Artifact #4: Application to Practice Teaching Portfolio (TE 892)

Goals: 2
Standards: 1, 2, 4
Artifact #4 is an analysis of a created unit of study and actual
student work. This artifact is different than the first three because it is
application-based with a follow up reflection, which is closest to what I
am doing on a day-to-day basis. I am including work samples with this
artifact for visual support. I planned this unit of study on the elements
of a story (characters, setting, plot, and theme) for my sixth grade
class of English Language Learners, with a direct focus on one
individual student whom I called Asra. I offer the gained background
knowledge of the diversity in our classroom before teaching the
lessons. I also share the content and language objectives for the three
lessons in this particular unit and the formative and summative
assessment assessments I used. I then discuss the teaching process,
including the amount of recasting done and the purposeful decisions
behind student pairings. Finally, I reflected on how the lesson went,
describing both strengths and weaknesses of my own teaching
methods.
This artifact seemed important to include because it is a direct
lens into my everyday classroom practice. Through my teaching I want
to ensure that I am differentiating each lesson and truly reaching each
of my students right where they are. This requires knowing them well
and playing to their strengths, while still pushing them to move
forward (Goal 2). This lesson went pretty well for Asra, but it very much
reminds me how lessons must go well for everyone, not just one
student. I specifically chose to use a set of fables for this unit, because
most students can easily relate to stories with morals that suggest
making some kind of right choice, and stories with animals as
characters. This allowed all students in the class to access the meaning
behind the stories, no matter where they came from (Standard 1). I
shared with students the importance of being able to identify the
elements of a story as good readers do, and later as good writers do.
Understanding what we read, I told them, is why we read at all.
That reading comprehension piece is so huge to learners, especially
when they are doing it in a second language, and I wanted them to
pick up on the key ways to understand as much as they could
(Standard 2). Lastly, I will readdress that while this unit went well for
Asra, it does not necessarily mean that it went well for all my ELLs.
Looking back, I can see how more explicit vocabulary instruction, more
pictures, and more sentence frames could have helped my lower level
English learners (Standard 4).