Artifact #1 Commentary

This Socratic seminar lesson plan allowed students to share their thoughts and opinions about The Oddysey’s characters, events, and themes. In preparation for the Socratic seminar, during which students were expected to use academic language, handouts were distributed that provided students with sentence starters that could be used to introduce an agreement, disagreement, or a request for more information. The teacher modeled academic language throughout the seminar, and a set of discussion questions was provided to the students beforehand.

Students enjoyed the Socratic seminar and remained engaged throughout. A potential modification for future use would include allowing time for students to write their own questions to ask the class and showing a video demonstration of a successful Socratic seminar before students participate for the first time.

Artifact #2 Commentary

Students were asked to write diary entries for a chosen character rather than demonstrating their understanding through more traditional means such as a test or formal essay. This differentiated product allowed for more student creativity and choice; students could choose their character, what events/plot details to focus on, and how to present their diary entries (on paper or as record vlogs). Because students had a lot of control over the direction of their project, they enjoyed the process. The result was that students not only performed well on the project but demonstrated a deep understanding of the characters and their motivations and scored well on related portions of the unit exam. A potential modification for future use would include having students write diary entries for several characters and/or asking them to write a more lengthy entry from characters as if they responding to the play's outcome.

Artifact #3 Commentary

Throughout our unit on Julius Caesar, I created several Kahoot! quizzes for my students to complete in class. These quizzes were a highlight for my students as they kept them engaged by gamifying the learning. They enjoyed the friendly competition and felt a surge of pride when they scored well, and their names topped the podium. In addition to making learning fun, these Kahoot! quizzes also gave the students instant feedback that helped them understand how well they comprehended the text. Likewise, I was thrilled with the data it provided me as I could see who was doing well and who might need some intervention. A potential modification for future use would be to ask students to write their own questions that I could include in the quiz. This would engage them to engage with the text on a deeper level and would get them thinking about difficult questions that could stump their friends!

Artifact #4 Commentary

As a student teacher, I quickly found that communication with my students and their families was crucial for student success. I kept the daily agenda on Canvas up-to-date and detailed so that my students—even if absent—were always aware of upcoming assignments, assessments, and due dates. I also scheduled emails to go out to parents and guardians when a significant assessment or project was near due. In this artifact, a message was sent to parents and guardians several days before the Julius Caesar unit exam. It detailed the format of the test, the kinds of study materials available to students on Canvas, and information about an extra credit project. This prompted more students to turn in their extra assignments and study for their exams. As a result, my classes scored the highest average on the test out of all the English 9 classes. One potential modification to this artifact would be to send it out to families sooner, and to include some of the study materials directly in this email rather than directing the families to Canvas.