The competent teacher understands the diverse characteristics and abilities of each student and how individuals develop and learn within the context of their social, economic, cultural, linguistic, and academic experiences. The teacher uses these experiences to create instructional opportunities that maximize student learning.
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis Response
World Vision Curriculum Lesson Plans
Rationale:
Attached above are two artifacts that are meant for the enrichment of diversity. The first artifact is a Google form response that I created in the beginning of the school year of 22-23. This form is a response that students were to fill out after we read the first chapter of Nick Sousanis' graphic novel Unflattening. This book is meant to encourage people to explore diversity, possibility, creativity, and to reveal what it looks like to be a slave to uniformity. The second artifact is to some lesson plans that a colleague and I made as we taught some of World Vision's curriculum to a freshmen class. These plans were made over the course of the 22-23 school year. In these lessons, we sought to engage students in deep thought about poverty, brokenness, flourishing, physical transformation, and relationship. The activities therein are meant to demonstrate and help visualize these concepts and to help students think critically about them.
I believe that these artifacts will adequately show how I "[understand] the diverse characteristics and abilities of each student". These artifacts do not directly show what I think, but rather how I think as they spur students on toward understanding diversity and its importance and desirability. Furthermore, these artifacts are meant to cultivate experiences for students that maximize their learning of diversity too!
In these things, students learned that being different is what God wants us to be. We were designed uniquely to fulfil our own roles. They learned that it is through our relationships and our willingness to step out in faith that the lives of others are touched and changed as we deliver the Gospel to the world through our actions, words, and relationships. It is easy for teachers to see students as statistics; I know that I have caught myself there sometimes. What I have learned is that teachers need to constantly learn and remind ourselves that we are dealing with no mere mortals as C.S. Lewis says. These people that we teach and learn alongside are immortal beings made in the image of God and uniquely designed for His purposes. I constantly need the Spirit of God in me to reorient me and the mind of Christ to rule in me so that I can see my students in truth.