Domain #3 - Instruction

Instruction is about what to be aware of when you are teaching. During instruction, you must be thinking of how to keep your students' attention and informally assessing them through questions. You must not go on autopilot when teaching and constantly remind yourself of how to engage your students. You must monitor student learning through your questions and their responses, their body language, and how engaged they are during activities. Being able to concentrate on so many different aspects of learning while teaching is no easy feat, but it is important to ensure you are teaching your students well.

Components:

• Communicating with Students
• Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques
• Engaging Students in Learning
• Using Assessment in Instruction
• Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness

5 ways I can demonstrate this domain in my classroom:

• I can send home positive postcards to students specifically and their parents to affirm the student adds to the leaning environment and is a pleasure to have in class. Positive notes home to show you appreciate a student goes a long way!
• I can ask many questions throughout my lessons and go beyond the lesson with my questions. I can ask my students to draw conclusions or ask about broader implications of a topic. I can also have my students discuss subjects among themselves and walk around to listen to their ideas.
• I can engage my students in their learning through interactive activities. We can act out vocabulary words, experiment in science within the classroom and outside, and we can reenact historical scenes. These episodic events will help them remember the content they learned better and give them a few memories to keep down the line in the future.
• I can use quizzing games like Kahoot or Quizizz to make short quizzes about the day's lesson to gauge what my students learned that day. I can go back over the concepts that were mostly missed or hard to understand the next day. I could even just give my students an exit ticket that asks what their confidence level on the lesson is, what parts of it they did or didn't understand, and ask them for what I need to improve upon or expand upon for teaching the next year or the next day.
• I can shift around my week's schedule if we need more time on a specific aspect of a subject and can reroute my lesson(s) if necessarily in order to facilitate better student learning.