ELA TPE d

The candidate understands how to teach the skills for reading and comprehending complex literary and informational texts; interpreting meaning; analyzing structure of texts; and evaluating perspective.

What is this?

I annotated this article as part of a lesson on bias for 8th graders during my placement at R.L.S. Middle School. After having students make predictions about the bias of the article based on the title and the author's age, and then reading it aloud to them as they highlighted, I grouped them for a jigsaw exercise. Each group summarized part of the article, resulting in a complete summary. Finally, I put a blank copy of the article under a document camera and we identified statements with bias together. I used the above notes to point them in the right direction as needed.

Why did I choose it?

I chose these annotations because they demonstrate how I helped students comprehend and interpret a text. They were also evaluating perspective by identifying the article's bias, which is a difficult thing to do. I found it important to not only identify where bias was located in the article, but what made the selected statements biased so that the skills students picked up would be transferrable. To do that, I annotated which type of bias was at play based on my mentor teacher's lecture the previous day, as well as what clues told me so.

What did I learn?

Discussing and annotating the article along with my students mostly showed me how hard of a concept bias is to understand when it is first learned, and that more instruction was needed on the topic. The students identified some of the same statements as I had, but they also pointed to statements that were simply facts about one group of people, and not actually showing anyone's perspective or bias, and they often did not catch generalizations and other biased statements made by the author. I believe I would teach this topic a different way next time.