goal-4

4.c. Refer to Evaluations

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:44:50 +0100

Please refer to my Final Intern Evaluation for evidence that I have met performance 4.c.. For Goal 4, I received a rating of “5”: “Exceeds Goals”.

Intern Evaluation, Spring 2011 (Goal 2)
Please note that this final evaluation summarizes all relevant material from my Fall Intern Evaluation.

4.a. Refer to Evaluations

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:44:22 +0100

Please refer to my Final Intern Evaluation for evidence that I have met performance 4.a.. For Goal 4, I received a rating of “5”: “Exceeds Goals”.

Intern Evaluation, Spring 2011 (Goal 2)
Please note that this final evaluation summarizes all relevant material from my Fall Intern Evaluation.

4.a. & 4.b. Portfolio Writing: Connecting Content

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:41:21 +0100

Written June 2011

Portfolio Writing:

Connecting Content

Write a 2-3 page paper in which you reference appropriate sections of your unit plans in the appendix. Specifically, point out those areas in the unit plan which:

· Connect the content area to other content areas

· Connect the content area to practical situations encountered outside school.

· Demonstrate your knowledge of the structure of the curriculum.

· Demonstrate your knowledge of the tools of inquiry.

My “Cultures at a Crossroads” Unit makes connections between English and social studies content areas and provides students with social skills and letter-writing skills useful, if not crucial, in their everyday lives.

In this unit, we used To Kill a Mockingbird as a jumping-off point for discussing the civil rights movement in the American South. We then used the American civil rights movement as a jumping-off point for exploring the Alaskan Civil Rights movement.

The students learned valuable social skills in how to interact with Elders and how to participate in a storytelling when visiting speaker “Grandma Jane” came to visit. Jane Phillips Cason, age 83, is the grandmother of six West High graduates, and three future West High graduates. She lived in the Jim Crow South, and moved to Alaska long enough ago to have voted in Alaska’s first state election, raising three sons in Homer. She taught school for over 30 years before retiring. Before she arrived, we reviewed specific skills surrounding the proper etiquette for having speakers, including how to politely and audibly ask questions, respecting the views of our speakers and our Elders, proper listening behavior, and when to ask a new question. They were informed that, depending on the direction that Grandma Jane went in her conversation, they might or might not get the opportunity to ask questions.

This unit places heavy emphasis on the skill of letter writing. The students first learned the proper structure of thank you notes after Grandma Jane’s talk. In their letters, students were charged with noting one story, fact, or anecdote that resonated with them, and telling Grandma Jane a little bit about themselves. Writing thank you letters is an invaluable skill in the professional world, and many of my students had never composed one before! They did an excellent job – so excellent, in fact, that I photocopied all of their notes to save – as, of course, the originals were bound, with pictures of the students, and given to Grandma Jane in thanks.

The culminating project of this unit asks students to compose a letter, as if they were Alberta Adams (a famous figure in Alaskan Civil Rights), to the then-territorial governor. This task emphasizes the role that protest letters can play in a democracy, an important lesson in civics. It also teaches students the real-life skills that they need to write a letter to the editor or to their congressperson.

Similarly, the “Uniquely Alaskan Unit” also makes cross-curricular connections, tying in with Alaskan studies and physical education. The unit also builds directly on information students need to know to be safe in their Alaskan environment. I used a hypothermia facts multiple-choice test as a “hook”, drawing students into the dark Alaskan tale of “To Build a Fire” (Jack London). At the end of the tale, they learn the message of the Naturalist literary movement, a lesson learned each year by unfortunate travelers of the Alaskan wilderness: Nature overpowers man. By having students go outside and become cold as the topic for their descriptive writing assignment, I am giving them the opportunity to write about something that they have lived, rather than just writing about experiences in books. After completing the assignments, we review the hypothermia quiz again, to make sure students understand the correct answers before leaving the portable to sprint back to the warm school.

As a teacher, I review the content being covered in social studies classes at my students’ grade levels to check for unifying themes across content curriculums. When I can draw parallels between the knowledge they are learning in other classes, they can better scaffold the knowledge.

