task at one time and have good hand to eye coordination. Another task that students will engage in that will also address experiential learning is when they take their field trip to the Chinatown to observe the Chinese culture in their neighborhoods. Students will tour their town and sketch out their architectural designs and written language (characters for writing) and make note of their behaviors and language they speak. They will do the same activity for their trip to the Mexican neighborhood and visit the Mexican museum of art.
Teaching strategy is the method used to deliver information in the classroom, online, or in some other medium. Effective teaching strategies help to activate students' curiosity about a class topic, engage students in learning, develop critical thinking skills, keep students on task, engender sustained and useful classroom interaction, and, in general, enable and enhance the learning of course content. The goal of a teaching strategy is to facilitate learning, to motivate learners, to engage them in learning, and to help them focus. There is no one best strategy; we can select from several instructional strategies for just about any subject. It is important to vary instruction to not only keep the students' interest, but also to allow them to interact with content in a variety of ways that appeal to various learning styles (Boundless Education, 2015). The various teaching strategies that I have included along with the learning styles of my students will assist me in teaching the content objectives for this unit to provide students with an assortment of opportunities for learning about the Chinese and Mexican cultures immigration to Chicago, traditions, and geographical location.
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