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 …
Overview In this analysis, I apply my understanding of theories of knowledge acquisition form Piaget, Vygotsky, and Freire to consider how the theories of learning to which instructors ascribe will impact their perceptions of their curriculum’s likelihood to reinforce the false notion of White supremacy and dehumanize Students of Color. I use Vygotsky’s theory that …
Overview In this paper, I discuss how a classroom context wherein I am fortunate enough to work with a co-teacher would impact my approach to lesson planning and instruction. Specifically, I discuss how collaborative teaching can support multilingual learners. Collaborative Lesson Planning and Instruction After reading Honigsfeld’s and Dove’s (2015) co-teaching and collaboration articles and …
Overview In this reflection, I discuss how the knowledge I gained about Second Language Acquisition through completing my Masters of Education program will influence how I differentiate instruction to support students acquiring English as an additional language. I describe Carlos, a student I met while volunteering in an academic intervention program, and discuss how my …
Overview As a White educator, my commitment to disrupting oppressive education practices must be as internal as it is external. I must recognize my own biases and take responsibility for how my actions perpetuate racist systems. Educating myself about how my White identity shapes my worldviews is an important part of that process. In the …
To plan lessons that bridge students’ strengths with content-area concepts, I create learner profiles that consider students’ experiencial, social, linguistic, cultural, and academic assets. I find asset-based profiles a useful tool in classrooms with culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. The ability to read across profiles and consider profiles alongside lesson objectives helps me choose …
In the below paper, I describe a reading comprehension observation, evaluation, and analysis I performed to develop strategies to help a student reading below grade-level better access, comprehend, and perform higher-order thinking activities on course texts. The student I worked with had previously progressed out of ESL programming, but the tactics I outline are appropriate …
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 …