Portfolio


Cover Letter
Alternate EdTPA
Subject Matter
Student Learning
Diverse Learners
Instructional Strategies
Learning Environment
Communication
Planning Instruction
Assessment
Reflection and Professional Development
Collaboration, Ethics & Relationships
Cover Letter

As an educator with communications industry experience, I encourage students to bridge the critical literacy and composition knowledge they build inside the classroom with the texts and ideologies that shape their identities, values, and beliefs. The teachers and scholars whom I worked with in Advanced Placement, Project-Based Learning, AVID, and academic intervention settings sparked my passion for affording all students access to activities that fulfill academic standards through engaging them in acts of reading the world. I compiled this collection of theoretical articles, personal reflections, and activities and assessments to show how my teaching philosophies of dialogic learning, crucial literacy, and culturally and linguistically relevant and sustaining pedagogy influence my teaching practice. Click on the tabs on the left side of the page to see how my work categorizes into ten competency areas in which Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board requires all educators to prove their proficiency.

The portfolio artifacts demonstrate how I use community-building strategies, inquiry units composed of student-directed activities, and assessment continuums to develop a personalized, inclusive learning environment that exposes the value each student brings to their school. Through building relationships in classrooms where all students were failing their content courses, where most students received special education services, and where many students were multicultural and multilingual learners, I learned to view students’ actions as reactions to the learning environment. As an educator, I prioritize understanding the unique skills, needs, and aspirations that scholars bring to the classroom so that I can tailor my content and communications methods to expose the importance of English education in their lives. I know my students have engaged in purposeful learning when they can transfer the knowledge they acquired with the pen and through the page to the situations they face outside of the school’s walls. 

I hold undergraduate majors in mass communications and English. Alongside my professional experiences working with copywriters and copyeditors, my education deepened my knowledge of how writers use and subvert Dominate American English and taught me to analyze the intended and unintended ways that language impacts our lives. My understanding of how narrative choices and rhetorical strategies function in different contexts allows me to teach composition as a series of strategic decisions that an author makes and comprehension as an act of uncovering ideologies embedded within texts. As a student teacher at Prior Lake High School, I helped students construct knowledge of Dominate American English grammar not by prescribing how to write, but by asking them to describe how the construction of a sentence or a paragraph affects its message. While working at Murry Middle School, I sparked diverse students’ interests in classic texts by asking them to question how authors represent people of different races, social classes, and genders and then describe how these representations shaped their perceptions of themselves and others. These methods position learning as a lifelong pursuit and prepare students for how they will experience language in college and their careers.

Every learner will enter and exit the classroom as an author. I seek to help students consider how words shape their worldviews so that the authors who leave our learning environment hold the tools to make our world a more just place. The process of compiling this portfolio reminded me of the importance of reviewing and reflecting on my work, and of critically questioning how it advances my mission. While it took time to locate and post evidence for each section, the act of reading across my philosophical writings and my instructional plans and materials helped me see my work in a new light.

Sincerely,

Ashley Mattei

Alternate EdTPA

Follow the links to visit the task pages.

Task One- Instruction Planning (Click here to view).

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 commentary section, I explain how my school’s context, student population, and curriculum expectations factored into my lesson planning process.  At the end of each lesson plan, I include a chart that displays the differentiated supports I created for students with special learning needs, which I outlined in the teaching context. The Assessments tab demonstrates how I plan summative and formative assessments in a continuum to promote student mastery. To view detailed descriptions of how I planned, evaluated, and adjusted this unit’s assessments, visit each of the assessment pages.

Task Two- Instruction Delivery (Click to View)

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 one of my instructional narrative, I reflect on my experience teaching the first two days of the unit I planned and describe how I used direct and indirect feedback from students and my cooperating teacher to adjust my instructional materials and prompt better student learning. The instructional materials and reflections I include demonstrate how I communicated to students throughout the period of in-person instruction. In part two of my narrative, I discuss the process of adapting my unit for distance learning during the COVID-19 outbreak and provide artifacts and reflections from my time leading distance learning. As with the in-person instructional materials, these artifacts demonstrate how I communicate to students as a large group. Visit the linked communication pages to explore how I communicated with individual students and their families.

