Instructional Strategies Supplement

Though I focused my lesson plans on cooperative learning and debate inquiry, my

personal teaching style and content area focus on Direct, Skills-Based, Inquiry as primary
instructional strategies.
Direct instruction is a natural member of this group, and the most likely method to be used by
any teacher in this current educational paradigm. History is an example of Engineering content
that can neither be demonstrated nor learned through inquiry. Through direct instruction, I
convey to students the pathway through which technology was invented. Additionally, as
History of Engineering is one of the lesser-important goals in K-12 Technology Education, direct
instruction provides high efficiency so that I may spend more time on other topics. Finally,
direct instruction allows me to conform my lesson to the needs of my learners. Exceptional
misinformation exists regarding the history of technology, and only through directly addressing
it can I contradict these falsehoods. (For example, humans knew the Earth was flat as far back
as 2000 BC! The Greek Eratosthenes proved it mathematically in 200 BC! Columbus didnt
prove anything.)
Skills-based education is easily the bread and butter of a Tech Ed classroom. Through use of
document cameras, I can even demonstrate very tiny processes without having to figure out
how to crowd 20 students around me at a table now. For example, when building Arduino
microcircuitry, the typical prototype board is about 2 inches by 3 inches. Using the document
camera and a large projector screen, an entire classroom can observe me as I teach them the
basics of using a breadboard. I can have unprecedented efficiency with the document camera,
modeling placing jumpers, resistors, switches, and capacitors onto a breadboard, while
additionally calling students to the document camera to practice it in front of the class,
providing constructive feedback throughout the process.
Finally, inquiry is the model through which students discover meaning in the Engineering Design
Process. A comprehensive practicum is a frequent capstone in high school engineering
programs. In such a practicum, students may be asked to design, prototype, test, and produce
a glider to attain certain goals. Students receive direct instruction on the principles of flight,
skills-based instruction on manufacturing, and cooperative-learning based instruction during
design. But only through inquiry can students take test data and discover how varying
parameters alters results. While I personally know how changing these parameters effects their
design, I let the students discover these through guided inquiry, so that they may develop their
sense of engineering intuition. Through inquiry, students learn the relationships between data
and form, so that they may alter their design to achieve their goals.