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 …
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 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 …
As an instructor, my goal is to give students tools they can apply to novel problems and situations. Students with broad vocabularies carry well-stocked toolboxes for decoding texts. However, my work of inspiring students to engage with texts inside and outside of the classroom means I can never predict the full scope of the tools …
Overview: Teaching Formalist Criticism in a Multilingual Classroom New Criticism literary theory views the text as a unit of meaning, independent of its historical contexts, as well as the biographical information and “intention” of its author (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018). New critics examine how the words, phrases, and structure of a text contribute …
Creating Novel Assessments to Collect Accurate Student Data In 2018, a high school practicing Project-Based Learning invited me into their halls as a composition tutor and seminar assistant. Working with scholars throughout the course of the semester as they proposed, planned, and presented their independent projects as a means to meet state standards allowed me …
Subject-Area Knowledge This unit takes students through a postcolonial and class reading of the rhetoric that the World Council in Ayn Rand’s Anthem uses to impact ideologies and hierarchize society. Then, it asks students to apply knowledge of how rhetoric is weaponized to oppress people to question how the popular rhetoric of the United States …
Inquiry Units to Promote Student Learning We crafted our American Born Chinese Mini-Unit unit from a Backwards Design standpoint (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), first considering the Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings that we wanted students to be able to answer and describe after participating in the unit activities and assessments. To ensure that the unit’s …
I created a playlist inspired by the stories in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio for a Technology for Teaching and Learning Class. I was surprised at how much time I spent interacting with my peers’ playlists, discovering new music and reading their justifications for why a song connected with the text.