Describe, Analyze, and Reflect: Performance Criterion 3.1

Source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGDF4fzVWPDVDdjCBXbGtjL7xRuovESApK7pDuZdUxmHPEroBZzJhYHoi52EDOZyoEjpK3Spz6ndKOS09yS0I040lO0bo3dEitKMBHEux_rOydLeQpyG3yICukxKZ_3Rt561pmxRIMHmI/s1600/open+journals.jpg

Hello! Things are wrapping up quickly in my Middle and High School Literacy and Curriculum courses, and as my assignments and assessments come to a close, I have been spending a lot of time reflecting on the skills and instructional strategies I have developed over the semester. One of my final assignments includes a portion of my Vermont Licensure Portfolio; specifically, I wrote a mini DAR (design, analyze, and reflect) journal about my fulfillment of Performance Criterion 3.1.

Check out my P.C. 3.1 DAR here!

Comments

YA Lit.: Dumplin'

Nowadays, young adult literature covers a wide range of themes, offering commentary on everything from self-image and confidence to abuse and death. While the recent release of the Netflix series (based on the novel) 13 Reasons Why has arguably created a negative association between young adults and literature, there are plenty of YA novels that deal with teenage realities beyond suicide. Julie Murphy's Dumplin' , a novel full of southern charm and the narrator Willowdean's no non-sense sarcasm, provides the reader with a classic battle between feeling good in your own skin and wanting to fit in with society's bodily expectations. Willowdean, an overweight 11th grader in a town obsessed with an annual beauty pageant, can't seem to get away from the local pressures to be a beauty queen. Usually comfortable in her skin, Willowdean starts to question her confidence when a co-worker shows romantic interest. Although dealing with a serious topic that could...

On Teaching and Reflection

Somewhere on my bookshelves, sandwiched between worn copies of literary classics and young adult novels, rests my collection of the title On Writing and other memoirs focused on the craft. Several authors have attempted to make sense of their adopted art, and even more have tried to guide others through their creative processes: Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Sol Stein, Ray Bradbury, and George Orwell, to name a few. While many of the memoirs composed by those who have found great success in their writing highlight similar themes when discussing the elements of their work, each writer also offers a sort of defense for his or her own approach in connecting a pen to paper. That, of course, is the beauty of writing: an author has freedom within some set conventions, and even these boundaries can be broken if the right time presents itself. After four years of undergraduate study, I think the biggest takeaway from my experience as a pre-service teacher is that education ...

Place-Based Learning: Museums and the Importance of Physical Space in Middle School Education

Before there were formalized schools, there were living rooms, church halls, back steps, battlefields, and the great outdoors. Education came in all shapes and sizes, from the modern understanding of “traditional” study through the analysis of past writings and artifacts to the natural signals one learned to recognize on the farm before an approaching storm. Students were not just young people hunched over a book shielded from the world behind brick walls. They were citizens learning how to manage a family business, reading and printing newspapers, planting seeds, plowing land, and striving to better prepare themselves for the future, whatever it held for them. Today’s students aim to do the same. Yet their education seems to have restricted itself to the boundaries of school property, or perhaps it occasionally wanders beyond county lines. What happened to learning about your environment— and all the life that lived and lives within it— by experiencing everything it has to offer fir...

Future Teacher, Forever Student

Search This Blog