Task Three- Assessment (Click to View)

To prepare students for their summative Atlantic Essay, I created a series of formative assessments that target the same standards. The essay assessment comes after the Rhetoric Challenge Pretest and the Social Worker’s Report and Governor’s Budget Fiasco formative assignments. The Social Worker’s Report apprenticed students through the tasks of identifying an author’s rhetorical choices and describing if they were effective in advancing a given purpose. The Governor’s Budget Fiasco asked students to complete a similar series of tasks and identify an author’s purpose. The Atlantic Essay exercises both of these skills. On this page, I provide links to each formative assessment’s pages (containing an assessment description and analysis of data). I also include the summative assessment description, objectives, and rubric, and I demonstrate how I provide students with feedback on their work. I grade the Atlantic essay with a weighted competency-based rubric. The rubric, which I used for all written assignments in this unit, allows students to see their competency in five key areas. I weight the areas that the formative assessment data indicates students need more practice to master less than the other areas. Therefore, I can provide students with honest feedback without punishing them for still working on a skill. 

Subject Matter

Philosophy & Practice

As I believe authentic learning occurs when students can transfer their knowledge to situations outside of the school’s walls, I teach literature to empower students to use the understandings they co-create about language to build a more just society. Through reading and analyzing a variety of literary and informational texts and products, students build empathy for others and an understanding of experiences that are different from their own. When we work together to consider how words shape our worldviews, we gain the tools to become more responsible and intentional consumers and producers of language. As every student will author communications during their lifetime, I want to support students’ discoveries of how they can use their words to better their lives and communities.

Using Discipline-Specific Knowledge to Create Meaningful Learning (1A)

Student Learning

Philosophy & Practice

I believe the myth that the United States is a meritocracy presents a large challenge for secondary students in today’s educational system. Many teachers, students, and administrators believe that high grade-point-averages correlate with a student’s intelligence and effort. This thinking makes students a scapegoat for teachers and administrator’s failures to create an inclusive learning environment that recognizes the value that a diversity of skills, abilities, and experiences brings to their space. Students lose their motivation to participate in school because they feel incapable of mastery. As social institutions tend to value the skills, knowledge, and ways of living that social oppression privileges White, middle-class citizens in attaining, Students of Color see themselves framed in deficit-terms. This phenomenon disguises social inequities as laziness and keeps students from recognizing the root of what appears to be gaps in achievement. Until teachers give their students the tools to deconstruct the myth of meritocracy and transfer their learning to create positive change within their communities, students will face systemic oppression that hard work alone cannot help them overcome. I establish a classroom community that welcomes risks, normalizes mistakes, and supports students in making revisions so that we can all engage in this difficult and rewarding work together.

 Incorporating Knowledge of Student Learning into Instruction (2A)

 

 
Diverse Learners

Philosophy & Practice

I use the Understanding by Design educational planning approach to develop units that ask students to engage with English composition and literature content and concepts to critically consider policies, practices, and ideologies that impact their lives, communities, and identities. My lessons support students’ acquisition of the skills and knowledge that institutions value while exercising their cultural and linguistic assets to dismantle and resist the notion that these ways of thinking and behaving are inherently more academic than their own. To help eighth-grade students meet the Minnesota English Language Arts Standards for literature, I developed a unit around the essential question, “Is creating art a social justice act?”. The unit helps students fulfill state standards by analyzing The Hate U Give, tracing the creation and dissemination of a meme about equity, interpreting how a social justice artist uses color and shape to convey his ideas, and creating and revising their own social justice art. Discussions, group projects, and multi-genre writing assignments throughout the unit encourage students to draw on their experiences to help their peers see concepts from new perspectives. Because I prioritize learning about my scholars early in our time working together, I can select supplementary texts that are relevant to students’ lives so that they experience adding value to our discussions. At the end of the unit, students produce an example of social justice art in any format they choose and present their creations to their school and community. Though applying their diverse strengths and abilities to real-world questions and situations, students see how they can work together to make their school more socially just.

