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All course requirements must be completed in order to
receive credit for the course.
Informed class participation:
10%
In order for you to successfully fulfill this
requirement, you must also participate out loud in class
discussion. I know that some of you feel that you are quiet by nature
and are therefore allowed to sit and pay attention without speaking up,
but really, that doesn't help us generate knowledge as a community. So
if you want to do well in this class, you have to share your ideas and
your confusions.
Teacher Journal: 20%
In this class, we are going to read, think, and talk about the following
questions:
- Who am I as a teacher?
- Who are my students?
- What should I teach in a secondary English class?
- Why teach those things and not others?
- How do I teach in a way that engages my students
and encourages development of higher order critical thinking skills?
In order to enrich our discussions but also in
order to get you into the habit of self-reflection and reflective
teaching practice, you will keep a journal. No, really. I will help by
providing prompts. Sometimes the prompt will be to respond to a
practical situation or scenario, but most often the prompt will relate
to something in the reading. Later in the semester, we will be spending
the majority of class time doing demonstration lessons and discussing
them, so we won't always get to talk about the assigned reading. By
responding to it in your journal, you can pose questions and critique
what you read even if we don't get to it. Another reason for keeping the
journal in this way is that teaching is sometimes a lonely business.
Other than the occasional profession conference, workshop or seminar, or
the daily gripe sessions in the teacher's lounge, you're pretty much on
your own as the head vassal in your little fiefdom of adolescent
peasants. So, you will have to create opportunities to think critically
about what you're doing; keeping a journal like this would be one way to
do that. You can do it as a blog if you are so inclined. Otherwise, I
want you to email your responses to me. I will check that they are being
done, and periodically respond in depth, but not every time, so if there
is something specific that you want me to look at, do flag it in some
way.
Your entries should be 500-750 words long, and should
sent to me via email by Sunday evening. If you are writing a response to
a chapter or article, your response should include: APA or MLA
citation information for the resource you chose, a short summary of the
major arguments or ideas in the text, and a thoughtful critical response
that could include an assessment of the biases in the text, an
evaluation of the quality of the argument that addresses its successes,
flaws, limitations, and any connections you see to your own former or
anticipated experience as a teacher. Two of these responses should be on
the management book that you choose to read (one for the first half of
the book, one for the second).
Clinical Observation Hours:
You are required to complete 10 clinical observation hours. More on that
later.
Membership in
Illinois Association of Teachers of
English and the National Council of Teachers of English
(ungraded requirement)
Semester Plan with one full Unit Plan
30%:
I will give you the course outline and objectives for either
a year or a semester long course. You must create a calendar that lays
out your plan for the length of the course, and then you are to design an original unit plan that will cover a
minimum of two weeks of classes (10 sessions that are 45-55 minutes
long).
Your unit may be organized around a single text, a paired or
set of texts, or an idea.
Your rationale and context may address the
entire unit rather than the individual lessons plans. Other than that,
individual lesson plans should follow the outline provided below.
Any handouts, test, etc. should be designed and
included.
Teaching Demonstrations:
20%
You will prepare and deliver a
50-minute lesson that relates to one of the works of literature that are
assigned (Monster, Tangerine, The Arrival). Pay attention to the
word "relates" in that last sentence. In other words, you could do a
lesson that you would conceive to be in a unit that included one of the
texts, for instance, a poem that related thematically or formally to the
text.
For each lesson, you will write a
lesson plan for an age-appropriate classroom literature lesson. The
lesson should be grounded in theory and should be differentiated for
multiple kinds of learners. Your lesson plan should include the
following components:
1. Title of Lesson/Activity
2. Rationale/Link to theory
3. List of
State and
National
Goals addressed.
4. Student Objectives
5. Instructional Plan:
Resources
Preparation
Instruction
and Activities
Extensions
and Variations for Diverse Learners
6. Student Assessments and
Reflections
You will deliver the lesson to the
class. Plan for 45-50 minutes.
We will discuss your lesson and its
delivery as a class, and you will write a summative reflection that
indicates areas of strength and things to work on.
T-Files:
20%
Teaching
requires infinite creativity, to keep both you and your students engaged
in what you're doing. Some days, you just won't feel creative. Sometimes
you will look at your textbook and think: I don't know what to do with
this short story about a bear. Other times you will think: my students
are not getting anything out of just answering the questions at the end
of the selection and their answers are so boring that I think I will
scream if we don't do something fresh and new and for heaven's sake if I
can barely stay awake for this stuff what are my students feeling? For
those times, you need to have a bulging bag o' tricks, and you need to
know where to find new tricks when your old ones are past their
freshness date.
You should start a collection of resources
that you can continue to build on during your 297 course, use during
your student teaching, and then continue to add to as you enter your
career as a classroom teacher. The sorts of
things you should include would be lesson plans, handouts, assessment
materials, assignment sheets, evaluation rubrics, peer-evaluation
guides, supplementary materials, sub plans, brilliant ideas, vague ideas
with potential, etc. Some of these will be
electronic (powerpoint presentations, for instance), and some will be
intended for print, but I would like to have them organized and
submitted in an accessible electronic format (CD, wiki, blog, personal
website, etc.). The more materials you collect, the more prepared you
will be for the first few years of teaching. Hence, I will be looking
for development of both quantity and quality of your T-Files. I will
also be looking for organization. A lack of organization is my own
personal haunt; I have great ideas and have developed wonderful unit
plans, activities, and resources over the years which do me precious
little good because I can never find them when I need them. So you will
be held accountable for learning from my frustrations, and developing an
organized filing system of some sort that will help you not only
generate resources, but also keep track of them so that you can pull
them at the last minute. (You won't believe how many "last minutes"
there are in teaching!) Storing them electronically is a great starting
point (I lived in 10 different apartments/houses during my first three
years of teaching--carting print files from place to place is a
nightmare), but only a starting point. Develop a plan, and work within
it.
ITPS
Requirement I: Database Management
Read the information regarding this requirement at the
ITPS website. Let me know by Feb. 12 if you cannot figure out how to
do this task. I can't help you, but I can find someone who can, and I
will set up a time for him to walk you through it.
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