I also construct my units to allow for “scaffolding” within my class, teaching basic information and skills first, and then building more complex connections from there. A great example of this in action comes from my House on Mango Street Unit.

Abstract concepts such as figurative language, including similes and metaphors, were a big challenge for many of my 10^th-graders at the start of the school year. 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 surrounding similes and metaphors. 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. The learning 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. By scaffolding each new task upon the last, I can help students construct knowledge and skills with a solid, interconnected foundation, better ensuring that they can remember, use, and build upon the knowledge and skills in the future.

Another important factor built into my units that assists students in constructing and retaining knowledge is involving students in the process of inquiry. Inquiry is the essential academic tool whereby all new knowledge is created and organized. Scientific discoveries occur when a scientist asks “how”? Great authors ask “why?” and “what if?” in writing their classics. In asking my students to come up with questions for Grandma Jane in the “Cultures at a Crossroads” Unit, I was engaging them in inquiry.

A more powerful example comes from the “Name Poems” culminating projects for the House on Mango Street Unit. To start, students described their names using similes and metaphors from all five senses. In this process, students had to ask many questions, many of which they asked me aloud: “How can a name smell?” “What does my name smell like?” “What adjectives describe my name?” “Should I base my choice of adjectives on the sound, the word/letter shapes, or [qualities of my identity]?” In answering the questions (with a some modeling on my part), they created a bank of poetic, descriptive, figurative statements about their names such as “my name feels cold, like the underbelly of a fish”. From this bank, the students selected at least one simile and one metaphor to create wonderfully successful acrostic poems, which were displayed proudly as artwork in my classroom for the remainder of the school year.
3. Scaffolding and building

4. Teaching through questions – bellringer. Hooks. Forming questions. Asking students to infer… Context Cues in Vocabulary Building

4.a. Portfolio Writing: Content Knowledge

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:51:08 +0100

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 9^th-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.

4.b. Research Investigation - Motivating English students

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:44:17 +0100

In the following paper, I investigate current teaching methodologies in high school English, using journal articles as my primary resource, but also drawing my personal experiences working at West, with the hopes of finding methods for motivating students of all different backgrounds to succeed in English class.

Fiona Worcester

Research Paper

ED691- Teaching Internship

Dr. David Marvel

December 2011

Motivating West High School’s Students to Achieve in English Class: Reflections from Current Research and Practice

“School is boring.” This is not an uncommon statement at West High School, the school from which I graduated six years ago, and at which I currently work as a teacher-intern. At West, the students are broadly heterogeneous, across ethnic identity, national origin, race, socioeconomic background, educational tradition, and intellectual capacity. My first hour English 10 class demonstrates this extreme level of diversity. More than twelve of them speak a language other than English at home. While five of them are reading below a 6^th grade reading level, another four of them have been or are currently enrolled in honors classes for English or Social Studies. While the statistical data on the school may show many differences between the students, there also appears to be a common identity; with a dropout rate of 35% in 2010, motivation issues seem to be somewhat universal. In the following paper, I investigate current teaching methodologies in high school English, using journal articles as my primary resource, but also drawing my personal experiences working at West, with the hopes of finding methods for motivating students of all different backgrounds to succeed in English class.

Motivating students

In her article, “Creating Motivating Learning Environments: What We Can Learn from Researchers and Students” (2010), Erica Daniels’ states: “Teachers cannot make someone motivated, but they can create motivating learning environments.” Based on the psychological research of Richard Ryan & Edward Deci, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, and herself, Daniels presents three aspects that enhance student motivation. Students feel motivated (1) when they feel some sense of autonomy over their learning, (2) when they feel connected to the class and the school, and (3) when they feel as if they are adequately prepared to address the challenges of school.

Daniels asserts that adolescents want to feel some sense of control over their lives, and when students are allowed choices of what to read and options on how to demonstrate their learning, they come to develop ownership of their learning, enhancing their motivation. Both of my mentor teachers allow for such student choice in their classrooms, and cite it as a major source of student motivation. Ms. Johnson, allows her honors students to select which of three books they want to read for the Romanticism unit, and frequently allows students to choose the groups in which they will be working. Miss Ardy, allows students to choose an essay topic from one of several and to choose the topic for their final research paper.

