Teaching Glossary Terms and Classroom Connections

For today's blog entry I looked around on the teaching website https://www.teach-nology.com/glossary/ and browsed through and learned more about some teaching terminology and terms. The two terms I picked out to write about today are "Concept Mapping" and "Initiation Phase". I will be explaining what these terms are and how I personally saw them being demonstrated in my internship classroom earlier this semester.

Concept Mapping

"A learning strategy used to aid students in organizing information; concept maps take a variety of forms suited to the type of information and activity". 

Concept mapping is basically a way for students to organize their notes or content information in a way that is simpler and easier for students to remember, understand, and visualize; some examples are...

In my internship classroom this semester the 7th-grade students used this technique quite frequently, at least a couple times a week when taking notes, and I observed it truly helped them understand the material quicker. It also encouraged the practice of actually enjoying taking notes as well, which is a skill that they will definitely need as they move through their educational career.

Initiation Phase

"In a lesson, this is the opening stage where the instructor begins the lesson".

You will observe this term in almost every classroom, almost every day. The initiation phase, or sometimes also called the anticipatory set, is essentially the "hook" or the beginning/opening activity at the start of a class period. 

What I loved so much about how my internship teacher structured her initiation phase was that it was not only used to get the students interested and excited about what they were learning that day, but she also used it to build relationships with her students and expand their knowledge about the world as a whole. She often used this time to ask her students questions about their lives or their opinions so they could all get to know each other better, which as Ron Clark says; relationships are the foundations of teaching and are SO important! She would often also play different current event news clips as to broaden the student's knowledge of the world, which is very important with social studies students, plus students thoroughly love watching videos so it also gets them engaged at the beginning of the class and for the rest of the day.