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 …
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 …
Composition teachers can use the WIDA rubrics to assess students’ written English proficiency in the discourse-level, syntax-level, and diction-level domains. After I determine a student’s English writing proficiency level, I reference the WIDA Can-Do Descriptors to determine which writing activities are in the student’s Zone of Proximal Development. Comparing what a student “Can Do” to …
How do I mitigate biases in assessments? This question came to my mind frequently while faced with the challenging and rewarding task of teaching a standard, preAP curriculum to a culturally and linguistically diverse student population. My students became my biggest teachers in learning how to adapt standard assessments so that students with a variety …