Daniels believes that students feel connected to the class and school when they feel that their teachers care about them and when they are actively engaged in their own learning. Daniels also stresses a theme that I emphasize in my classroom; that English is fundamentally about communication. People read, write, speak and listen daily not because they wish to succeed in English class, but to simply communicate! Daniels asserts that after teaching the standards, students should be provided with a range of activities with which to construct their own understandings of the lesson, including making and presenting models, writing essays, and leading and participating in discussions. Such an exercise empowers the students to demonstrate their knowledge in their own contexts, allowing students to create their own connections with their classmates, teachers, and with school at large using their own skills of communication.

Finally, Daniels states that in order to feel motivated, students must be feel adequately prepared to address the demands of school. In addition to modeling the skills needed for particular assignments, including expository writing skills, teaching students skills in note-taking, organization, prioritization and stress-management can be critical towards enhancing motivation in the English classroom.

* * * * *

Daniels believes that creating a motivating classroom environment can best be achieved by promoting student autonomy, connectedness with school, and proper skill set development. While Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher would agree that these ingredients are not only helpful but perhaps even necessary for student motivation, they believe that the true key to motivating high school English students is properly assigned and implemented group work. In their article, “Motivating Requires a Meaningful Task” (2010), Frey & Fisher explain that as students approach high school age, motivation declines and bottoms out, just as adolescents are increasingly turning to their peers groups for “validation and support”. They explain that teachers often “lower the bar” in response to this decreased motivation, providing less challenging individual coursework.

Frey & Fisher believe that by capitalizing on this need for peer interaction, teachers can provide challenging and thus motivating group work, provided that the students know that they will have adequate support from peers and their teacher. Teachers can achieve this balance between challenge and motivation by following the framework of educational psychology Carole Ames, which utilizes the acronym “TARRGET”. A teacher must create an interesting and challenging Task, allow student Autonomy in creating and implementing the learning activity, provide adequate Resources, provide opportunities for students to both receive and give Recognition and Evaluation, and spend his or her Time as a teacher providing assistance and encouragement.

Ms. Johnson (one of my mentor teachers) subscribes to group work wholeheartedly, with almost all in-class work in her Honors 10 English class centering on engaging group work. Miss Ardy, however, does not utilize group work very often in her English 9 and 11 classes. I think both teachers are utilizing the correct strategy for their particular group of students. At West High School, unfortunately, Miss Ardy and I have both found that students in regular education classes have trouble working well in groups in academic settings. Perhaps they are not often enough provided adequate resources or a challenging enough task, but I find that my students are unmotivated to stay on-track when working in group situations.

I believe that the main reason why group work is not a good motivator for regular education students is the fact that unless students are in a series of classes with a special label (such as “honors” or “special education”), there is no “teaming”. This means that the regular education students do not necessarily share any other classes with their classmates in my class, and thus have not formed friendships with them, and do not likely consider them to be “peers” outside of class. The heterogeneity of the school population further exacerbates this issue, as students do not seem to see interacting with these “non-peer” classmates as a motivator, but, rather, as something to be avoided. Though teachers can go a long way in bridging these gaps, it is very difficult for one student-teacher to change a school’s culture.

Ms. Johnson, in teaching honors kids, operates in a more homogenous team-like atmosphere, and thus can utilize Frey & Fisher’s paradigm of motivating students through challenging group work. Miss Ardy, who works with regular students, seems to do better by utilizing Daniel’s advice, and designing motivating work that provides for students’ autonomy and incorporates connectedness with peers and school, while simultaneously providing students with the skill sets they need to properly attack the assignments.

