Showcase

Few people have the opportunity to practice this type of inquiry in a remote setting. In this assignment, I envisioned what it would be like to visit the Maori of New Zealand. Not very often do teachers engage in Participant Observation. This process encouraged me to consider the viewpoints of my students and make changes in my classroom & practice.

In this piece of inquiry, I reflected on my own perspectives and biases of technology and literacy in my journey as a student and educator. This was valuable in understanding my own hesitations for implementing technology and literacy practices into my classroom.

Continuously looking for feedback and making refinements to my teaching are things I do often. I know that I've shared my teaching habits and theories with prospective schools and principals, but I'm not sure I've ever told my students my why for teaching. This letter is a perfect example of sharing my passion for teaching with students who may enter my classroom in the future.

This artifact demonstrates how valuable self-reflection is in my teaching. Although sometimes difficult, I am open to making changes to my classroom and to my teaching practices in order to best support my students. I am continually learning new things and looking for opportunities to get better at my craft.

As a teacher of primarily African American children, this was an assignment that inspired me to "do better" for my students. Before the start of the new school year, I made it a goal to expand my classroom library to include more texts that included main characters that looked like my students. Through multiple donors and personal purchases, I succeed in making that happen.

Creating a learning theory was quite the task for me, but so rewarding. I struggled in the beginning to lose the teacher lens and switch to a learner's perspective. It required me to revisit my beliefs on how students learn best. I critiqued my current teaching practices and made adjustments so they better reflect and support my theory on how students learn best in the classroom.

This was my first attempt at creating a blog. I would like to use this in the future as a way to highlight the learning that happens in our classroom and as a way to communicate with parents.

One of my strong suits as an educator is my ability to scaffold lessons based on student need. This is an example of working backwards from an ELA standard and beginning with the necessary, basic understanding, of schema. I used this lesson with my third graders before diving into standards relating to key details and describing character traits.