Standard 3: Understanding and Organizing Subject Matter for Student Learning
3.1 Demonstrates knowledge
of subject matter, academic content standards, and curriculum frameworks.
3.2 Applies knowledge of student development and proficiencies to ensure student understanding of subject matter.
3.3 Organizes curriculum to facilitate student understanding of subject matter.
3.4 Utilizes instructional strategies that are appropriate to the subject matter.
3.5 Uses and adapts resources, technologies, and standards-aligned instructional materials, including adopting materials, to make subject matter accessible to all students.
3.6 Addresses the needs of English learners and students with special needs to provide equitable access to the content.
3.1 Demonstrates knowledge of subject matter, academic content standards, and curriculum frameworks.
To ensure that my lessons are meaningful and purposeful, I make sure to incorporate the current state standards in my daily lessons. I have always done so since the beginning of my long-term placement: looking at the standards and integrating them into my daily lessons. However, I believe I have become more observant of the standards and have become more specific as to which particular standard am I focusing my lesson on. When I started out in my long-term placement, the standards I included in my daily lesson plans were very broad and long (see ELD Lesson 1). In addition, I also noticed that my objectives and goals did not assess the standard that I had stated, let alone align with the said standard. Notice in this lesson plan, I had a lot of standards which I did not cover at all in my lesson. One of the objectives I had is “Students will be able to define the character’s actions and physical features”. Yet, I did not explain how; how will students define the character’s actions and physical features? Is it through verbal participation or written? Comparing this lesson plan to my current ones, I noticed that I have made my lesson plans more specific and focused on the day’s lesson alone – not the entire unit (see ELA 7 Informational Text Lesson 1). As seen in this second lesson plan, I only have one standard. Even though I have only one standard, the standard is specific and it is the one that I am focusing on for the day. Also, my objectives are clearer and more precise; they address exactly what my students will be able to do and how they will be able to demonstrate that. The assessment also clearly indicates how I will assess and provide feedback to my students. Taking these differences into consideration, I show that my ability to develop lesson plans has improved. Not only that, but I personally feel that I have grown as a lesson plan developer.
3.2 Applies knowledge of student development and proficiencies to ensure student understanding of subject matter.
To ensure student learning and engagement in my classroom, I take my students’ social and academic development into great consideration when planning my lessons. I believe that a well-planned lesson not only incorporates state content standards, but it also engages students by taking students’ interests and academic level into account. With this in mind, I planned my lessons to cater to my students’ interests, as well as to my students’ social and academic development. Recalling Laurence Steinberg and Margo Gardner’s (2005) studies and adolescent literature I read for one of my Human Development courses in adolescence as an undergraduate, I understood that my group of students, twelve to thirteen years old seventh graders, is at the social development where their friends and peers are more important than their families. Steinberg and Gardner concluded that the adolescent brain is still undergoing development, particularly dendritic pruning in the prefrontal cortex (responsible for critical thinking, analysis, and rational behavior) and increasing growth in density of fibers that connect the amygdala (responsible for emotions and feelings) to the prefrontal cortex. As a result, many of the decisions adolescents make are still weighed and determined heavily by the amygdala; the amygdala is responsible for emotions. As Steinberg and Gardner’s research shows, adolescence is a time where teenagers spend more time with peers than with family; therefore, their actions and decisions are highly influenced by their peer-interactions and their emotional reactivity. Taking Steinberg and Gardner’s research to understand my students’ behavior and interests, I focused my lessons on topics that I know my students will have a lot to contribute to.
For example, in preparation for The Giver, I designed a lesson on individualism, collectivism, and conformity for my students. For this lesson, I focused on explanation of the three terms. The concept of individualism and collectivism enabled me to connect the lesson to my students because, as mentioned above, they are at the cognitive development where they want to fit in with their peers. Therefore, this lesson encouraged them to be unique individuals and gave them the opportunity to express their own individuality in a classroom setting among their peers. Embedded in the lesson, my students had to, with a partner, recall a time or situation in which they have conformed or have seen others conformed. This lesson connected some of the themes of The Giver (individualism, collectivism, conformity) to my students’ personal experiences and to my students’ cognitive and social development as adolescents.
