Before I began two courses about internet-based teaching this semester, I felt that blended and digital instruction was a trendy concept that worked best in theory, not practice. As I read the first half of Neil Selwyn’s (2014) article tootled “The Internet and Education,” I could see the possibilities the internet afforded: it reduces constraints …
For much of the 2020-2021 school year, teaching and learning with the internet was a necessity versus a pedagogical choice. The learning model (distance, hybrid, or in-person learning) our school was engaging in most heavily determined the technology tools and platforms I incorporated into my lesson plans. In hybrid environments, where learners were asynchronous and …
Below, I detail my experience teaching a unit on rhetoric to four sections of a PreAP English course located in the suburbs south of the Twin Cities. To learn more about how I planned this unit to align with the learning goals of the school, course, and students, visit the unit planning page. In part …
Overview Observation of students’ reactions and behaviors is one of the main tools I use to understand if I need to adjust my instructional strategies to promote better student learning and to gain data that helps me decide how to modify a lesson. When first tasked with delivering asynchronous instruction during the COVID-19 outbreak, I …
Overview The instructional presentation and analysis below detail my experience delivering a “Six Traits of Good Writing” AVID-notes presentation to a ninth-grade English class. I describe how my co-teacher and I considered Freire’s concepts of banking (passive) and active instruction when designing the lecture, attempting to make it dialogic and interactive. Using theories of student …
Overview Every action within the classroom is also a reaction; it is a response to the other bodies and ideas in the space, and therefore, it is a feedback tool I can use to improve how I am encouraging those bodies and thoughts to interact. Process journaling helps me trace behaviors to contexts. On one …
Overview In this analysis, I describe and reflect critically on how an instructor’s process for managing discussions can promote or impede dialogic learning. I include interaction maps from a class discussion I witnessed about a Shakespeare text to trace the teacher’s movements and questioning strategy to patterns in the type of students that engaged in …
As part of my student teaching experience, I designed this PreAP curriculum-aligned unit to teach to tenth-grade students in a suburban high school. Below, I provide the teaching context, daily lesson plans, instructional materials, and assessment plans for the unit. In the context section, I explain how my school’s context, student population, and curriculum expectations …
Overview As a new student teacher tasked with teaching a unit about how authors of informational texts use rhetoric to advance their messages, I knew I would have to gain an understanding of my students’ starting knowledge of rhetorical terms and abilities to analyze texts rhetorically. While I had some existing assessment data to work …
Overview In the reflection below, I examine an incident I encountered while tutoring and eighth-grade student and describe what this incident taught me about how young teen’s desire to explore and further define their identities impacts the way they engage with subject-area content. Applying my learnings from the experience on which I reflect, I present …