THE INSTRUCTIONAL CONTEXT

Your Take One! entry begins with a section called the Instructional Context. The purpose of this section is to give the assessor a "snapshot" look at your class and teaching situation. This is where you start to build the evidence that you know your students and their learning needs. You will demonstrate your knowledge of students through examples of your responsiveness to a few featured individuals or groups of students who present teaching issues. In later sections, you will use the information in the Instructional Context to show how it guides your teaching decisions. The assessor who later reads your entry will look for a direct connection between the information in the Instructional Context and your selected goals and strategies.

A word used frequently in the prompts of this and other sections is RELEVANT. Since you can't possibly include everything you know about your class, you need to make choices about what information to include in the limited space available. National Board considers a feature to be RELEVANT if it impacts the teaching choices you make. Your specific teaching context has a direct impact on how you teach. The choices you make for your students, at this time, in this place, are very different that the choices you might make if you taught in a different school in another part of the district. You make many teaching choices for your students that are different than decisions teachers at Cochise, Kiva, or Copper Ridge would make for thier population of students.

The Instructional Context is essentially the same for all certificates (but read your own carefully - there are minor differences), so let's examine the Instructional Context prompts for content and writing style:

• What are the number, ages, and grades of the students in the class featured in this entry and the subject matter of the class? This is straightforward description, similar to what you would write about your Target Group in a SPAR if you have written one of those: just the facts, please (yes, in sentence form).

• What are the relevant features of this class that influenced your instructional strategies for this sequence of instruction [unit or series of lessons]: ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity: range of abilities of the students, personality of the class? This is mostly description [just the facts] with some analysis implied. You are asked to make a judgement as to which features have an impact on your teaching decisions.

• What are the relevant characteristics of the students with exceptional needs and abilities that influenced your planning for this period of instruction (for example range of abilities,cognitive, social/behavioral, attentional, sensory, and/or physical challenges)? This is a combination of description and implied analysis like above.

• What are the relevant features of your teaching context that influenced the selection of this instructional sequence? (available resources, scheduling classes,room allocation [own room, shared room, itinerate space], whole class, small group, 1-1, pull out, inclusion, etc.) Here you are making decisions about the aspects of your teaching context (analysis) that influenced your teaching of the unit or series of lessons used for this entry, then describing them.

Your planning and analysis later in the entry will refer back to this context, so be sure to respond clearly to each question. It is also important to identify specific students, their learning characteristics and needs. Note that exceptional needs may not refer only to students with special education needs. It can also refer to the unique qualities/needs of individual students that you will demonstrate your understanding of and response to throughout the entry.

Writing the Instructional Context is a good way to just get started writing. You may revise it several times before considering it finished, but writing it out will get you thinking about your students' needs and your own teaching context.