STANDARD #8: Instructional Strategies

The standard: The teacher works with a variety of strategies in an effort to support and
expand the communication of learners through speaking, writing, listening, reading and
other modes.

Narrative: While working with Mrs. Shields, my professor at Rochester College, I was able to
explore strategies for teaching Language Arts and Reading to students with learning
disabilities. In this class, we dove into many ideas on how to think deeply about reading. I
maintained many artifacts from this class that we practiced ourselves.

Reflection: Thinking routines helped us lay out ideas that were relevant to discussion. We
discussed what we thought of when we
thought of the word “reading”, and thought
this would be a great routine to go through a
class with. One of the other artifacts was to
step into the characters’ perspective, so after
reading a story aloud, I took the perspective
of a character and asked three questions:
“What do they perceive? What do they know
or believe? What do they care about?” This
exercise is a great idea to get students to
jump into the characters’ shoes. This will get
students thinking more in-depth about what they are reading.