3.3 Organizes curriculum to facilitate student understanding of subject matter.
As a teacher whose job is to make sure that all students leave the classroom with the knowledge and skills they will need for the following school year, and beyond school walls, I focus closely on lesson planning and instructional strategies that will best support my students’ learning. This entailed using my knowledge of the subject matter to organize, structure, and plan lessons that caters to the needs of my students. After analyzing the state standards on informational text, and researching informational text and strategies other teachers have used, I decided to design a unit on informational text – with a focus on text features and text structure. Once I figured out that I want to focus on these two aspects of informational text, I planned out the whole unit by laying out which aspect I planned to cover first, how I was going to cover the material, and how I was going to connect both aspects together. Looking at both aspects, I decided to take an inward approach with the unit: I covered text features first, text structure second. I decided to take this approach because I concluded that text features helps readers understand, to an extent, what the article is about; therefore, it is a smoother transition for my students to learn the features that provide hints about the article before delving into the complex text of the article. In other words, this approach is like previewing a movie; students look at glimpses of the movie and get a gist of what the movie is about before sitting down to watch it.
With this decided, I introduced text features by having students compare and contrast a featureless text and one with features (see Beelzebufo article A and article B). This activity led into a direct instruction on the various text features, followed by examples. During the direct instruction, I included visuals to support visual learners in grasping the content; I repeated concepts as well as had other students repeat concepts and provide examples to support auditory learners. To support my kinesthetic learners, I planned a gallery walk, following the direct instruction, for students to apply what they have learned to actual published articles (see Text Feature gallery walk article A for an example).
After spending two weeks on text features, I moved on to text structure. I connected the two aspects, text feature and text structure, by asking students to explain how we can use the titles, headings, pictures, etc. to understand what kind of information we can get from the article. This is an example of one successful unit, but it is also a unit that I strategically planned in order to connect two aspects together and make it accessible to my students’ learning modalities.
3.4 Utilizes instructional strategies that are appropriate to the subject matter.
As in every other classroom, my classroom is filled with students from diverse backgrounds, diverse personalities, and diverse learning abilities. This means that each individual student in my class learn differently; therefore, it is my responsibility to cater my lessons to the learning differences of each individual student. Hence, it is highly important that I use multiple instructional strategies to not only illustrate the concept, but also to meet the needs of all my students. During our persuasive unit, students struggled with the structure of a persuasive essay; students had difficulty understanding the structure of a persuasive essay. Noting this struggle in my students, I presented a student model of a persuasive essay to my students. Together, we walked through each element of the persuasive essay – annotating as we move along (see Persuasive Student Model). During this lesson, I, using the essay example, modeled the structure of a persuasive essay. In addition, I included think-pair-share sessions where students briefly discussed with a partner on certain elements of the essay, explaining why. For example, in pairs, students had to explain why there needed to be hook, what purpose does a thesis statement serves, and so on. Following this lesson, students worked in groups to put the essay together based on the structure of a persuasive essay. In groups, students had the opportunity to discuss with their peers to come to an understanding of the essay structure. Therefore, both lessons focused on instructional strategies that support student understanding of subject matter through teacher modeling and peer-to-peer discussion.
Another example in which I used various instructional strategies to support student learning is during our poetry unit. As part of the unit, students read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “Paul Revere’s Ride”. The following day, I did a think-aloud of the themes depicted in the poem. Together, we went over the definition of theme and other literary devices, analyzed the poem in its entirety, and identified a few themes. By doing the think-aloud and working together to define literary terms and themes, I not only modeled how to analyze but also provided scaffolds to support students’ understanding of literary devices. Drawing from this, students worked collaboratively in groups, using what we had went over together as a class, to analyze one element of the poem, such as metaphor, similes, personification, etc. By working together, students cooperated and shared ideas among each other to gain a better understanding of the text.
