Ms. Rumble's Portfolio
Standard #8:
Instructional Strategies
The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections and to build skills to access and appropriately apply information.
Artifact #1: Student Peer and Self-Evaluation
Description: For the I Am The Messenger community service project, students were required to write a reflective narrative of their experience. As a means to teach them the editing process, I had the students take part in a workshop, where they worked with their peers to edit each other’s papers. Before turning in the final draft, the students completed a self-evaluation, identical to the peer evaluation, where they expressed to me how they think they did. This gave them the opportunity to assess their own writing.
Rationale: In the student interest survey I handed out at the beginning of the year to better understand my students, the majority of them expressed how they did not want to do essays because they either did not like them or did not know how to write one effectively—so, obviously, I had us face that fear and write an essay that I masked as “a reflective narrative.” Because the majority of the students expressed how they did not know how to write or that they were bad writers, I had them complete a workshop where they would experience the editing process and individually assess their own learning and writing. Doing a self-evaluation allowed the students great reflective time, which is something I noticed they did not do with their work. With this self-evaluation and peer evaluations, my students were able to witness and reflect on the progress they made during the workshop.
Artifact #2: “To do or not to do” Hamlet Final Project
Description: For the final project to conclude Hamlet, I presented my students with a variety of projects to choose from to show me their final understanding of the play. Students could choose from performing a scene, creating a playlist and cover art inspired by characters and plot events in Hamlet, writing a piece of short fiction as an extension to the ending of the play, and creating a fake Facebook page for one of the characters. I also told my students that if none of the options appealed to them, they could present me with a project proposal for one of their own project ideas. The results of this project were phenomenal, and some students actually completed a project of their own making.
Rationale: I wanted to give my students choice with the Hamlet final project. We had spent the unit on Shakespeare’s Hamlet being creative and thinking out-of-the-box, so I wanted the final project to reflect that “spin” on Shakespeare idea that we had been working with. I developed a variety of projects that gave my students the opportunity to show me their learning in several different ways. Each project also involved using different types of technology to complete it—students used YouTube to create playlists, a Fakebook website to create fake Facebook pages for characters, etc. One student, who chose to create her own project, used her tablet and an animation program to create an animated series of the play with a voice-over done by her. I would never have thought to develop a project like that for Hamlet!
Playlist Project
Fakebook
Short Fiction