Each student will enter the unit I described above with different strengths and needs. This diversity will be an asset to our learning together. However, it means I cannot assume that students start the unit with specific skills or types of knowledge. I create lessons through a process of defining learning objectives, designing formative and summative assessments to evaluate mastery, and developing differentiated learning pathways for students to build the skills and understandings the assessments will exercise. Through defining the lesson’s content and language objectives, I can determine what forms of scaffolding I need to embed into the learning activities so that the lesson’s goals are attainable no matter a students’ English language proficiency or learning exceptionalities. Before I finalize a unit’s learning plan, I collaborate with students’ families and other teachers to understand how I can support their learners in achieving a unit’s objectives, and I use discussions to pre-test students’ understanding of concepts. I incorporate a variety of formative assessments into each lesson so that I can assess student mastery and adjust my instruction to fill gaps in understanding. When students do not meet learning objectives or engage in the learning community, I understand there are injustices in our classroom that it is my job to mitigate. My goal is to create a classroom community where every student has the scaffolding needed to test, revise, retry, and apply their theories.

Contextual Lesson Planning (3A)

Supporting Learning Exceptionalities (3B)

Supporting Multilingual Learners (3C)

Critical Literacy (3D)

Critical Reflection (3D)

Instructional Strategies

Philosophy & Practice

Equitable curriculums honor and sustain the lifeways that schools often erase, engage those assets to help students attain skills that dominate institutions value, and provide students with opportunities to use their skills to disrupt oppressive systems. For example, to help my students gain the institutionally-valued abilities to identify themes in literature,  analyze new media, and develop multimodal media products, I created a mini-unit around the question, how does the advertising industry perpetuate notions of white supremacy? After reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and writing about and sharing how white beauty standards impacted their self-esteem, students used a critical visual literacy protocol to analyze current print, digital, and social advertisements from beauty companies. Students cited textual and visual aspects of the advertisements to argue what they communicated about beauty. Then, they used creative-brief templates to design communications that challenged White beauty standards. Opportunities to discuss how brands targeting African American consumers use African American Vernacular English worked to sustain and value the linguistic variety while also increasing students’ knowledge of Dominate American English.

Of course, an equity-focused curriculum will do little to close opportunity gaps if Students of Color do not feel safe bringing their ideas and bodies into the classroom each day. I use applications like Equity Maps to monitor which voices and theories dominate the class time, and I ask students to use activities like Socratic Seminars to metacognitively assess how equitably they are engaging in discussion. Reflective journaling allows me to consider how I am monitoring, evaluating, and interacting with students and work to identify biases in my thoughts and actions. I share my plans and observations with my colleges to create opportunities for them to pinpoint inequitable practices I may have missed. The work of equitable teaching does not end; it is an active, collaborative, challenging, and ultimately rewarding process of striving always to be better.

Knowledge of Instructional Strategies (4A)

Incorporation of Instructional Strategies into Lessons to Enhance Student Learning (4B)

Learning Environment

Philosophy & Practice

To build a culture of learning and positive interactions, I work with students to construct classroom norms, develop community building activities that exercise students’ subject-area knowledge, and divide instructional units into seasons of training and performance. To kick-off each course, I create opportunities for students to define how respectful, productive, and collaborative learning environments operate. For example, I may ask students to fill out a “looks like, feels like, sounds like” chart or create a mindmap to identify the qualities that create a safe environment for collaborative learning. We discuss how we need to behave to realize the qualities we defined as beneficial to our knowledge and develop a list of classroom norms. As part of each learning activity’s instructions, I ask students, how will performing this task while adhering to our norms look? Because we clearly define positive working behaviors, when the students or I  perceive that our practices do not align with our community promise, we can state what we notice and come up with a strategy to adjust our actions and interactions.

To ensure student success, I create a community among students from diverse backgrounds so that every learner experiences the value they add to the classroom. I build community while engaging students in subject-area learning by stressing that our understanding of a concept increases with the number of perspectives from which we consider it and by apprenticing students into dialogic learning. My goal is to establish a space where students are not telling each other what they know but responding to each other’s ideas as they work together to construct knowledge. For example, I once asked students to write a poem or a story about their given or chosen names in any voice and form that advanced their message. I encouraged dialogic learning by asking students to discuss similarities and differences between how each author approached their narrative, structure, theme, and figurative language. We reflected on how the exercise expanded our understanding of the importance of names.