3.5 Uses and adapts resources, technologies, and standards-aligned instructional materials, including adopting materials, to make subject matter accessible to all students. 3.6 Addresses the needs of English learners and students with special needs to provide equitable access to the content
As briefly touched upon above, I work hard to make my lessons engaging and relevant to my students’ lives. I believe that lessons should focus on student learning; therefore, to support student learning, lessons should be designed to the interests and needs of all students. With this in mind, I have, over the course of my long-term placement, gradually, when the opportunity permitted, embedded online resources into my lessons. I try to look for opportunities where I can use other modalities to enhance my students’ learning experience and support their learning.
As mentioned above, we did a class read-aloud of “Paul Revere’s Ride”. Following the class read-aloud of the poem, students watched a reading of the poem accompanied with an animation of the poem. The animation served as a visual for my students to support their understanding of the poem. Once students understood the plot, as depicted in the animation, students were more prepared to move onto the next step – analysis of the poem. Therefore, the animation also served as a scaffold to support students’ understanding of the plot of the poem. In addition, the animation not only supports my visual and auditory learners, but it also supports my English learners and my students with IEPs. The reading and animation in the video supported my English learners’ understanding of the poem because of the tone projected by the narrator and the visual presentation of the poem itself. Similarly, the video supported my students with IEPs because it provided the reading of the poem more than once.
Another lesson where I had the opportunity to include multimedia in the classroom was during a lesson on speaker and audience. For this lesson, students read the first two stanzas of Dorothy Parker’s “One Perfect Rose” (see Speaker/Audience handout). After the reading, students identified the speaker and audience of the poem, tying it to the message of the poem. Following this, students listened to and watched a live performance of Collective Soul’s “Needs”. However, I omitted the last stanza of the song without telling the students. Like what they did with the poem, students identified the speaker and audience of the song, tying it to the message of the song. Then, I presented the last stanza of the poem and the last stanza of the song to the students. Following this, we lead a discussion on how one small stanza can completely change the speaker and audience, as well as the message of a text/work. This lesson used both music and video to engage students as well as support students’ understanding of speaker, audience, and message. The use of music and video supported students’ understanding of speaker, audience, and message because the song enabled students to hear how the lyrics are sung, focusing on the tone, while the video provided a visual for students to relate the lyrics to the mood. By tying the lyrics of the song to the visual and audio hearing of the song, students were able to connect the message of the lyrics to the tone and mood of the singer – ultimately, students connected those said elements to the speaker and audience.
My experiences during my long-term placement promoted my belief and advocacy for the integration of multimedia and technology in the classroom; multimedia and technology not only engages students, but it also supports all students, including English learners and students with IEPs, in learning because they (1) serve as visuals and audios to support further understanding, and (2) make the subject matter accessible to them.
3.2 Applies knowledge of student development and proficiencies to ensure student understanding of subject matter.
3.3 Organizes curriculum to facilitate student understanding of subject matter.
3.4 Utilizes instructional strategies that are appropriate to the subject matter.
3.5 Uses and adapts resources, technologies, and standards-aligned instructional materials, including adopting materials, to make subject matter accessible to all students.
3.6 Addresses the needs of English learners and students with special needs to provide equitable access to the content.
3.1 Demonstrates knowledge of subject matter, academic content standards, and curriculum frameworks.
To ensure that my lessons are meaningful and purposeful, I make sure to incorporate the current state standards in my daily lessons. I have always done so since the beginning of my long-term placement: looking at the standards and integrating them into my daily lessons. However, I believe I have become more observant of the standards and have become more specific as to which particular standard am I focusing my lesson on. When I started out in my long-term placement, the standards I included in my daily lesson plans were very broad and long (see ELD Lesson 1). In addition, I also noticed that my objectives and goals did not assess the standard that I had stated, let alone align with the said standard. Notice in this lesson plan, I had a lot of standards which I did not cover at all in my lesson. One of the objectives I had is “Students will be able to define the character’s actions and physical features”. Yet, I did not explain how; how will students define the character’s actions and physical features? Is it through verbal participation or written? Comparing this lesson plan to my current ones, I noticed that I have made my lesson plans more specific and focused on the day’s lesson alone – not the entire unit (see ELA 7 Informational Text Lesson 1). As seen in this second lesson plan, I only have one standard. Even though I have only one standard, the standard is specific and it is the one that I am focusing on for the day. Also, my objectives are clearer and more precise; they address exactly what my students will be able to do and how they will be able to demonstrate that. The assessment also clearly indicates how I will assess and provide feedback to my students. Taking these differences into consideration, I show that my ability to develop lesson plans has improved. Not only that, but I personally feel that I have grown as a lesson plan developer.
