Teaching Methods Have Been Facing Increasing Amounts

¶ … teaching methods have been facing increasing amounts of scrutiny. This is because there has been pressure from various stakeholders to improve accountability and quality. To determine how this can be achieved in a real world environment requires focusing on tactics that can address these challenges. The way that this will take place is through: providing a description of how new opportunities are promoted, the way a Thinking Map is utilized and identifying interactive tools that are effective. Together, these different elements will offer specific insights as to how these techniques can improve the total amounts of learning comprehension.

A description of a past lesson in which you see opportunities to promote flexible thinking and encourage students to pursue additional learning

In the past, gifted students have been difficult to motivate. This is from the material and work not being challenging enough to inspire them. To address these issues, a new technique was utilized called flexible learning. This is when there is a focus on using a variety of formats to reach out to the individual (based on their unique learning style). During this process, the educator will use flexibility in making adjustments to the material they are learning about. The results are that these students found the content more interesting and they understood how they could apply these concepts in the real world. Once this happened, is the point that their underlying amounts of motivation increased exponentially. (Holzman, 2005)

As a result, these ideas are showing how flexibility in teaching methods can encourage students to pursue additional learning. This is because the format is introducing new ideas to them in way that is most interesting to them. When this takes place, the individual is motivated to learn more about these ideas and other related concepts. (Holzman, 2005)

A description of how you would use a Thinking Map in the lesson to encourage flexibility in your students' thinking and promote openness to continued learning

A Thinking Map is one particular tool that can help to encourage continuous learning and provide a basic understanding of key concepts. This is because it is focused on using specific visual patterns that are incorporated with: standard curriculum and lifelong education. The way that this will improve critical thinking and motivation, is through presenting different concepts in a variety of formats. Once this takes place, the student is able to understand key ideas (which are giving them a background for this subject). At the same time, these unique approaches are appealing to each individual's learning style. This is causing the total amounts of motivation to increase exponentially. Over the course of time, the improved flexibility will give students a reason for understanding how they can use these ideas in the future. ("Building a Common Language," 2012)

Identify one of the online thinking maps or interactive thinking tools you found and describe one strategy for using the tool with students