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 …
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 …
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 …
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” …
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.