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 …
Overview The instructional presentation and analysis below detail my experience delivering a “Six Traits of Good Writing” AVID-notes presentation to a ninth-grade English class. I describe how my co-teacher and I considered Freire’s concepts of banking (passive) and active instruction when designing the lecture, attempting to make it dialogic and interactive. Using theories of student …
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 …
In this portfolio, I provide twelve instructional that strategies instructors can engage students in considering either before, during, or after reading a text. Alongside each strategy, I discuss concepts from modern literacy theory as rationale for why I believe the activity will increase student learning. The strategy portfolio demonstrates my ability to recognize which learning …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Facilitate student exploration of how an object’s concrete features (qualities students can experience with their five senses) represent abstract ideas. As symbols are culturally specific, this activity allows students to practice the thinking skills involved in symbolic analysis without assuming students have specific forms of cultural knowledge or positioning one culture’s symbols as more “correct” …