Teaching Strategies

Describe how you use a variety of teaching strategies (please identify) to deliver effective lessons.

I believe it is important to implement teaching strategies throughout the entire process of teaching. The teaching process can be roughly broken down into the three largest phases. These include planning, lesson delivery, and reflection.

Planning

1. Understanding the Standards: First, it is important to understand the standards and goals of a lesson. I ask myself when thinking of the standards, “What is expected and what does the outcome look like?” Then I think about what is necessary to reach these standards for each student. What skills and knowledge will they be using as a foundation?

2. Breaking it Down: I always aim to break down

I have eight recent years of partner teacher experience. Many of my strengths can be seen in the letters of recommendation written by my past job share partners. They have described me as collaborative, committed, motivated, constructive, organized, positive, empathetic, experienced, a good communicator, well-liked and helpful. I hope that at least most of these things are true about me because they are things I value and strive to achieve as a partner teacher.

Describe your knowledge of the Common Core Standards.

I moved to Switzerland before the Common Core State Standards were implemented but I’ve followed them rather closely and I’m very familiar with them. They outline what students should know in math and English in each grade level from K-12. These standards were adopted by the states to ensure high expectations, fairness and provide consistency when moving to another school or even another state.

The Common Core math standards address not only content but also methods and practice. There was a change to fewer topics, but with more emphasis on strategies and relating the math to real world applications. This was something I was happy to hear about because it is similar to what I saw in Switzerland, where math scores were ranked very

Just about my entire teaching career has been based on working with English Language Learners (ELLs). Aside from my knowledge of Spanish and in addition to the strategies I mentioned above there are a few more that specifically help meet the needs of ELLs in the classroom. Of course this is not a complete list, but here are a few examples.

Natural Immersion: Their school environment should be full of English. Whenever possible they should be exposed to the language in a meaningful way. This includes input such as instructions, reading, and listening to friends, as well as output such as writing and speaking.

Understandable Input: Messages should be understandable and connected to prior knowledge. This may require support such as visuals, realia, gestures, acting out, and use of intonation. I try to connect meaning to the students’ own experiences when possible and have them do this for themselves as well. As with all learning, when we hit overload or confusion, we tend to shut down. We need to understand a language to learn