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 …
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 …
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 …
This multi-genre literacy assignment will assess students’ comprehension of Anthem and pre-test their abilities to align their rhetorical choices with their communication purpose and intended audience (required for the summative assessment). The exercise’s objective is to help students gain an empathetic understanding of the ways that institutions popularize rhetoric to persuade people to see the world …
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.