Leaning Letter

The book talk, mini-lesson, and unit plan were the first experiences I've had putting together curriculum on literature, so needless to say, I learned a lot from these activities. The book talk I enjoyed because I can remember re-reading the Scarlet Letter three times in High School, which was great once, but pointless the second and third times through from an academic perspective. My senior year I had a teacher who had me read another The House of Seven Gables in addition to the Scarlet Letter homework, which was good, but could have gone further to differentiate it to be meaningful. Come to find out, she hadn't read House of Seven Gables, so she didn't know what to do with it to give me something else to do.I say all of that because I think of the book talks and I heard about books that I haven't read that I'm excited to read and possibly suggest to students, for personal and teaching purposes. 

The Mini-Lesson and Unit Plan especially were challenging for me in thinking through all the aspects of assignments, handouts, rubrics, in-class activities, videos and all of the planning that goes into one class session. The mini-lessons were great for ideas of how to teach different parts of a text.  The lessons that came  from the readings we did were mostly much different than what I would have devised on my own, so I appreciated all of the different methods presented. It was valuable for me to take the theories that we talked about in class and use them to develop or justify the different lessons that I wrote. 

The theories that we discussed in class have challenged and formed the way the way I think about teaching as I am at the beginning of my journey to becoming a teacher. Having the theories and perspectives that we talked about to articulate my teaching philosophies is taking from thinking like a student to thinking like a teacher.  I had to write  a classroom management philosophy in Dr. Valeo's class this quarter, if I wouldn't have been in this class and reading about differentiation, assessment, and discussion, I would have struggled to have said anything meaningful in that paper.

I benefited greatly from hearing about the classroom experiences that everyone else shared this quarter. There are methods that I can use and incorporate in my teaching that I've observed and heard about from many of you this quarter. Being around the passion and excitement for teaching that was exhibited made it easy for me to want to engage with these topics. Talking about oppression, poverty, and social justice in regards to education is a conversation that I haven't thought much about especially as a teacher. The articles that we read about social justice and how individual teachers bring about social awareness in the classroom is crucial in building students who are critical thinkers and initiators of change.