Entry 3-3 | Instructional Strategies

The candidate understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage

learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to
build skills to apply knowledge in relevant ways.

The candidate should complete a reflective essay demonstrating how the strategies
utilized in instruction are appropriate for meeting the needs of all students in the unit.
Three artifacts detailing these relationships and activities should be included.

It is important for teachers to plan instruction with all of their students in mind. This
means that they plan for possible challenges by forming strategies to address challenge in
advance. Of course, they improve in their ability to effectively do this with more experience
of common challenges, so for new teachers it is very important that they connect with more
seasoned peers and do some research to identify possible pitfalls in advance of presenting
a lesson.

This unit was presented to the school’s Concert Choir. Due to the variety of experience and
ability levels in the choir Ms. Stucky and I attempted to present a focused approach to
building key signatures and scales, but then also present a number of alternatives for those
who are challenged by the initial approach. With that said, the goal was to not overwhelm
the students with multiple strategies at once and in doing so confuse them to where the fail
to grasp any one strategy effectively. Strategies we utilized to teach students to build a key
signature included building a major scale, utilizing the “last sharp-last flat” approach, and
using the order of accidentals.

In retrospect, these strategies were presented, but they were not presented in as targeted a
way so as to truly benefit the students in recalling them. On a second round of this, I’d
maybe introduce a strategy each lesson, and give each strategy its own dedicated step by
step guide where students are forced to detail the process itself. I think this was a missing
link in their success at the end of this unit. While they need to develop their understanding
in pre-requisite content knowledge such as understanding the chromatic scale, I think they
also are still needing development in regard to their procedural fluency.

Artifacts
● Study Guide
○ In preparation for the summative assessment, I created a study guide for the
students which we completed in class and detailed out what they would need
to respond to on the exam. Again in retrospect, I would alter this so that it
required them to detail out (write down in step-by-step fashion) procedures
and goals for specific tasks. I would make sure they understand what the goal
is for various questions on the assessment, how to find the answer, and then
give them practice in doing so. The current study guide is more of a guide for
what will be on the test verbatim, and allows the students to choose to study
procedure. I would flip it so that the guide required the students to memorize
procedure, so that they can accurately find the correct answers even if they
haven’t memorized for the test.
○ Key Signatures Study Guide

● Video - Building Scales

○ One of the strategies we used was to teach students how to build scales.
Ultimately this strategy was unsuccessful. What I’ve realized through this is
that the reason the students struggled so much with this is not because the
don’t get the process. All of them could correctly write the major scale
pattern (wwhwwwh), and were required to do so on their assessment. The
issue is that there is a gap in application because the students do not yet
understand the chromatic scale. Because they do not understand the
chromatic scale, they struggle with understanding that there are multiple
 pitches on each line and/or space. So while they can accurately notate that a
whole step is equal to two half steps, they are unable to apply that knowledge
in action. This video shows the start of a class period as well as a student
attempt to build a scale.
○ Building Scales

● SMART Board Work

○ I used a SMART Board to relay most of this information to the students. This
gave the students an opportunity to interact with the material and build their
own scales and key signatures. The artifact below is a SMART Board slide
from the end of a lesson.
○ SMART Board Work