My Teaching Strategies

As a teacher, I always strive to help each learner achieve meaningful and long-lasting learning whatever his/her abilities are. To do this, I know that my planning and teaching strategies need to be learner-centred in which each learner is actively involved in his/her own learning process. This course has helped me gain insight into various effective strategies to achieve this. I have come to understand and experience the effectiveness of such strategies by integrating them myself into my teaching. I have learned about the first important stage of the learning process in which teachers need to understand each learner's prior knowledge. By implementing this, I have noticed that it helped me get to know each student’s needs and abilities at the

Thus, this short activity helped me to adapt the lesson according to the children’s needs and abilities. Afterwards, I continued by discussing and sharing the learning intention and the success criteria by writing them on the board. (See Figure 5) At that moment, I continued with a whole class discussion about light and heavy objects. I also demonstrated and explained how the weight balancing scale shows us which object is heavy or light. By demonstrating this, the children could easily relate to the learning intentions and success criteria because they were actually seeing them being put into practice. I saw that the children felt more at ease because they were well aware of what they were going to learn and do. As Black and William (1998) confirm, when students understand the learning objectives of the lesson, they “become more committed and more effective as learners” (p.6). Actually, I noticed that this helped the children to stay focused during the following hands-on activity. This was a group work activity where they had to compare the weight of different real-life objects by using a balance weighing scale. Here I used the knowledge that I gained from the first activity about the children’s needs and abilities to decide how to group them. I joined those children who needed help the most and split them into two smaller groups. The LSA in my class was of great help as she helped one of these groups of children whilst I helped the other group. Meanwhile, I formed another two groups made up of children who displayed to have a good understanding of the topic. I still observed these groups but they easily worked independently and successfully. Actually, as soon as I gave them the books and equipment, they started to work immediately and focused on what they had to do. (See Figure 6) When they finished, they also started to weigh other objects they found around the class and