Linking Classroom Motivation with Classroom Discipline Issues

As discussed above, it is important for students to play an active role in creating and implementing motivating class work. In her article, “A Positive Classroom Climate: Create It … Sustain It” (2010), Katherine Evans expresses the view that it is also important for students to play a role in instilling classroom discipline in general:

[W]hen the teacher bears the sole responsibility for controlling classroom activities and behavior, students miss out on the opportunity to develop social skills and emotional regulative capacities.

Undoubtedly, this could lead to enhanced motivation. Interestingly, Evans draws parallels to Daniel’s three goals by citing a recently-developed model of discipline called “Resorative Justice”. In this model, individuals build their lives around three “pillars”: “autonomy”, “order”, and “relatedness”, which would seem to be closely related to Daniels three motivational factors: “autonomy”, “preparedness”, and “connectedness”. According to the model, misbehaviors result when students’ needs are not met in one of these areas.

If we can agree that Restorative Justice’s “three pillars” and Daniels three factors of motivation are similar (if not identical), we would have to conclude that misbehavior not only results from unmet personal needs, but reflects the absence of either a student’s motivation or a motivating classroom environment in general. In “Restorative Justice”, Evans tell us, “students are given the opportunity to make amends when they have wronged someone, strengthening problem-solving and social responsibility in a manner that applies to real life.” Perhaps instead of viewing misbehavior as grounds for punishment, it would be most beneficial to view it as an opportunity to have a conversation and learn what can be improved. The question then becomes: What needs must be met such that an individual student feels the autonomy, connectedness, and preparedness to be motivated rather than disruptive in the classroom environment?

Motivating Special Education Students

Motivating special education students to achieve in a regular education classroom often presents a particular challenge. In the most recent issue of English Journal, Lisa Storm Fink reflects on the way in which her personal teaching strategies have evolved over her 15-year teaching career with regards to special education students, and, especially, the changes she has made in her teaching in response to giving birth to a child with disability (2010). She states:

I realized I had been operating under the paradigm that it is my job as the teacher to present the material and the students’ job to learn it. I took my part of the job seriously, working diligently to create detailed and structured assignments rich with rigorous content. If a student was unsuccessful, it was easy for me to tell myself that I had done my part of the job and to record the F as the natural consequence of the student’s actions.

She realized upon further self-examination, however, the further importance of providing students with individualized attention and personal empathy. Fink also sought to use her teaching material to reach students, using books like To Kill a Mockingbird and stories like “the Scarlet Ibis” as a jumping-off point to discuss “otherness” more generally, a topic to which many special education students can readily relate.

These are both strategies that I apply readily in my classroom. However, as a first year curriculum-writer and grader with idealistic and perfectionist tendencies, my mentor teachers have stressed to me that I have to accept that some of my students will fail regardless of my best efforts and intentions. Regardless, I must always keep in mind Finks’ two worthy goals – giving each of my students personal attention and personal empathy – with the hopes of assisting them in connecting with and learning the material to their best of their abilities.

Innovations in Motivating English Language Learners (ELLs)

As more and more people in the world learn English internationally, English classrooms are becoming “linguistic contact zones” in which the language used in the teaching and learning is coming into contact with other languages present in the minds of the students. This is certainly the case in my first-hour class, where more than half of the students speak a language other than English at home, and this is undoubtedly the case at West High in general, where I have heard teachers jokingly refer to general education classes as “Honors ESL”.

An international group of researchers has recently formulated teaching methods that harness students’ native language skills to help students better learn the material in English (Cazden, C., Kwek, D., & Comber, B., 2010; Martin-Beltra, M., 2009). The authors cite programs in numerous countries, including Brunei, Singapore, Australia, and the U.S., in which teachers have crafted lessons that are taught and/or processed and/or learned in more than one language simultaneously, allowing students to utilize their first languages to build and express understanding and scaffold from there into understanding the material in English. In writing narratives, students might reflect on the differences between writing in different languages. During a science lesson, students might initially discuss the concepts in their first language before moving on to discuss it in English.

