Standard 4
Content Knowledge
The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches and creates learning experiences that make these aspects of the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners to assure mastery of the content.
Performance
4(h) The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn, practice, and master academic language in their content.
This year I worked with my students on short constructed responses. In my lesson "CrashBoomLove: Answering Text-Dependent Questions using the ACE writing strategy" I introduce the writing strategy ACE, an acronym to help students include specific information in their answers. To present the strategy I use instructional scaffolding, gradual release.
In part B of the lesson, I introduce the writing strategy by having them take guided notes. I use a think-aloud to guide students into the thinking process when answering the question. I then have students work as pair, before having them practice individually with scaffolded practices. The exit ticket allows me to assess whether they have mastered the strategy.
This form of instructional scaffolding is something I use frequently. I have used it in numerous lessons, with literary techniques such as grammatical mood, claim-counterclaim-rebuttal, and call to action. I believe that the various trials of practice allow students to build their confidence with the new concept, technique, or device.
Performance
4(f) The teacher evaluates and modifies instructional resources and curriculum materials for their comprehensiveness, accuracy for representing particular concepts in the discipline, and appropriateness for his/her learners.
Critical Disposition
4(r) The teacher is committed to work toward each learner’s mastery of disciplinary content and skills.
At Mililani Middle School the curriculum for Language Arts is set by SpringBoard. Students are provided with SpringBoard texts and SpringBoard writing workshop books. Teachers are provided with the teacher's edition as well as a pacing guide for each activity. Each unit is broken into multiple activities and each activity is given a pacing schedule. For example, in Unit 2, activity 2.3 has a pacing schedule of 2 classes. However, I have come to see that these pacing schedules do not always work for the classroom. In those cases, I modify the pace to lengthen the lesson to ensure students understand the new concepts being introduced. In other cases I have had to modify the curriculum materials because they were not in line with the student objectives and embedded assessment.
In SpringBoard Unit 2: Challenge of Utopia students were provided with two options for their embedded assessment. Due to their recent "Heroes Journey Essay" I selected the prompt that had students compare and contrast the dystopian society with modern-day society. I felt that the compare and contrast prompt required higher critical thinking skills than the heroes journey prompt. However, after reading over the unit, I discovered roughly half the activities were geared toward the heroes journey. To ensure my students readied themselves for the correct prompt, I omitted the activities that focused on the heroes journey and emphasized the activities that compared and contrasted the setting and perspectives. By modifying the curriculum my students would not need to be bombarded with unnecessary work and information. All the work they do should be geared towards an objective, useless and gathering of unnecessary information will only confuse them.
At the end of the Unit students displayed their mastery of the subject in their embedded assessment. Each activity emphasized a technique, term, and device which students were asked to implement in their final paper. Every lesson builds upon the prior one to strengthen their understanding. I ensure their understanding by assessing their formative assessments and determining whether or not an activity needs to be lengthened so that students feel comfortable with what they learned, as I did with Unit 2, activity 2.3.
The pacing schedule for activity 2.3 was set for 2 class period. However, after my observations of groups and individual formative assessments, I saw that we needed to spend more time on the activity, explaining the concept of dystopia and how a society reached that extreme idea of equality. I saw that students had difficulty understanding handicaps and how those handicaps related to equality. To assist with their understanding, I spent time guiding them by asking them higher level questions and applying scenarios to themselves. I lengthened the activity 2 more days to assure student understanding, as the key ideas of dystopia is directly related to their embedded assessment prompt.