a. Effective instruction Effective instruction are those that have been shown to exert a positive effect on student achievement.

These include planning for content coverage and using effective teaching strategies. Effective instruction have been demonstrated to be positively associated with achievement of all students in inclusive settings. Planning for content coverage is a critical component of teacher effectiveness. Teachers must consider carefully the role of objectives, scope and sequence, curriculum, pacing, and types and levels of learning when planning instruction. Types of learning include discrimination, factual, procedural, rule, conceptual, and problem solving/critical thinking. Levels of learning include acquisition, fluency, application, and generalization. Students can provide either identification or production responses. Consideration of types and levels of learning can be beneficial when planning instructional strategies. Effective teaching strategies include maximizing academic time-on-task, making effective teacher presentations, monitoring practice activities, review, and formative evaluation. All are critical components of effective teaching for all students. Effective teacher presentations use the SCREAM variables including structure, clarity, redundancy, enthusiasm, appropriate rate, and maximized engagement. Additionally, effectively used questioning, feedback, and praise are important contributors to student learning. Practice activities provide opportunities for students to solidify and apply their learning. Practice activities can include guided practice, in which teachers closely monitor student responding, and independent practice, in which students work more independently. Frequent review allows for long-term learning. Formative evaluation refers to collecting student performance data throughout the course of instructional units, so that instructional decisions&emdash;such as increasing academic engaged time&emdash;can be made while instruction is still ongoing. A sample model of a lesson based on teacher effectiveness variables includes daily review, statement of objective, presentation of information, guided practice, independent

practice, and formative evaluation. Model lessons are based on careful consideration of objectives, scope and sequence of instruction, pacing, curriculum materials, and types/levels of learning expected for successful achievement of all students.

b. Understanding students

c. Communicating Communicating is exchanging information with another person and there are many ways in which this can be done. The most obvious is by speaking and this can be either face to face or by using a medium such as a phone. It is also possible to communicate via the written word. Examples of ways of doing this are: By letter By email By fax By memo Communicating can also be done non-verbally by using body language. The most obvious examples of this are things like nodding and shaking the head to indicate yes and no; shrugging the shoulders to show that you don't know something; or by facial expressions, but it can also take place by other gestures. Some of these can be very subtle and very often are a subconscious way of showing what we are feeling, and some people are much better than others on picking up on these cues.

d. Creating learning environments Learning environments are typically constructivist in nature, engaging learners in "sensemaking" or reasoning about extensive resource sets. Learning environments typically include

four components: an enabling context, resources, a set of tools, and scaffolds (Hannafin, Land, & Oliver, 1999). Authentic or realistic contexts are provided to motivate learners, and typically take the form of complex, full-scale problems representative of real-world tasks. To help students understand their complex problems, extensive resources can be provided. A truly open-ended learning environment would involve students in independent research to find and select their own relevant resources (e.g., in the campus library, on the internet). In some learning environments, however, selected resource sets are provided to learners. A full set of tools should be provided to help learners process information, manipulate data, and discuss the data. Scaffolds should also be present to bolster student problem solving as needed. These can take many forms from tools to teachers to student peers.

According to Jonassen, et al. (1999), meaningful learning is:

Active (manipulative): We interact with the environment manipulate the objects within it and observe the effects of our manipulations. Constructive and reflective: Activity is essential but insufficient for meaningful learning. We must reflect on the activity and our observations, and interpret them in order to have a meaningful learning experience. Intentional: Human behaviour is naturally goal-directed. When students actively try to achieve a learning goal that they have articulated, they think and learn more. For students to experience meaningful learning, they must be able to articulate their own learning goals and monitor their own progress. Authentic (complex and contextual): Thoughts and ideas rely on the contexts in which they occur in order to have meaning. Presenting facts that are stripped from their contextual clues divorces knowledge from reality. Learning is meaningful, better understood and more likely to transfer to new situations when it occurs by engaging with real-life, complex problems. Cooperative (collaborative and conversational): We live, work and learn in communities, naturally seeking ideas and assistance from each other, and negotiating about problems and how to solve them. It is in this context that we learn there are numerous ways to view the world and a variety of solutions to most problems. Meaningful learning, therefore, requires conversations and group experiences.

To experience meaningful learning, students need to do much more than access or seek information, they need to know how to examine, perceive, interpret and experience information.

e. Adapting instruction for students with special needs f. Evaluating student learning Many educators view assessment of student learning as a comprehensive task. However, evaluating a students performance can actually be done in a formative and/or a summative way. Formative evaluation is a process of ongoing feedback on performance. The purposes are to identify aspects of performance that need to improve and to offer corrective suggestions. The formative version of learning assessment, deals with the different ways teachers can evaluate students based on the material presented in class. The students themselves get to see where they need to concentrate more efforts on then use the information collected from this type of assessment. The teachers can also use the results to focus in on the areas where extra time should be spent on instruction. Summative evaluation is a process of identifying larger patterns and trends in performance and judging these summary statements against criteria to obtain performance ratings. You must rely upon your evidence and perceptions to justify ratings. The summative version of assessment of learning gives teachers the opportunity to grade work that evaluates the quality of the students work through different assignments. Not only is this data graded for accuracy but also how well the student translates their knowledge of the subject matter at hand. The bottom line is that assessment of learning is what many educators do to determine whether a student is ready to pass to the next level of study. It is not always at the end of the year before grade promotions. In fact, it can and should happen frequently throughout the year and

should incorporate more than just grades but also level of competency in other areas of learning as well. Evaluation lies at the heart of improving teaching and learning. However you look at it, change only comes about when you determine to make a change. In order to come to that determination, you must first consider your current practice, and come to the conclusion that change is necessary. If you don't want to change your practice, or to improve your practice, if you don't want to improve the learning experience of your students, then there is no need to evaluate their learning experience or the learning environment you have created for them. However, if you are eager to improve the learning experience of your students, then it is important for you to consider where change can best be effected. It is quite valuable to begin by evaluating that experience. Appropriate and effective evaluation can lead to appropriate and effective change and development. Indeed, evaluation should not be seen as something additional to your teaching. It should be seen as an integral part of the design and delivery of a program of teaching for high quality student learning.