This professional teaching standard emphasizes the importance of using inquiry-based

learning experiences to make the curriculum both engaging and meaningful to all students. Most

importantly, each inquiry-based learning experience should not only be engaging and hands-on,

but it can also create a connection across curricular areas in addition to real-world experiences.

By helping students to develop personal connections with the curriculum, all students are able to

understand the content better. Furthermore, this is a prime example of how to adapt instruction to

the needs of both ELLs and students with disabilities. Therefore, this standard wants me to

recognize the importance behind understanding major curriculum concepts and principles in

order to provide access to a quality education for all students.

I chose a lesson plan incorporating literacy strategies into a 3rd grade science lesson as the

artifact to demonstrate how to apply this standard in practice. Not only does this lesson plan

present knowledge to students central to science, but it also uses reading and writing to integrate

language arts into a science lesson. The students are asked to write a letter to a state senator

presenting ideas of how to prevent future oil spills. This demonstrates an understanding of “the

relationship of knowledge within the discipline to other content areas and to life and career

applications.” These established connections make learning more concrete and meaningful for

the students. By allowing students to brainstorm their own ideas of how to prevent future oil

spills, the students are provided with an opportunity to learn through inquiry-based experiences.

These inquiry-based experiences and integrating reading and writing into the lesson “uses a

variety of explanations and multiple representations of concepts that capture key ideas to help

students develop [an overall] conceptual understanding.”

Although this lesson plan has not been directly used in practice, it will significantly

impact my teaching in the future. Completing research for this lesson and integrating literacy and
social science into a science lesson illustrated how to use thematic instruction in the classroom.

Thematic instruction focuses basic disciplines, such as reading, math, science, etc., around a

central topic, such as the ocean in this case. This type of instruction is simply one strategy to

make the content more meaningful to all students. It explicitly creates concrete connections for

students between one discipline and another. However, thematic instruction is merely one

example of a possible teaching strategy to use in the classroom to make the content more

engaging and memorable for students.

After considering how to create learning experiences that make the content more

meaningful for all students, I feel more prepared to teach and learn in a diverse society. ‘Diverse’

can be defined in multiple ways. For one, it can be interpreted as an ethnically and racially

diverse environment. With an ethnically and racially diverse student population in the classroom,

it is important to create a multicultural community. Not only does this make learning more

engaging for all students, but it teaches students to think critically and through other cultural

perspectives when creating connections between the curriculum and real-world experiences. If

the students learn about different real-world experiences, then it makes the content more

engaging and exciting. Furthermore, ‘diverse’ can also be interpreted as an academically diverse

environment. I now understand how to use cross-curricular connections and multiple

representations among other teaching strategies to modify instruction to meet students’ diverse

learning needs. This will prepare me as a prospective teacher to provide the best education for a

diverse group of students. I look forward to using this knowledge in my future and am confident

that my future experiences will furthermore build upon these understandings as well.