Domain Three: Instruction

In my tenth grade classroom, students had a summative essay assignment for our Great Gatsby unit. Students could choose one of three prompts to answer, and had to do several days of prewriting in order to receive feedback so that they could have a strong start to their essay-writing process. Students spent one day deciding the prompt they would like to answer, as well as their claim and supporting evidence for this prompt. Then, they had to turn this into a strong thesis statement. Following the rubric, I left advice and comments on student work to help them reach their goals of exceeding expectations. Students would go on to use my commentary to guide their revisions and the start of their introduction.

In my ninth grade classroom, students read Romeo & Juliet. For their culminating project, students had to write an essay about who was ultimately responsible for the deaths of the two main characters. Two of the essential questions for this unit were (1) How do others impact or influence the choices one makes? and (2) How do social boundaries affect people’s interactions with others? In order to answer these questions, students had been thinking about argumentative prompts throughout the unit, considered the role of fate in various interactions across the unit, and discussed power dynamics and community influences. This essay allowed them to bring together what we had been learning about all unit and reflect on their perceptions of the play and who should be held accountable for the tragedy.

In any classroom, teachers create routines and expectations that students can fall back on. When they know the process that we will use, they can worry less about learning the instructions and more about learning the content. In creating the units I would use in the Spring semester with my classes, I wanted to focus on teaching for social justice and promoting scaffolding for my students’ learning. To do so, I chose various tools, practices, and protocols for my classroom to build into our routines, while making sure they reinforced discussion and reflection skills that I wanted to promote across units and classes.

In thinking about what kinds of formative assessments I would use to engage my students and assess their learning with, I wanted to prioritize assessments that did not rely on typical testing style assessments. I believe that students require room to share their learning with their communities and to show their skills in ways beyond multiple choice exams whenever possible. In my analysis of different formative assessments, I focused on text-dependent questions, which are traditional, as well as interactive writing practices to teach perspective-taking and empathy, two-cent discussion protocols to promote turn-taking and conversation, think-pair-share assessments to show what students know independently and what they can reach with a partner in their zone of proximal development, and tactile timelines that allow them to physically manipulate events and reach an understanding with their hands.