Written June 2011

Portfolio Writing:Content Knowledge

Write a one-page paper in which you discuss your education and experience in your field.


I am being certified in three areas: English, psychology, and art. As my backgrounds in each area differ, I will explain my education and experience for each separately.

English

I have always been an avid reader and a skilled writer. As a child, my parents had to confiscate books from my sister and I as we drove through the Swiss Alps on order to get us to “appreciate” the view. I have gained most of my knowledge of literature through the reading I do for pleasure, often reading a book or two per week and avidly researching the authors’ backgrounds to find out the historical and thematic connections between their novels and their lives. I do not consider it "work", yet it has contributed greatly to my professional development.

Throughout middle and high school, my teachers praised me for my organized, precise, and expressive writing. I had several excellent teachers who taught me how to write effectively and creatively for a variety of purposes: to write solid, persuasive arguments about sociopolitical issues, and to write compare / contrast essays about poetry. My test scores also showed my aptitude and achievement; I received perfect scores on the English section and Writing SAT II my senior year of high school.

At Williams, I honed my reading comprehension skills and academic writing skills further. In the liberal arts tradition, being able to communicate important, complex connections through good academic writing is paramount; indeed, I took tests that were exclusively essay questions in four of my psychology classes, and all of my economics, history, social studies, and art history classes. Though I took only one English class in college, my avid reading and extensive experience writing has given me the experience I need to excel as a high school English teacher. My English PRAXIS scores deem me "highly qualified": I scored in the top 15% on the Content Knowledge exam with a score of 193, and scored a 185 on the essay.

In my year of student teaching, I developed curriculum to teach 12 novels for English 9 and English 10 in accordance with the ASD Language Arts Curriculum Guide, with my mentor teachers and others often requesting copies of choice lesson plans. . Every time I came across an unfamiliar term in the curriculum guides or lessons plans, I looked it up; as a result, over the course of the year, I built additional background knowledge in parts of speech, literary devices, and pedagogy, and acquired a new set of vocabulary for describing grammar to my students. I also acquired countless teaching materials from my mentor teachers, who were very generous in sharing their plans with me, and from other teachers in the West High English Department. I collaborated with 5 other teachers this year in creating my lessons, gaining a variety of diverse perspectives and strategies (often conflicting) on “how to teach English”. Also, as part of a ASD district-wide 9th-grade goal, I learned how to use MYAccess!, an online artificial intelligence program that provides differentiated feedback and instantaneous assessments to students for a variety of prompts.

Inspired in part by MYAccess!, this summer I am becoming acquainted with the 6+1 Traits of Writing delineated by Ruth Culham. These traits are the backbone of most English assessments, but have traditionally been taught in the lower grades. I hope to develop a more unified writing curriculum for next year that utilizes, based around these 6 traits, that involves student and teacher goal setting in each of the traits. Through this continued professional development I hope to create a more holistic, individualized system of teaching writing.

 Psychology

I received my B.A. in Psychology from Williams College in 2009, with a GPA of 3.97 in the subject. My education at Williams emphasized a strong research psychology background, and in my time there, I composed seven journal-style research papers in A.P.A. manuscript format, all based on original data and statistical analysis. In my senior year, I conducted an independent study under Dr. Saul Kassin, a leading researcher in false confessions and eyewitness error. In my experimental research, I investigated whether lying to subjects about their lie detector results increases the likelihood that they will falsely confess (it probably does!). Other areas I studied included distortion of self-perceptions and -distortions, childhood peer relations and clinical issues, psychological disorders, and neuroscience. In addition to being a student of psychology, I also have some limited background in teaching it. In the summer of 2008, I was a teaching assistant for Introductory Psychology at Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer camp, and in this role, had the opportunity to create and teach lesson plans to 12-17-year-olds on psychology subjects of my choosing. I received a PRAXIS score of 880 on the Psychology PRAXIS, missing 6 questions out on the 120-question test.

Art

I have been creating art since I was a small child, and incorporate my skills into everything from cards to class projects to the way I dress. However, I got started on it academically rather late, winning grand prize at my high school art show my senior year in my first art class. I received a B.A. in Art from Williams in 2009, with my portfolio of art on display in the Williams College Museum of Art. My preferred media include drawing, watercolor, oil painting, assemblage (3D found art), collage, monotypes, linocuts and etching. I passed the Art PRAXIS with a score of 180.