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 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 …
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 …
Contextual Lesson Design: Teaching Colorism and Media Analysis When I taught a student population of mostly White, middle-to-upper class learners, I often heard students use past-tense verbs when discussing concepts like White supremacy and racial oppression. The racism-is-in-the-past ideology that many White students held made the few Students of Color in the class feel uncomfortable …
Overview In this reflection, I reference the dual-processing theory of cognition to describe why many students will experience cognitive dissonance when examining texts from critical lenses for the first time. When I was working in classrooms where eighty percent of the students were white, I needed to anticipate and mitigate the fact that the vocal …
I created this lesson plan with the assistance of a colleague, Olivia Williams, as a project for a Technology in Teaching and Learning class. The objective of the project was to demonstrate our abilities to purposefully integrate technology into our lesson plans to add value to our instruction, class assessments, and students’ learning.