Eastern Michigan Writing Project 2016
As a participant of the 2016 Eastern Michigan Writing Project (EMWP) summer institute, I spent two weeks on EMU's campus in a cohort of 19 fellow educators exploring various facets of my career and personal identity: teacher as writer, teacher as leader, and teacher as researcher. Herein contained are a number of artifacts representing those explorations, including my reflection on the institute, some personal and professional writing pieces, my research proposal, and a quick reflection on an academic text I read, discussed, and presented on with some of my peers.
Teacher as Writer
General Overview of Student TeachingWorking out of Albion College, I completed my student teaching internship at Marshall High School teaching English 10 Honors and Yearbook with Mrs. Tracie Mathis. For English, I designed and taught units and lessons on creative writing, short fiction stories, videography, and George Orwell's Animal Farm. As an adviser for the yearbook, I designed and taught lessons on journalism basics (body copy, captions, AP style, photography, etc.), long form writing, and video. Outside of the classroom, I worked with Dianne Long as an assistant director for MHS' fall theater production, Moon Over Buffalo. I participated in staff meeting wherein the the school discussed and worked to implement the new Positive Behavior Intervention Strategies (PBIS) behavioral model, and I worked with the school's Reading Committee to come up with and implement school-wide techniques for improving student reading, particularly reading speed and stamina. I also attended the Reading Apprenticeship Conference with Mrs. Mathis. I also aided the teachers in dazzling the student body with a flash mob "dance-through-the-ages" at the homecoming assembly.
The one who says he knows (how to teach), knows not. The one who knows he does not know (how to teach) will make a great teacher. |
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Animal Farm Unit
George Orwell wrote that Animal Farm “was the first book in which [he] tried, with full consciousness of what [he] was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.” As a scholastic endeavor, Animal Farm is one of the few literary gems commonly found in high school curricula that allow for equal parts literary and historical analyses. As an artistic work of literature, the novella is founded on devices such as allegory, satire, and - to a degree - fable. The story is a tale of power, corruption, and exploitation. Interestingly, the tale has no clear protagonist, which separates it from most other works of fiction read in school. The story’s lack of focus puts impetus on the reader as a reformer - to realize, learn, and become a protagonist herself. Thus is the point of allegory and satire. As such the text can be studied as an exercise in persuasion as well as an exploration of human nature.
During my internship, I challenged myself by building a unit from scratch, entirely of my own making. My Animal Farm unit was the result of this personal challenge. Focusing as much on the satirical techniques used throughout the novel, we studied the Animal Farm not only as an allegory of the Russian Revolution, but as a workshop on how authors (and people in general) can inspire social change through art.
During my internship, I challenged myself by building a unit from scratch, entirely of my own making. My Animal Farm unit was the result of this personal challenge. Focusing as much on the satirical techniques used throughout the novel, we studied the Animal Farm not only as an allegory of the Russian Revolution, but as a workshop on how authors (and people in general) can inspire social change through art.
Thinking About ThinkingAs a requirement for student teaching, my peers and I conducted action inquires during our internships. Unlike more rigorous experimentation, the enterprise asked us to identify a problem or phenomenon in our classes, collect data on the problem/phenomenon, design/implement data-driven interventions, and measure their effectiveness.
For my inquiry, I studied how implementing metacognitive strategies in the classroom can help students both learn about their own thinking and learning, and to thereby improve their motivation and, for lack of a better term, class "buy-in." |
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Maymester - Boundary Crossings
As part of the Albion College education experience, all prospective teachers go through a pre-student-teaching student-teaching experience. As a part of the class, students stay an extra three weeks after the semester's end to actually work full time in a local school. The goal is to give students a taste of the demands associated with full time teaching and figure out the necessary adaptions to mitigate the "shock" that comes with student teaching. Maymester students must also design and teach a three-week unit that combined their major, the class subject, and Albion Colleges "theme" of the year. Our theme was "sustainability."
During Maymester, I worked with Mrs. Tracy Haroff in her General and AP Chemistry classes at Marshall High School. I designed and taught a unit for the AP students called Communicating Science. Having completed the rigorous AP Chemistry curriculum, the students knew their science, so I wanted to focus on the communication thereof. Using Maymester funds, I brought the students to the Albion College Whitehouse Nature Center to perform in-the-field water testing. Using the data obtained from the trip, I taught the students how to structure and write an APA style lab report, something they would need to be familiar with in college. For the second half of the unit, I taught the students videography and video editing. Using iPads provided by MHS's media library, the students worked on video PSAs about a local sustainability topic of their choice. The topics ranged from sustaining the environment by being conscious of gas emissions to the sustainability of one's teeth and eyes. The ultimate goal of the unit was to introduce students to different reasons for communicating science (data sharing and analysis in the scientific community and for application to real-world issues) and to equip them with the skills necessary for doing so. |
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