The third framework focuses on the teachers ability to instruct within the classroom and looks at their ability to communicate with students, to use questioning and discussion techniques, to engage students in learning, to use assessment in instruction, and to demonstrate flexibility and responsiveness.
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When the school's ELA team decided to do both a prep for an upcoming district writing assessment and to gauge where we stood on student's ability in argumentative writing in relation to our goal, my results showed that though my students still struggled, they struggled primarily with explaining the significance of their quotation instead of summarizing. To the right, I have attached copies of both a prompting graphic organizer and an essay outline as well as practice sheets that were done individually and then in small groups based off an I Do, We Do, You Do approach demonstrating not only my ability to use assessment instruction but my responsiveness to the data..
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As an educator focused on prompting student curiosity and the multiplicity of information, I love engaging students with a text beyond a rehashing of information. However, when working with ELA in a classroom of students who average significantly below grade-level, assessing comprehension of a text is still important. In order to work with this, I introduced the QAR strategy to my students. After creating a foldable with notes, students and I worked through questions I had created with our current text, Becoming Naomi Leon, using the attached graphic organizer. From here, students gradually worked through answering only, to answering and creating questions, to a balance of answering pre-arranged questions and providing their own to the class, and ending the novel with a class discussion based purely on student higher level questions. I greatly enjoyed watching these conversation and questioning skills flourish by the end of the quarter as I got to sit back and act as the occasional mediator between student discussion on characterization in the novel.
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Frequently in working with Social Studies, students tend to ask why it's important to learn about the past. It can be difficult to engage them in a topic they believe has no relation to them. While working the Mayans and discussing their advances in math and architecture, to drum up engagement, I had students build structures from toothpicks and marshmallows. Their first goal was to see how tall they could make it without having to hold it up. Next, students had to make the strongest structure they could. (Our strongest held 8 textbooks for several minutes before beginning to break.) From this activity, we discussed what structure worked best, why we still have these cities around today, and what structures do we still have that uses these building ideas.
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