Creating a Positive Learning Environment (5A)

Classroom Management (5B)

Demonstrating Care for Individual Students (5C)

Communication

Philosophy & Practice

I know I explained a learning activity’s directions clearly when students can describe the activity’s relevance to their learning, their objective for completing the activity, the audience for the work they will create, and the deliverables they must produce. Students should be able to outline how to productively and respectfully engage in the task. Before students begin to work on an activity, I describe the task and model how I might approach it. Then, I allow students to discuss their questions or concerns about the activity with their peers and share them with the class. When students have no more questions, I call on students to model the task with me or to explain it using their own words so that I can evaluate their understanding of the directions. I assess how well I directed their work by observing how they work while they are completing the task. I look for patterns in their final products to consider where I succeeded and failed in helping them understand what I wanted them to produce.

Finishing my student teaching assignment during the COVID-19 outbreak has allowed me to practice adapting the in-person lesson plans that I designed into learning activities appropriate for distance learning. The distance-learning lesson planning process challenged me to integrate skills such as website building, digital instructional delivery, and selecting and evaluating learning applications that align with the content, students, and learning tasks. I developed these skills while working in digital marketing and advertising, designing an online career course for English majors as an academic advisor, and participating in technology in teaching and learning courses. I know how to deliver instruction and communicate with students through learning management software, such as Google Classroom, Infinite Campus, and Schoology.

General Communication Skills (6A)

Directions and Procedures (6B)

To present clear directions, I model activities and provide instructions through multiple formats (display, verbal, worksheet). View the assignment and assessment pages below to see sample instructional materials that demonstrate how I model activities, present directions, and help students understand success criteria.

Questions to Prompt Higher-Order Thinking (6C)

I organized each of the units or lessons below around an essential question, which the unit activities help the students consider. View the individual pages for a detailed explanation of how I scaffolded activities within the lesson to facilitate higher-order thinking.

Planning Instruction

Philosophy & Practice

As I want all students to produce knowledge that breaks through siloes of subject and grade, I tackle lesson planning as a collaborator. I look to the learning objectives of the classes from which my students will come and to which my students will enter to contextualize my role within their educational journey. Special educators and English language teachers become my partners in creating accessible learning materials and performance tasks. I build the content and skills the administration and English Department tasks me with teaching into inquiry units. These units pose students essential questions and provide students enduring understandings that are relevant to their experiences and to the topics that scholars of literature and composition study. Using a backward design process (Wiggins and McTighe 2005), I identify what evidence I will need to verify that students have acquired the desired understandings of the unit, and I decide what criteria I will use to assess the quality of the evidence students provide. To collect this evidence, I plan a continuum of assessments ranging from formative dialogues to summative performance tasks that simulate real-life challenges for which students must innovate a solution by integrating their knowledge and skills. The daily learning activities I create help students prepare for performance tasks. Students learn to explain and interpret subject-area content, apply their discoveries to novel situations, view a topic from multiple perspectives, develop empathy for different experiences, and self-assess their past and pretest work. By encouraging students to engage with the unit’s content from day one actively, I deconstruct the notion that the teacher’s job is to make the student competent by feeding them ideas. Students come to class with the capabilities to generate ideas that I am curious to hear. My job is to provide them with the scaffolding they need to engage in this work.

Creating Learning Plans Around Clear, Relevant Goals (7A)

Assessment

Philosophy & Practice

I build, manage, and maintain a productive and inclusive classroom community by organizing the unit into seasons of training and performance, which ask students to engage their assets and lived experiences in the pursuit of new learning. In training seasons, I apprentice students through tasks that equip them with a base-level proficiency of the contextual knowledge, self-awareness, critical interest, and cognitive flexibility they need to take risks within the learning community. The formative checks I plan throughout the training season help me identify where I need to differentiate my instruction and scaffold my lessons so that each student has access to success in the seasons of performance. I acknowledge that teaching impacts the direction of students’ development and approach teaching with the mindset that no pedagogy is neutral of values, ideologies, and relations of power. Rather than prescribing the ways that students should think through content or work through their assignments and projects, I ask students to define their goals for each learning scenario and make strategic judgments about how they can reach those objectives.

