CSTA is a professional organization and so we wear many hats for our membership. Here in our blog we give you updates about the state of the organization, its outreach, and the resources that we put together for you. In addition we like to believe that we also help you become better teachers. I have blogged before about the Doing What Works website maintained by the US Department of Education. They recently added a new resources called How To Organize Your Teaching which I believe can be useful to teachers both new and old.
As a new teacher, feeling a little overwhelmed at times I would imagine, this resource can help you find research based practices for meaningful instruction. Presenting the information to students in such a way that it makes use of their prior knowledge, creating advanced organizers, and many other strategies that can help you with both the day to day planning of your lessons, and also the long term unit planning in your courses. This is especially helpful for computer science teachers as we are often the only teacher in our area within our school and therefore have to do this type of long term planning on our own quite often.
As an experienced teacher I never underestimate the value of looking either at something new or reminding myself of something I learned in a methods class a long time ago. Sometimes with more experience I am better able to understand and integrate a teaching method that seemed abstract or useless for my subject when I first saw it as a novice. I also find that there is ever more research on learning and memory that becomes useful to me in my instructional strategies.
What essential teaching strategy can you experienced teachers share with our membership? If you are a new teacher, what would you like help with? Post a comment here!
Leigh Ann Sudol
CSTA Volunteer