Showcase
Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of remarkable children with learning differences, and I feel ardently drawn to helping them realize their potential. Subsequently, I sought to pursue a master’s degree with rigorous studies in evidenced-based methods and informed practices to gain insight into ways that I could best serve all my students in inclusive classroom settings. In other words, I aspired to become a master of my beloved craft. Below I have gathered a collection of coursework that I accomplished while attending Michigan State University’s Master of Arts in Education Program (MAED), which demonstrates my conviction to inspire young learners to succeed. Connecting my past experience with my scholarly endeavors concentrating on special education and literacy education, this showcase is arranged into three aspects of teaching that I believe represent what accomplished educators strive to achieve: meeting students’ needs, sharing knowledge with colleagues, and reflecting on practice. It is important to note that student names identified throughout the showcase are pseudonyms intended to uphold children’s confidentiality.
Examining a Unit of Inquiry to determine whether instruction enables all students to learn using Universal Design for Learning principles
With the best intentions, teachers devote themselves to making a difference in the lives of their students. Towards that end, however, they have daily requirements of meeting curriculum expectations and documenting children’s achievement. Despite these demanding responsibilities, it is essential for teachers to thoughtfully look at their instructional practice to effectively discern how existing curriculum could impact students’ motivation and learning. To support my efforts as a reflective practitioner, I refer to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to analyze developed curriculum and contemplate how learning outcomes could be improved. UDL is a set of principles that provides educators with a design to develop flexible learning goals, methods, materials, and assessments intended to ensure that curriculum does not unintentionally limit students’ opportunities to succeed. The following curriculum analysis and summary demonstrates my thorough reflection of a second grade unit of inquiry with a science focus titled Adapt to Survive. Keeping six former students with learning differences in mind, I conducted a comprehesnive analysis of the curriculum using the CAST Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Self-Check (http://udlselfcheck.cast.org) to determine opportunities to improve the unit by identifying obstacles that could hinder success for children with learning challenges, as well as contemplate changes in the curriculum design to promote learning for all students.
Confessions of a Digital Immigrant
Digital Literacy is increasingly important in the classroom, as the role of technology has impacted virtually all areas of education and has the capacity to serve as an indispensible instrument for student learning. Technology removes barriers of accessibility, provides accommodations for learning needs and differences, offers multiple ways to present and share information, and often encourages students to enjoy learning and interact with content. Moreover, digital technology provides amazing opportunities for creativity and imagination. As a reflective practitioner, it is important for a teacher to contemplate her personal perspective and experience with technology in order to objectively consider ways technology can effectively enhance students’ learning. Subsequently, this autobiographical essay was written as a narrative inquiry into my personal digital learning journey.
Learning and Performing in the Workplace
Reflective Practitioners not only contemplate the past and present, but also seek out role models with the intention of bettering their performance in the future. Recently I found inspiration to grow as an educator by reading Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, written by New Yorker contributor Dr. Atul Gawande, who shared his commitment for bettering his professional performance and embracing a passion for lifelong learning. In the following essay, I considered how Gawande’s views on strengthening performance through diligence, doing right, and ingenuity contributed to my understanding of learning at work to improve outcomes.
Creating learning material for participants of a professional development program aimed at helping educators teach mathematics
In a collaborative group, two peers and I designed an eighteen hour-long professional development program for general educators teaching children in kindergarten through third grade. The purpose of the program was to help elementary teachers provide mathematic instruction to students with learning disabilities more effectively, with segments highlighting the characteristics of students who struggle in mathematics, accommodations and modifications to support learning differences, strategies intended to engage students, progress monitoring, and encouraging teacher collaboration to effectively reach all students. The professional development program engaged participants with readings, PowerPoint presentations, discussions, interactive tasks, and a culminating evaluation. The following guidebook was created collaboratively, with each group member serving as the expert for her given section. Along with suggesting the culminating task to evaluate participants at the end of the program, I was responsible for producing the second segment of the program regarding the role of accommodation and modifications to support learning, which can be seen on pages 9 – 24 of the Professional Development Booklet. This segment was divided into three sessions examining policies and practices attributed to accommodations and modifications, inquiring about assistive technology, and considering alternative assessment methods to flexibly evaluate student learning.
Informing general education teachers about supporting students with hearing impairments
Inspired by a family member who has a hearing impairment, I created a Fast Facts Sheet for general educators to use as a reference in the event that they have a student with a hearing impairment in their classroom. The fact sheet was designed to be a quick guide to help teachers recognize how the disability could impact a child’s social and academic development. The page also offers suggestions for accommodations and practices a teacher could put in place to help a student with a hearing impairment participate and thrive in a general education classroom, as well as a list of websites a general education teacher could turn to for further information.
Meeting students’ needs requires teachers to get to know students’ background knowledge and experiences, gather data to inform instruction, design learning activities tailored to utilizing students’ strengths and supporting areas of weakness, and to administer assessments to gauge progress. The following case study documents my efforts to support two struggling kindergarten students with underdeveloped phonemic awareness. The overall goal of the inquiry was to strengthen both students’ abilities to segment sounds within words, serving as a foundation for their reading development in kindergarten and throughout their academic career. In order to protect the children’s privacy, actual student evidence that was originally included with the case study has been omitted. However, my original Student Interview Checklist and Lesson Plan still remain at the end of the document.
Meeting needs through explicit instruction, peer collaboration, and multiple representations and exposures
Promoting engagement by creating a learning community
Interpreting multiple assessments to establish goals and propose interventions
It is essential for accomplished teachers to determine whether children are meeting grade level expectations, and to effectively analyze students’ strengths and challenges in order to comprehensively support their progress. In the following diagnostic reading report I systematically examined student data from several reliable assessments that measured various aspects of her literacy abilities in order to pinpoint key areas of need, select specific learning goals based on the evidence, and suggest high quality instructional strategies to strengthen the student’s reading development.
The Self-Determination Theory developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan maintains that social environments encourage intrinsic motivation when they reinforce three innate psychological needs – autonomy, competence, and relatedness. To motivate an alienated and disengaged student who was struggling to learn English, I used the Self-Determination Theory as the foundation for transforming a conventional English class into a genuine learning community with the intention of inspiring the struggling student to feel empowered, capable, and gain a sense of belonging. The attached PowerPoint slides summarize an extensive design project I conducted over several weeks to address the student’s alienation and foster her feelings of being valued by implementing practices that orchestrated relationship building and promoted autonomy.
Gallery Frame, Helping Hands, Friends, and Glasses Clipart Icons (n.d.). Retrieved April 5, 2016, from Wix.com.
Reflecting on Practice
Sharing Knowledge with Colleagues
Meeting Students' Needs
