The competent teacher has foundational knowledge of reading, writing, and oral communication within the content area and recognizes and addresses student reading, writing, and oral communication needs to facilitate the acquisition of content knowledge.
Artifact 1
The above was a book report completed for my Literacy in the Disciplines class in my Junior year of college. The assignment was two read two books, one fiction and one non-fiction, that talk about the same topic. Since my discipline is history, I did two books that both discussed a group of women known as the Radium Girls. After reading the books, I had to do the following with each: summarize, explain how the book could be useful in teaching history, what grade levels the book could be useful for, any possible reason the book might be challenged, and my overall reflection of the book.
Illinois Professional Teaching standard 6G states that the competent teacher "understands how to design, select, modify, and evaluate a wide range of materials for the content areas and the reading needs of the student." For this assignment, I had to read each of the books myself and determine what grade level each book could be useful for as well as any possible reason students, parents, or administration might find an issue with either book being used in the classroom. I also had to evaluate the reading difficulty of each book and take that into consideration when determining what grade level the books could be useful for.
I learned how to calculate the readability of a text to help determine the appropriate grade level. We used a website called readabilityformulas.com. We entered an excerpt from the text and the site ran the excerpt through different formulas and scales and determined its score for each and provided an estimate of what grade level would be most likely able to read and process the text. It's a really useful site and I think it was incredibly helpful.
Artifact 2
Student C Journal Outline Student C Journal Entry
The above outline and journal entry come from one of my students during my student teaching. I mentioned this assignment in a previous standard. The students were to fill out an outline and then write a journal entry as an explorer based on their notes and their outline. This was a summative meant to test their writing abilities and their knowledge of the notes.
Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 6P states that the competent teacher "teaches students to develop written text appropriate to the content areas that utilizes organization (e.g., compare/contrast, problem/solution), focus, elaboration, word choice, and standard conventions (e.g., punctuation, grammar)." I gave students an outline to fill out so that they knew roughly what the journal entry itself should look like and what details they needed to include. I chose a journal entry for two reasons: because I thought it would be fun and because I wanted to test their writing abilities. Based on previous examples of student work, I knew that the majority of my students weren't strong writers. I wanted to use this project as a sort of guided practice since they mostly worked in class with myself and my cooperating teacher available for help as needed. We also had students check their work with one of us before they could submit it so that we could make sure they were understanding.
I learned that I need to be more explicit in my instructions. A lot of students thought that the last line of the outline was where their journal entry was supposed to start. Quite a number of students were also just copy and pasting information from their notes into their journal entry and so their journal entries occasionally didn't make sense; this was part of the reason why I had them check it in with myself or my cooperating teacher before submitting. Even so, some students didn't check it with anyone and just submitted it, usually incorrectly.