Domain 1: Planning and Preparation
1a: Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy
1b: Demonstrating Knowledge of Students
1f: Designing Student Assessments
My first artifact for this domain is a lesson plan I constructed while teaching senior English. The book we were reading was Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. I chose to include this lesson plan because it depicts a variety of teaching strategies including writing, inquiry, collaboration, discussion, and analysis; all of which are reagularly employed in my classroom.
For this next artifact, I chose to include a formal evaluation written by my third quarter placement teacher. For this experience, I had been placed in a middle school band program, which was no small transition from my previous placement teaching senior English. It proved to be an extraordinary experience, and I found that I was equally capable of guiding and instructing these fantastic younger students, as evidenced by the comments in this evaluation.
This domain's final artifact is the one that I am most proud of. As part of a Frankenstein unit that I designed, I developed an alternative end of term assessment that proved extremely engaging and effective. Over the course of the quarter, students took on the role of a legal magistrate investigating the murders recorded in the novel. Their final summative assessment for the unit had two main parts: 1) a mock trial in which the creature was suing Dr. Frankenstein for child neglect and abandonment, and 2) a final "case file" portfolio where students recorded and analyzed relevant data from the unit. This portfolio included a final court write-up essay, evidence journals, character dossiers, summaries of legal terminology, and annotated articles, which documented real court cases which were conceptually similar to our mock trial.
