411 Practicum seminar

Blogpost: How might you incorporate differentiation and translanguaging strategies in using/teaching one of Tovani’s reading strategies? After our class on Thursday, I really felt that I got a sense of what translanguaging really is and not just the definition that I have remembered from past classes. "Translanguaging in Curriculum and Instruction" lays out some real concrete strategies that really put it into perspective for me. One of my favorites was the word walls (pg 133). I have heard of word walls in the past but never thought of using multiple languages and different cognates to help emerging bilinguals VISUALIZE the connections between the words. I kept connecting back to myself to think of myself learning Spanish and how helpful having these visual aids displayed in the classroom at all times would be extremely beneficial. Therefore, in my group we came up with the idea of having an 'on-going' chart that students could have in their notebooks, maybe a spec...

The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas is an incredible first novel that portrays, what I believe to be, the most realistic portrayal of the reality of police violence in 2018. It follows Starr, a young black teen who lives between her two worlds. She balances her own identity between her life in Garden Heights and her primarily white private school. Leaving a party one night with her childhood friend Khalil, she witnesses the horrifying event that changes her life forever. Khalil was pulled over and was asked to get out of the car for no particular reason. He was unfortunately shot and killed by a police officer while unarmed, reaching for his brush. This novel follows the aftermath of this event and how Starr is impacted by this tragedy. This novel for me was the narrative we've been missing and as an educator is the novel we've been waiting for. After reading this novel I immediately thought how this would be a great addition to the many novels in our curriculum. This is extre...

Creating lesson plans is the 'meat and potatoes' part of teaching that gets me the most excited. After reading Christenbury, it reminded me that with the excitement that comes with lesson planning there is also the difficulty of not creating lesson plans that are too ambitious for your students. I believe that once you become well acquainted with your students, you will have a general idea of their abilities and discover their zone of proximal development. Personally, I believe this is one of the most crucial aspects of creating lesson plans due to the fact that you may have an incredible lesson to teach, but once in practice will be a complete flop. Students may be overwhelmed with information or content that they were expected to have prior to entering your classroom. However, with fluctuations of ability in your classrooms, this creates an opportunity to utilize them to your advantage. A large part of what goes into a good lesson plan for me is relevancy. I find if you c...

Tackling the difficult topic of Racism in your classroom is no easy task. As we've mentioned in class, there are many risks in teaching the topic that may cause unpredictable outcomes and questions we may not be able to answer. In my opinion a good place to start using technology is to "find out what they know first". You could do this by creating a word cloud through Poll Everywhere  which allows students to 'text' in their answer and it will appear on the screen. The words with the most use will be larger indicating that many students also selected the same word/s. This will give you a feel for what students already have some understanding of and will spark a very thoughtful conversation. Asking them questions about the definitions of privilege and prejudice as we had done in class is a great conversation starter and will allow students to  anonymously  submit answers they may or may not feel comfortable with saying out loud in a group discussion. Starting off w...

Critical literacy is clearly a very important component in our classrooms that will give students agency to analyze, question, discovery, and look through many different lenses they may have not noticed the first time around. After reading Ira Shor's piece on critical literacy, I was reminded of the time when my cooperating teacher taught a lesson completely around the idea of critical literacy. She did this by creating a powerpoint of 'thought provoking' images with several pop culture references including Facebook and the zombie-like connection many people have to their devices. (see below). Presenting students with images like this one, allows students to analyze many different aspects of the photo through a multitude of lenses. Guiding questions like: "Why is Facebook depicted as a box of cereal/food?, Why is the word EGO on the  bowl? Why did they choose a bowl? What is the image trying to convey to the audience?  Again another image that really captures...