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.
The pictures in this collage were taken during my student teaching semester at Thornwood High School. These pictures are of student created responses to an assignment that they worked on in class (the lesson plan that included this assignment can be found by clicking here). This assignment asked each student to go through the text of Julius Caesar and identify one word that they were unfamiliar with (we did this before we started reading the text), claim it on our class open document (once a word was picked by a student it could not be picked by another student, the open document was displayed on the smartboard for all to see), research their chosen word and define it, provide the page number and line in the text where the word appears, and provide an example of the word being used in addition to creating a meme for their word. After students submitted their responses for the activity, I printed out everyone's creations and posted them along the wall in our classroom, which is referred to as the "word wall".
The assignment shows that I can create an activity that "facilitates the use of appropriate word identification and vocabulary strategies to develop each student's understanding of content" (6L) and "teaches students to develop written text appropriate to the content areas" (6P). It also shows that I "know appropriate and varied instructional approaches, including those that develop word knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and strategy use" (6I). This assignment shows proof of this through having students create a written piece that is appropriate for our activity that has them identify unfamiliar vocabulary, research and define new terms, and use the new terms in a modern day approach in order to gain understanding and context of the vocabulary term they chose.
By having students create the submissions that composed our "word wall" I learned how to use a new and appropriate strategy to help my students develop their comprehension of new vocabulary. This is an important skill to have as an educator because in an English Language Arts classroom students will often run into new terms that they may be unfamiliar with as we read various texts. The "word wall" creations also help with comprehension of vocabulary since they are displayed on the walls in the classroom so any student can refer to them as necessary, and during my classes reading of the text I had my students be the experts on the word they did their creation on. As we read and we came across that word we would refer to our in class expert (the student who had chosen said word) to explain to us the definition and context of that word in the reading so everyone would be aware of the word's definition and use as we encountered new vocabulary---this shows that I also learned how to incorporate students creations into my own lessons.
JFGElizEraLesson.pdfThis lesson plan was written for my Edu 454: Student Teaching Seminar: Contemporary Issues course at Trinity. This lesson plan was written and taught by me at Thornwood High School. During this lesson, students had a research project that they worked on in groups where they had to research a topic about the Elizabethan Era, create a Google Slides presentation, and present their findings to their peers.
The lesson and the requirements for this research project shows that I can "integrate reading, writing, and oral communication to engage students in content learning" (6Q) and that I "teach students to analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and summarize information in single texts and across multiple texts, including electronic sources" (6O). (The rubric used for grading the presentations can be found by clicking here. The instructions and expectations for the research project can be found by clicking here). This research project shows proof of this by having the students read to perform research from multiple sources (both from physical texts and from electronic sources), they have to write to create their Google slides and to complete the worksheet given to them where the tell me what they learned from their peers presentations that they will watch, and the project promotes oral communication since the students will have to give a presentation where they will discuss their findings with the rest of their peers.
By creating this research project I learned how to incorporate multiple skills into one assignment. The research project required collaboration, reading, writing, and oral communication in order to complete and be successful. This is important to my development as an educator because I will need to be able to develop as many skills and abilities as possible in my classroom to meet the needs of my students both inside and outside of the classroom. We have a limited amount of time each day in class, so I must use that time wisely, and the more I am able to help my students develop within that time frame each day the better their chances are for success in school and in life after they leave school and enter college or the work force depending on the path each student chooses for themselves.