Right Decision Concerning the Choice

¶ … right decision concerning the choice of instructional strategy for middle school mathematics class it appears necessary to take into consideration the general school mathematics standards and the peculiar needs, behaviors and interests of middle school students. Besides complying with the standards, an efficient strategy should promote successful and productive learning. When it comes to middle school, the instructional elements, which could be extremely useful, are the following: clear routines, integrated curriculum, cooperative groups, combination of challenge and support, resorting to real-life connections. All of the above can provide valuable assistance to the teacher. The environment in the class should promote inquiry- and project-based, cooperative instruction. Engaging activities and connections with real life are sure to increase students' motivation and involvement. Thus, the challenging material will be easily tackled by them.

Speaking about mathematics, the instructional strategy should serve the purpose of attributing such characteristics to the lesson, which would expressly testify about its effectiveness. The characteristics of an effective mathematics lesson are the following: high student engagement, involving prior knowledge and experience of the students in order to secure deep understanding of the new material, modeling high-level performance, and self-monitoring conducted by the students.

Studying at the middle school is a very dynamic period of a young person's life. The students are faced with a number of changes - both academic and social. Taking this fact into account, many teachers find implementing the "student-centered approach" very successful. This teaching method requires that the students are directly involved in the process of learning while the teachers focus on their needs and interests.

In has been proven by the experience of many teachers that strategy/implicit instruction in application to middle school mathematics can yield very positive results. Therefore, in my teaching practice, I would choose this very instructional strategy.

Strategy/implicit instruction is a student-centered approach, which focuses on the general skills, rules and processes required for learning a particular concept. The chief objective of strategy/implicit instruction is to encourage the students to apply higher-level thinking skills to problem solving and use acquired techniques in other spheres. Strategy/implicit instruction holds as one of its major goals to teach students to control and evaluate their progress, thus assessing the strategy effect. Strategy/implicit instruction requires a certain sequence of actions: the teacher points out the objective, reviews the knowledge and skills required for comprehension of the new material and then presents the new material. The instructional process consists in the following: the strategy is introduced and modeled by the teacher. While modeling problem-solving with the help of the new strategy, it is crucial that the teacher clearly describes his thinking process so that the students could use the same considerations while applying the strategy. Then the students are assigned problems to solve with the help of the newly-introduced strategy.