3b+-+Artifacts+of+F2F+Course


 * 3. Reflections on current teaching practice in your face-to-face environment (continued) **




 * **Select artifacts that represent your teaching and learning strategies. **
 * **Write reflective statements for each artifact, elaborating on why it was selected and its meaning and value in the portfolio. **


 * My class mission statement **

I have this personal mission statement posted in my room, as well as on the first page of my teacher web site. I feel it is important that students know where I am coming from, what is important to me, and what I deem important in my teaching. By posting this information, I let students know what my goal is of myself as their teacher, and what I hope to accomplish and what I hope they will accomplish, during our time together.


 * I try to create a warm classroom community **

Creating a welcoming and accepting classroom community is important to me. If students get the sense that the environment is hostile or that they don't belong, those feelings are going to impact their learning while they're in my classroom, and it's going to also have an effect on the culture of our class. I strive to create a classroom culture of trust, acceptance,. When this culture is established and present in the classroom, students are more receptive to giving and receiving feedback and constructive criticism, are more open to learning from their mistakes, feel more empowered, are more accepting of others, and are more receptive to accepting responsibility for their behaviors and for their learning. Even in my practicum course, it was important for me to share a little bit of information about myself and to try to create a sense of community among the students.  The screenshot above is the letter of introduction I wrote to the students in my practicum course.

This screenshot is an example of one of the handouts I have given to students during the last quarter of the school year - typically when the weather has grown nice and the kids' minds are more focused on what's going on outside than what's going on in the classroom. No matter the time of year, or the level of the student, I have high expectations of my kids, and I expect them all to meet those expectations, or to accept the consequences. These expectations are posted in my classroom, they're introduced at the start of the school year, and I refer to them throughout the course.My students know that I'm tough, but they also know that I'm fair.
 * I have high expectations of my students **


 * Curriculum focus is essential to me **

It is my belief that being organized and having a curriculum focus or guideline are essential skills required of teachers. The screenshot above is one of my year-long curriculum for the freshman English course. I focus each marking quarter around a topic, and each topic has an essential guiding question. I then choose my texts based upon those topics and essential questions. Having this "map" of the year helps me to focus in on specific texts, specific skills, and specific areas of study for each of the courses I teach. It also helps in the sequencing of courses from year to year.


 * I like to try new things & technologies **

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This is an example of a Prezi I made for my freshman class, covering the literary device "allusion." I include it in this portfolio because it represents my willingness to take risks and try new things. I had just been introduced to Prezi less than a week before presenting this lesson to my students, and I wanted to see how they would respond to something other than lecture, PowerPoint, or slides, so I created this Prezi in a little under an hour during my lunch period and unveiled it to my 8th period freshman English class. I didn't know what their reaction would be, or what their attention would be like during this presentation, but I was willing to give it a shot and take a chance. Prezi: allusion

Part of my personal teaching style includes the use of humor in my classroom. That old adage of "Don't smile before Christmas" never seemed to mesh with my personality, nor did it really work for me, either - most likely because I knew I wasn't being myself, and the students picked up on that. I like to joke with my students, I like to have fun and use humor. I feel it's important to be friendly with them. //Being friendly// is not the same thing as //being friends// with them - because that is not part of my teaching belief. The above Word document showcases just a snippet of how I try to interject humor into my classroom - even if it's dry humor that causes the majority of the students to roll their eyes and think I'm the goofiest, most lame teacher around. I find it funny that in my experiences, it's sometimes the goofy, lame teachers who are the ones the kids pay attention to.
 * How I use humor **


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;"> Feedback to students is important to me **



<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">As I mentioned earlier, my teaching style is guided in part by the theories of constructivism. Feedback, then, is an important aspect of my teaching style. This screenshot shows a typical example of the type of feedback I provide my students. Normally, I provide extensive feedback on students' rough drafts, so that their final drafts will incorporate some of the ideas/suggestions/corrections I mention. This example above shows just two of the comments I made on a student's response to one question (out of 12 that were the entire assignment). Below is the link to the entire 12-question assignment the student completed, along with all of the feedback I provided through using Microsoft Word's comment tool. My feedback takes many forms, but I always try to include a few "deeper thinking" questions for students to ponder, which requires more critical thinking on their part and which helps me to really determine if they understand the issues we're discussing in the literature.


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Variety of assessments and showcasing learning **



<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">I know that not all students learn the same way, and that not all assignments appeal to every learner all of the time. For these reasons, I try to differentiate not only my learning, but my assessment techniques as well. In this example above, students had to complete an outside reading novel for the marking period. As an assessment, students are given a choice of 3 different assignments to complete - each one appealing to a different learning style. Sometimes I try to picture my students and guess ahead of time which one task they're going to choose - most of the time I guess correctly, but sometimes, I'm surprised (pleasantly!) at what students want to try.


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">I like to use "real world" audiences in my class **



<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">The screenshot above is an example of part of an end-of-the-year final exam that I gave to my freshman students last year. I like my students to have a "real world" audience when they are writing or completing projects. For this reason, my writing assignments are often focused on some element of their lives (such as when we read Romeo and Juliet and students are asked to have their parents create a list of traits their "ideal" mate for their child would possess) and their work is often either presented in class or put on display in the hallways or on class bulletin boards. I want students to see the importance of their work, that I am not the sole audience for what they do while they are in my classroom, that a world exists and they are important <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">outside the four walls of the English room. In this particular assignment, students were asked to write a friendly letter (the skill) to next year's incoming freshman students (the audience) about how to best be successful during their first year as a high schooler (the knowledge).


 * <span style="color: #800080; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Having students reflect upon their skills and learning is important **

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Having students take the time to reflect upon their own learning, to think about their areas of strength and weakness, is a valuable use of time in my classroom. Reflection of this sort helps students to see the purpose in what they are learning, gives them an opportunity to self-monitor, and helps me to see in what areas I still need to focus my teaching to better assist students in their learning. This screenshot is an example of a brief reflection I asked students to complete after they had taken their mid-year English exam. It had been explained to them before the exam what exactly it would cover, and I wanted to find out (a) what strategies I had made use of during the first half of the year were helpful to students so far, (b) the correlation between how much preparation they had done and their corresponding grades, and (c) how they might alter their study methods for the second half of the year, based on this reflection survey.

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