Written June 2011

 

Portfolio Writing:

Developmental Levels

 

Write a paper in which you discuss the appropriateness of your units for the particular age group in terms of the normal social, emotional, and intellectual maturation of the age group.

 

My favorite  lesson detailed in “Podcasting Lessons” involves asking students to go out into the community and interview an Elder about the Elder’s experiences growing up. I like this project because it not only involves students in the process of producing and editing a podcast; it helps them to connect to adults in their community and gives them perspective on the past and their value as a teen as a transmitter of history. Teens are at a stage of development in which they are trying to figure out who they are within their society; I hope that projects like these will give them perspective on their own values, bolster their social skills, and let them know the important roles they play in society, even anonymous ones.

 

With a similar goal, the anticipatory set from Lesson 1 of the  “Moral Ambiguity: Good and Evil” unit prepares students to empathize the crotchety old “Eddie”, the hero of the Five People You Meet in Heaven. It starts with a Read Aloud of “The Sneetches”, then a stand-up-sit-down activity, and then asks students to reflect on negative stereotypes held by teens about the elderly and the elderly about teens. This exercise helps students learn to interpret and navigate their social world, with an eye toward clarity and empathy rather than prejudice. Hopefully, this will assist my students later on in their lives, in relating to family members, romantic partners, employers, and complete strangers.

 

Intellectually, students are reaching an age in 10th grade where they are become more able to grasp abstract concepts. However, figurative language, including similes and metaphors, are still a challenge for many of these students. In my “House on Mango Street” curriculum, the primary skills focus is in helping students to understand, interpret and value figurative language, including similes and metaphors. In their Reading Guide workbooks, the exercises I have written have students start to identify, interpret, and write figurative language before I even introduce the concept and terminology. Step by step, we work up to writing “literary device analyses” in which students identify similes and metaphors and explain how they contribute to the passage using evidence. Their knowledge culminates in the production of acrostic name poems, in which students describe the meaning of their own names using the five senses and figurative language.

 

With this unit, I am not just working on intellectual skills; I not only want to teach my students to be more effective writers and more passionate readers, I also want them to learn to be more imaginative, about their own lives and the lives of those around them. I want them to know how to care about themselves and care for others. The student-centered “name poem” was one of the most successful projects I assigned this year. It provided me with an opportunity to connect with students on an individual level. Students enjoy expressing themselves, and I enjoy those assignments most that teach me something new about my students; they provide me with a new way to address and respond to my students.

 

Both social and emotional skills were employed when students presented their name poems to the class and responded to one another positively. With my 9th graders, I do a daily warm up exercise that has a similar effect: students write a paragraph in response to a prompt, ranging from questions such as “What is your favorite color and why?’ to “How do you think you could be a better friend?” I then take a survey of answers from the class, as students’ classmates respond and contribute. By creating a classroom community that is caring and accepting, and communicating to my students my personal investment in them, they will not only want to learn from me, but will learn to trust in, invest in, and contribute to a community.