InTASC Standard #7
Planning for Instruction
The teacher plans instruction that supports every student in meeting rigorous learning goals by drawing upon knowledge of content areas, curriculum, cross-disciplinary skills, and pedagogy, as well as knowledge of learners and the community context (InTASC, 2013).
Rationale:
​Brief Description of Evidence: In the Fall of 2022, in EDUC 201, Technology in Education, I designed a virtual escape room. The theme of my virtual escape room was Halloween and the students were tasked with finding and solving five clues around the room in order to “escape”. The clues are problems that I created, connecting them with second grade math Indiana Academic Standards. Clue 1 is a real world story problem involving money. Clue 2 reviews 2D and 3D shapes. Clue 3 involves telling time on an analog clock and solving problems involving addition and subtraction of time intervals. Clue 4 is practicing counting by 5s and filling in the missing numbers on the chart. Clue 5 practices addition and subtraction within 100 to unlock a code word. Once the students solved each clue, they typed the answer into a Google Form. If the students got all the answers correct, they would escape! Located within my escape room there is also a short Halloween themed math brain break. It is linked to look like it could be a clue and is there to “throw off” the students but to also engage the students in some fun math practice, if they decide to watch the whole video.
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Artifact:
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Reflection:
Analysis of What I Learned: By creating a virtual escape room, I learned how to create an interactive digital escape room on Google and experimented with different ways I could make it work. That was a new experience for me and I truly enjoyed using my creativity to design an educational digital escape room. I also gained some knowledge and practice of planning instruction that supports learning goals by connecting the clues to academic standards. In order to use the Indiana Standards to plan instruction, I must have some knowledge and understanding of the content areas I am teaching. This assignment also taught me how to use technology to teach, in the event that virtual teaching was necessary, having this knowledge is very beneficial to me.
How This Artifact Demonstrates my Competence on the InTASC Standard: By designing this virtual escape room, I was able to work towards my competency of InTASC Standard 7 Planning for Instruction, because I was able to teach myself how to create a digital, interactive escape room and create clues that involved knowledge of the content areas, connecting the clues with Indiana Academic Standards, cross-disciplinary skills and pedagogy. Pedagogy is the method and practice of teaching. My method of teaching this lesson was through a digital format that could be used in class on class issued devices or in a virtual teaching setting. I used a variety of second grade math standards to create clues that would be solved by the students in order to escape the virtual room. Some of the clues also connected with real-life experiences, such as dealing with money and time. This experience for me personally relates to Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset Theory. Dr. Dweck believes that, “When students believe they can get smarter, they understand that effort makes them stronger. Therefore they put in extra time and effort, and that leads to higher achievement” (Mindset, 2023). From a student perspective, if they wanted to “escape” the digital room, they had to put in extra time and effort to solve the math based clues. Understanding that it would take some time and effort would lead them to achievement of the goal of escaping. From a teacher's perspective of Dweck’s theory, I was given the opportunity to create a digital escape room using Google Slides and Google Forms, which was completely new to me. I had to put in the extra time and effort in order to create something that I was proud of by watching tutorials and researching how to link documents or set up a Google Form. When I created this escape room I thought that it’s intended use would be for a virtual teaching setting, however after learning more, I realized that it could be used to gain knowledge of my learners. I could set this up as an independent assignment to be completed in the classroom and would use it to collect data on what students already know about second grade math, what they need to know and what needs to be reviewed.
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