Internship | HOPE Principle Reflection

HOPE Principle H2: Honor Student Access to Content Material

The HOPE Principle H2 calls on teachers to honor student access to content material. Giving students access to content material means a teacher is planning lessons and assessments that effectively engage students, provide manageable goals, and support learning needs through flexible and adaptive methods. Throughout this course, I have examined several methods which should be integrated into planning, instruction, and assessment processes in order to honor student access to content. While student-teaching these past weeks, I have become more and more mindful of how and when I integrate the content methods examined in this course. The 9 best-practice methods (listed below) work together to provide students an accessible and engaging learning experience.

1. Assess student prior knowledge – When I assess prior knowledge, I reveal strengths and weaknesses, knowledge gaps or misconceptions, and student interests and questions. I use the information to plan lessons, activities and assessments which consider the students prior knowledge, and make use of it to engage the students with content they are ready for, and tasks that fit within their general skill level and interests.
2. Incorporate student assets – When I design lessons and activities, and in the midst of instruction or assessment, I have found that incorporating bits of information about students, the common culture, or their school culture, students engage more with the content because they connect to it.
3. Identify academic language – When I set learning targets and create assessment tools, I have include academic language learning as a critical feature. I model its use and provide impetus for students to practice speaking, writing, and thinking with academic art language.
4. Apply scaffolding techniques – When I design my lessons, I consider how I will first provide content material, building new skills and knowledge by supporting learning and then gradually transferring responsibility to the student as they apply the content to research, plan for, produce, and reflect on original art works.
5. Support student learning – When I design lessons, I make sure that I align the learning targets with the practice supports and assessment activities. I work hard to very clearly state what students are working to achieve, and how they can provide evidence to show they are learning. Students who have specific learning needs are given additional supports or adapted instruction, and students who excel are sometimes placed into a supportive role as a peer mentor to students who need additional help. Supporting learning can also mean offering options or providing multi-modal access to content.
6. Deepen student comprehension – When I engage students in content, I provide opportunities for deeper understanding through inquiry, practice, assessment tasks, and reflection activities. I ask students to rationalize, analyze, evaluate and reevaluate the choices they make as they follow the creative process.
7. Provide feedback – When I introduce new content, support understanding, assess learning, and show interest in students I am providing feedback. I ensure that students understand my feedback and that they can use it in some way to move forward in their learning process.
8. Have students reflect – When students are learning I ask them to reflect on what they are thinking, I ask them why and how, I ask them to think about their thinking. Through inquiry, and formative assessment activities, students reflect on their choices, process, and help them utilize their reflection to improve their own performance.
9. Reflect on student learning – Anytime I can take a moment to reflect on learning outcomes I do. I consider what I see, hear, read, and am told by students to evaluate the successes of my instruction and content delivery methods. When I am challenged by how to proceed, I reconsider my original intentions, and plan to adapt or realign instruction and activities to provide access for students to all targets and content. (EDU 6136 Content Methods, 2014)

This is an example of a Lesson Sequence for Visual Art I am planning to teach, which I feel effectively integrates most of the above best-practices for providing accessible content.

As I continue to learn best-practices for instruction and content delivery methods, I have chosen a few key areas on which to focus. I feel that it is most critical for me to be assessing prior knowledge (1), providing effective feedback to students (7), and reflecting on my teaching and on my assessment of student learning (9). I consider these three areas to be foundational to providing students access to content material. When I know what students know or believe about a topic (prior knowledge) I can plan to target learning at what is missing or inaccurate, and I can build of knowledge and skills students already have. When I let students know how they are performing (providing feedback) I must ensure that it is explicit, directive, understood, and aligns with the learning targets I have set. When I reflect on the outcomes of lessons, activities, or assessments, I am affecting my own ability to create a path toward accessible content and achievable goals for my students. The next steps for me are to make these methods concrete in my teaching practice, and then focus on another set of instructional methods, as outlined above, bringing me closer to becoming an effective and engaging art teacher.