Teacher candidates positively impact student learning, which is:
1: content driven. Students develop understanding and problem-solving expertise of the material taught in their content area(s) through the use of reading, writing, oral communication, and technology.
2: aligned with curriculum standards and outcomes. Students understand and are comfortable with daily learning targets, unit goals, and curriculum standards and they progress each day to meet them.
3: integrated across content areas. Students demonstrate subject matter using reading, written, oral communication, and technology.
My understanding of standard S:
Standard S is concentrated on teacher proficiency and student learning. Within teachers content areas they need to be focused on helping students learn through reading and writing exercises, oral communication practices, and using any technology that is available and appropriate for the lessons. Teaching using reading, writing, oral communication, and technology will allow students to grasp concepts, terms, functions, or music, etc. through an avenue that reaches most to them. Teachers must be able to deliver their material and instructions in a transparent and understandable fashion. Under the umbrella of the state and districts’ curriculum standards teachers need to have accessible unit goals and reachable daily learning targets help students feel and see progression and understanding in what they are accomplishing daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Lastly, teachers need to integrate subject matter from other content areas into life in a classroom to help students make connections throughout their school day. Helping students learn to keep a thread running throughout the six or seven periods of a day, if possible, will help them to create synthesis and greater meaning to their school career.
S1: Using reading, writing, oral communication, and technology in my class helps to develop my students’ understandings of the written and spoken English language. Developing a students’ understanding has to be done with scaffolding. Most of my internship has been based around analyzing novels: Macbeth and 1984. I have found that introducing a theme, concept, motif, symbol, or idea through the use of “word vomit prompts”—short journal responses that answer prompts where conventions and mechanics are not graded—help plant the seed of the daily lesson into their minds. This bell-ringer exercise creates a foundation to jump start us into analyzing the chapters in our novels. Example: W.V.Ps
S2: I set my students up to be successful in class by having our daily learning objectives on the overhead, which we go over once the bell has rung and we are settled in. When I first used the daily objectives in my internship I used the “I can…” statement. I found that this approach is student friendly, but not appropriate language for sixteen year old students. Instead, I have morphed my “I can…” statements into concise and direct targets that each student can meet by the end of the period. During the past unit I implemented having our unit goals printed and up on the walls to be seen by students every day. When I have my own classroom, I would like to have year goals up around the ceiling like crown molding. I have found that having visuals for students to reach for or to constantly refer back too gives them a sense of a common thread or contextual meaning to their, seemingly, unrelated units. Example: Unit goals.
S3: (Answer how students demonstrate their learning using reading, written and oral communication, and technology.) While reading our novels in class, I use four different approaches to helping students to demonstrate what they have learned on a daily, weekly, and unit basis. On a weekly basis, when we discuss our novel’s chapters, student come in prepared with either chapter questions finished and/or they have placed their sticky notes somewhere within the chapters they found interesting, significant, a new vocab word, or confusing. As a class we discuss a few students’ sticky note placements and the information they want to share or clarify. Another way I have students demonstrate their learning is through oral communication. During discussions I will use my tongue depressors, which have each of the students’ names on them, to call—at random—on students to tell me their opinion or to tell me plot, character, theme, symbol, etc. details, which they receive participation points for. On a weekly basis, students demonstrate their learning through “timed-writes”. A timed write is when students use their notes and novels to write in a certain type of essay style—persuasive, informative, analytical—for 30-40 minutes. In this essay they focus on the essay style (form) and the content following a prompt. On a unit basis, students are given final tests, which include information and concepts from the novel, any materials and we covered in class. Example: Timed-write–Motif
Stacey Barber's bPortfolio 