The benefit of these programs seems clear to me; it is not uncommon to come across a West High ELL student who seems to understand what they are reading, but who cannot write a coherent sentence – let alone paragraph – to explain their thoughts in English. I have a hunch that if they had adequate opportunity to express their thoughts in their native language first, many of them could work toward expressing the concepts in English. This goes back to the ideas presented by Daniels, Frey & Fisher, and Evans; by allowing students to connect with the material in a socially meaningful way, we can create a more motivating classroom environment.

Unfortunately, this model would not work well at West High. The successful programs cited relied on two or three homogenous populations fluent in the same first languages. For instance, in Southern California, a program could be implemented in a school in which 30% of the students speak Spanish at home, and 70% speak English at home. In my first hour class of 24 students, however, it would be difficult to implement such a program; there are eight or so languages spoken, but only three languages have the two speakers or more requisite to hold a conversation (English, Filipino, and Samoan). Also, these programs require support instructor fluent in the native languages; it would be impossible to obtain the staff necessary to successfully implement these programs as they are for all ELL students at West.

Motivating Boys to Read in the Classroom

Though, on average, males and females have an equal IQ, boys lag far behind girls in school performance. At West, two-thirds of the regular education population is male and one-third is female; in the honors classes, the reverse is the case. Of the 7 boys who failed my two classes this fall, six were boys – and the girl who failed simply wasn’t there. Unfortunately, I have noticed that most of the boys who fail my class refuse to read. In his article, (“Making Connections With the Boys Who Struggle in Your Classroom” (2010), Louis Martinez sought to discover why some boys read in his classroom and others do not.

Modeling his reading program after the pedagogy of Laura Robb, Martinez began by having students respond to reading surveys, questionnaires, and informal writing prompts. From there, Martinez allowed students to choose their own books to read quietly during a period of class and conducted 5 - 7 minute “one-on-one reading conferences” with individual students. The students kept notebooks in which they responded to questions that centered on their reading. Martinez kept a notebook himself, full of observations, reflections, and initial conversations with students.

Though Martinez does not seem to address boys in particular in his findings, his conclusions seem to confirm those of Daniels and Evans; he found that autonomy, connectedness, and preparedness are powerful motivational elements. When students were allowed the autonomy to choose the books that interested them, they not only felt empowered, they felt more connected to literature in general. By “[bringing] nonfiction and popular culture into the classrooms” students felt more connected to school and their teachers. These conferences not only allowed Martinez to connect with students as individuals, it allowed him to differentiate his instruction by adjusting his curriculum and better preparing individual students to succeed in his class. Martinez’s findings also mirrored those of Fink; he found that by empathizing with individual students and providing individualized attention, he could increase motivation.

Conclusion

Based on the research papers reviewed here, teachers can improve motivation in high school students by providing for student autonomy, by creating opportunities for students to connect with teachers, peers, and school, and by adequately furnishing students with the skills they need to perform the tasks at hand. To better connect with their students and thus increase student motivation, teachers should seek opportunities to empathize with their students and provide individualized attention instruction.

Sources Cited

Cazden, C., Kwek, D., & Comber, B (2010). Subject English in bilingual and multilingual settings: Embracing the linguistic Other. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8 (2), 1-5. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals.

Daniels, E.. (2010). Creating Motivating Learning Environments: What We Can Learn from Researchers and Students. English Journal, 100(1), 25-29. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals.

Evans, K. (2010). A Positive Classroom Climate: Create It… Sustain It. English Leadership Quarterly, 33 (1), 13-14. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals.

Frey, N., & Fisher, D.. (2010). Motivation Requires a Meaningful Task. English Journal, 100(1), 30-36. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals.

Martinez, L.. (2010). Making Connections with the Boys Who Struggle in Your Classroom. English Journal, 100(2), 121-124. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals.

Merritt, T., & Fink, L.. (2010). Finding the Will to Individualize Instruction: How My Son Made Me a Better Teacher. English Journal, 100(2), 49-55. Retrieved December 16, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals.

Martin-Beltra, M. (2009). Cultivating Space for the language boomerang: The interplay of two language as academic resources. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8 (2), 25-53. Retrieved
December 16, 2010, from Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals.

4.a. Research Investigation - Motivating English students

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 01:43:46 +0100