Intentional Teaching Cycle

The Connecticut Preschool Assessment Framework manual states “early childhood teaching is a continuous process of planning and observing. Teachers plan activities and experiences that help children learn. As the educators observe the students, the educators learn about the students and then are able to plan new activities and teaching strategies to challenge the students to progress further. This process is called intentional teaching”.

The intentional teaching cycle contains four ongoing phases, which are planning and implementing, observing and assessing, repeating the cycle, and summarizing. Add reference The Intentional teaching process begins to take place when teachers are deliberate, thoughtful, informed, and purposeful in his or her decisions and actions. A vital part for Intentional teaching educators is to keep up to date with the most current research pertaining to the best practice principles and then apply them to your everyday practice.

I think intentional teaching educators who have limited knowledge about a particular student’s interest should research the topic on the internet, at the library, local community and various other ways to gain more knowledge. I think this will allow teachers to engage with every child, encourage worthwhile conversations, promote interactions, challenging experiences that will encourage a higher level of thinking for the teacher and the students. My experience thus far using the cycle of intentional teaching occurred when I was working with two students in the block area.

The two students were string the blocks. One of the students complained the other student had more blocks than her. I asked them how can we find out if both of you have the same amount of blocks to string? One of the students said we can count them or use a ruler, the other said we could line them up, then the other student said we could use a scale to weight the blocks. I think in this scenario the children were able to think at a higher level mathematically by thinking of the different ways to determine who had the most blocks as well as how they could divide the blocks up evenly.