Learning Outcome Four
Learning Outcome Four: Understand how students learn and develop.
I have proven that I understand how students learn and develop both in my studies of education and my practice as a teacher, which I will prove with a lesson plan on plot elements, a contract for a book club I created, and a mini-lesson on parallelism.
My first piece of evidence that proves my firm understanding of how students learn and develop is a unit plan that I created for an Introduction to English Language Arts Course in the fall of 2008. The unit focuses on using a variety of texts including books, short stories, videos, and advertisements to discuss and analyze the topic of peer pressure. The unit reflects my understanding that students develop their reading and writing skills through reading and writing as much as possible. The unit therefore demands that students read as well as write in different genres in order to practice and hone their skills. The unit also includes ways for students to create work that goes beyond the classroom, an idea supported by Margaret J. Finders and Susan Hynds in their book, Literacy Lessons, that suggests educators provide students with authentic learning experiences that transfer outside of school. I understand that authentic learning is vital for students to develop and this unit provides students many opportunities to practice reading, writing, listening, and speaking that applies to their lives beyond school. Throughout the unit, students are learning not only skills associated with English Language Arts but skills in life as well, therefore helping them to develop both as students and as members of society.
Another way in which I’ve shown my understanding of how students learn and develop is through my completion of a Teacher Work Sample based on my experiences observing and teaching at Cortland Alternative High School. Creating the Teacher Work Sample allowed me to analyze student work in order to create a lesson that would help them to learn and develop their writing skills. I chose to focus on writing introductions, and I gave students a variety of examples of introductions in order to help them understand the various ways to create a captivating introduction. After my lesson, students rewrote their own introductions and the majority of them had largely improved. Comparing student work before and after teaching my lesson allowed me to directly see and understand how students develop with instruction.
I have also proven my understanding of how students learn and develop through a mini-lesson written to teach parallelism. As Robert Pattison points out in “Some Thoughts on Teaching English,” students need to be equipped with the proper grammar rules in order to succeed in American society. I therefore wrote this mini-lesson on parallelism so that students could gain the tools necessary to understand and practice the rules of parallelism. In the lesson, students must work through many questions in order to discover the definition of parallelism and how it works on their own. By discovering information on their own, students are more likely to understand the material and remember it. The lesson gives students examples of non-coordinated sentences and sentences showing parallelism so that students could compare the two in order to form an understanding of parallelism. Once they have done enough work to fully understand parallelism, students are then required to practice their understanding. This practice starts off with simple work that quickly becomes more challenging. They find examples of parallelism within a text, create a sentence containing parallelism based on details that are given to them, use parallelism to finish a sentence, and finally write multiple sentences which contain parallelism in their answer to a question. By taking away a little bit of support with each step, students are more than prepared for practicing entirely on their own with no support. They also are given multiple chances to better their understanding of parallelism with each question, and such a detailed practice will ensure that students gain maximum retention of the information.
I have proven that I understand how students learn and develop both in my studies of education and my practice as a teacher, which I will prove with a lesson plan on plot elements, a contract for a book club I created, and a mini-lesson on parallelism.
My first piece of evidence that proves my firm understanding of how students learn and develop is a unit plan that I created for an Introduction to English Language Arts Course in the fall of 2008. The unit focuses on using a variety of texts including books, short stories, videos, and advertisements to discuss and analyze the topic of peer pressure. The unit reflects my understanding that students develop their reading and writing skills through reading and writing as much as possible. The unit therefore demands that students read as well as write in different genres in order to practice and hone their skills. The unit also includes ways for students to create work that goes beyond the classroom, an idea supported by Margaret J. Finders and Susan Hynds in their book, Literacy Lessons, that suggests educators provide students with authentic learning experiences that transfer outside of school. I understand that authentic learning is vital for students to develop and this unit provides students many opportunities to practice reading, writing, listening, and speaking that applies to their lives beyond school. Throughout the unit, students are learning not only skills associated with English Language Arts but skills in life as well, therefore helping them to develop both as students and as members of society.
Another way in which I’ve shown my understanding of how students learn and develop is through my completion of a Teacher Work Sample based on my experiences observing and teaching at Cortland Alternative High School. Creating the Teacher Work Sample allowed me to analyze student work in order to create a lesson that would help them to learn and develop their writing skills. I chose to focus on writing introductions, and I gave students a variety of examples of introductions in order to help them understand the various ways to create a captivating introduction. After my lesson, students rewrote their own introductions and the majority of them had largely improved. Comparing student work before and after teaching my lesson allowed me to directly see and understand how students develop with instruction.
I have also proven my understanding of how students learn and develop through a mini-lesson written to teach parallelism. As Robert Pattison points out in “Some Thoughts on Teaching English,” students need to be equipped with the proper grammar rules in order to succeed in American society. I therefore wrote this mini-lesson on parallelism so that students could gain the tools necessary to understand and practice the rules of parallelism. In the lesson, students must work through many questions in order to discover the definition of parallelism and how it works on their own. By discovering information on their own, students are more likely to understand the material and remember it. The lesson gives students examples of non-coordinated sentences and sentences showing parallelism so that students could compare the two in order to form an understanding of parallelism. Once they have done enough work to fully understand parallelism, students are then required to practice their understanding. This practice starts off with simple work that quickly becomes more challenging. They find examples of parallelism within a text, create a sentence containing parallelism based on details that are given to them, use parallelism to finish a sentence, and finally write multiple sentences which contain parallelism in their answer to a question. By taking away a little bit of support with each step, students are more than prepared for practicing entirely on their own with no support. They also are given multiple chances to better their understanding of parallelism with each question, and such a detailed practice will ensure that students gain maximum retention of the information.