Standard 1: Knows and Teaches English as a Subject Matter
My love and passion for English was the primary reason I chose to become an English teacher in the first place. Throughout this year at Cass Tech, I have been able to develop my skills in unfamiliar instructional territory, such as objectionable literature as well as teaching students how to write research papers. My first artifact is my unit plan for the book No Disrespect by Sister Souljah. No Disrespect is the autobiographical story of Souljah growing up as a black woman in the 1980s, trying to find herself and making her place in the world. My unit directly addresses the controversial issues that Souljah addresses throughout her writing – homosexuality, feminism, racism, sex, relationships, etc. My unit tackled the issues in a manner that was classroom-friendly and allowed us to have an educational dialogue about the views expressed in Souljah’s work. The video below the unit plan was from my introductory lesson for the unit, a presentation on Groupthink. This discussion took place directly after watching the “Brown Eyes Blue Eyes Experiment” video that took place in 1968 on YouTube. In this video of my teaching, my relaxed style and encouragement of students’ ideas is evident. My rationale for having the students learn about groupthink is incorporated throughout the lesson, to insure that my students can invest in the information and topics I am giving them to think about. Through this book, the hope is that students will become more globalized thinkers and be able challenge ideas around them and not be prescriptive. My final artifact is that of a schematic done for a research paper by a student. Schematics have to be done by all the students during the research process, and turned in before they can move on to writing their rough drafts. This particular student is an extremely bright individual, who became interested the phenomena of groupthink and social group implications after the groupthink lesson. He was able to create a thesis and find supporting quotes from online databases and research to back up his theory. Working through the research process with 150 students has been exhausting, but worth it in the end.
Artifact 1: Unit Plan
No Disrespect Unit Plan | |
File Size: | 84 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Artifact 2: Video of Teaching
Artifact 3: Example of Student Work