I create assessments that afford students opportunities to demonstrate their learning by applying their knowledge to real-world situations and problems. For example, to assess a unit in which we studied how the rhetoric of cultural myths influences our perspectives of ourselves and others, I constructed a performance task that prompts students to consider the literature the English department requires them to read. The assessment asks students to revisit and analyze their required texts, determine if they perpetuate oppressive rhetoric, and make a recommendation to the English Department about how the school can teach the book to combat cultural myths. I experience the most joy when I witness my students feeling why our work together is worthwhile. When scholars see their goals realized, they realize the worth they bring to the school and their communities. Teaching provides me with the privilege of spending each day leaning from curious, young minds.

Consideration of Concepts & Issues Related to Assessments (8A)

Strategic Creation & Use of Assessments (8A)

Reflection and Professional Development

Philosophy & Practice

As a White, female educator who works with diverse student populations, I take the initiative to understand and acknowledge how an education system disproportionately staffed by educators who look like me regularly oppresses, criminalizes, and dehumanizes Students of Color. I commit to engaging in a self-directed study of critical race theory to gain insights I use to analyze my curriculum, pedagogy, and classroom management practices before, during, and after lessons. Just as I assess students to understand their strengths and needs, I seek feedback from students, families, and colleges and engage in critical reflection to know how to grow my teaching practice. I maintain a teaching journal where I record observations about how students and I participated in a lesson so that I can trace how my actions affected the learning environment. Critical reflection helps me identify my weaknesses to set personal goals and develop acquisition and evaluation plans. When I evaluate students, I use conferences and survey questions to allow students to assess how I taught the skills and content for which they are demonstrating their knowledge and to suggest how I can improve my work. Before trying new teaching practices, I determine how I will collect evidence about their effectiveness and evaluate their outcomes. I join professional learning communities to expand my understanding of the craft and discover books or courses to support my development.

Reflections on Teaching, Student Learning, and the Educational Environment (9A)

Professional Development Activities (9B)

Collaboration, Ethics & Relationships

Philosophy & Practice

My professional experiences in the advertising industry taught me that effective communicators earn their audience’s attention and engagement by presenting their content in a manner that aligns with their audience’s interests, needs, and values and by delivering it through accessible, interactive channels. To spark students’ interests in the subject matter, I must understand my students’ cultural and linguistic assets, individual learning needs and abilities, and enjoyments both inside and outside of the schools’ walls.

I take the initiative to understand each student’s learning needs and strengths by forming collaborative relationships with teachers across grade levels and subject areas. These relationships help me connect the content of my courses to the topics and skills that students are engaging in their subject-areas of strength. For example, after learning a student who struggled to master literary analysis was highly skilled in visual art, I encouraged her to create a visual summary of The Tell-Tale Heart and then analyze her creation. This activity helped her transfer her art analysis abilities to literature. Students’ families also provide valuable insights into how I can help their students succeed. From one student’s parent, I discovered that I could mitigate the student’s extreme social anxiety by giving her copies of our discussion questions in advance. This change helped the student increase her participation grade and gave her classmates and me the benefit of learning from her ideas.

As one of the best ways to understand a subject is to consider it from multiple perspectives, diversity is an asset to every classroom. To show my value for each student’s culture, I recognize that I cannot assume a student has specific forms of cultural or linguistic knowledge. I use strategies such as topic journaling and discussions to pre-test students’ understanding of a topic before I teach it. I also look to quantitative and qualitative data the school collects on students to gain a better understanding of the skills, experience, and abilities students bring to the school. I research students’ cultures and primary languages so I can ensure I respectfully represent them in lessons and consider them in course decisions. For example, I can avoid scheduling projects or exams on cultural or religious holidays. I can also design activities that allow students to exercise their skills to gain new understandings. One time, I helped a student increase his knowledge of English syntax by asking him to compare it to Spanish grammar.

I commit to attending my students’ athletic, artistic, and athletic events so that I can understand who students are outside of our classroom. Through this work,  I can bring the accomplishments that students achieve elsewhere into our class as a way to build community and strengthen relationships.

Collaboration with Colleagues (10A)

Communication to Students’ Families (10B)