Artifact 2

EDD469 Reading in the Content Areas Artifact

Description of the Project

For my Reading in the Content Areas class at UM-D, I had the opportunity to collaborate with another aspiring teacher to create a lesson plan focused on literacy. I collaborated with my peer, Mitch Smith, whose concentration is secondary Science. Our lesson plan focuses on introducing high school-aged students to the research process through the exploration of the topic of environmental conservation.

Importance of the Project

This project demonstrated to me the subtle ways in which content areas blend with each other. It is important for teachers to consider the work fellow teachers are doing in other content areas and the common goals we have for our students regardless of our own differences. This lesson plan taught me that collaborating with a like-minded and driven peer can produce beneficial results for myself as an educator as well as the education of my future students.

Skills Demonstrated

Although Science and English Language Arts are not typically combined, working with a peer who has a much different base of prior knowledge than I do helped me to strengthen my collaboration skills as well as my understanding of literacy as it crosses content areas. We found similarities in our chosen content areas through the emphasis placed on textual evidence as well as the collection of data to support an argument, and our goal in creating this lesson was to show students the same thing.

Tasks Completed

In creating this lesson plan I...

-Collaborated with another professional to create a lesson plan combining Science with English Language Arts

-Evaluated online resources for relevance and reliability

-Considered the differentiation required to satisfy the diverse literacy needs of students

-Emphasized the importance of supporting claims to students

-Demonstrated the necessity of research in the English discipline

Attached below is a PDF copy of the collaborative lesson plan.