3.2 Applies knowledge of student development and proficiencies to ensure student understanding of subject matter.
To ensure student learning and engagement in my classroom, I take my students’ social and academic development into great consideration when planning my lessons. I believe that a well-planned lesson not only incorporates state content standards, but it also engages students by taking students’ interests and academic level into account. With this in mind, I planned my lessons to cater to my students’ interests, as well as to my students’ social and academic development. Recalling Laurence Steinberg and Margo Gardner’s (2005) studies and adolescent literature I read for one of my Human Development courses in adolescence as an undergraduate, I understood that my group of students, twelve to thirteen years old seventh graders, is at the social development where their friends and peers are more important than their families. Steinberg and Gardner concluded that the adolescent brain is still undergoing development, particularly dendritic pruning in the prefrontal cortex (responsible for critical thinking, analysis, and rational behavior) and increasing growth in density of fibers that connect the amygdala (responsible for emotions and feelings) to the prefrontal cortex. As a result, many of the decisions adolescents make are still weighed and determined heavily by the amygdala; the amygdala is responsible for emotions. As Steinberg and Gardner’s research shows, adolescence is a time where teenagers spend more time with peers than with family; therefore, their actions and decisions are highly influenced by their peer-interactions and their emotional reactivity. Taking Steinberg and Gardner’s research to understand my students’ behavior and interests, I focused my lessons on topics that I know my students will have a lot to contribute to.
For example, in preparation for The Giver, I designed a lesson on individualism, collectivism, and conformity for my students. For this lesson, I focused on explanation of the three terms. The concept of individualism and collectivism enabled me to connect the lesson to my students because, as mentioned above, they are at the cognitive development where they want to fit in with their peers. Therefore, this lesson encouraged them to be unique individuals and gave them the opportunity to express their own individuality in a classroom setting among their peers. Embedded in the lesson, my students had to, with a partner, recall a time or situation in which they have conformed or have seen others conformed. This lesson connected some of the themes of The Giver (individualism, collectivism, conformity) to my students’ personal experiences and to my students’ cognitive and social development as adolescents.
3.3 Organizes curriculum to facilitate student understanding of subject matter.
As a teacher whose job is to make sure that all students leave the classroom with the knowledge and skills they will need for the following school year, and beyond school walls, I focus closely on lesson planning and instructional strategies that will best support my students’ learning. This entailed using my knowledge of the subject matter to organize, structure, and plan lessons that caters to the needs of my students. After analyzing the state standards on informational text, and researching informational text and strategies other teachers have used, I decided to design a unit on informational text – with a focus on text features and text structure. Once I figured out that I want to focus on these two aspects of informational text, I planned out the whole unit by laying out which aspect I planned to cover first, how I was going to cover the material, and how I was going to connect both aspects together. Looking at both aspects, I decided to take an inward approach with the unit: I covered text features first, text structure second. I decided to take this approach because I concluded that text features helps readers understand, to an extent, what the article is about; therefore, it is a smoother transition for my students to learn the features that provide hints about the article before delving into the complex text of the article. In other words, this approach is like previewing a movie; students look at glimpses of the movie and get a gist of what the movie is about before sitting down to watch it.
With this decided, I introduced text features by having students compare and contrast a featureless text and one with features (see Beelzebufo article A and article B). This activity led into a direct instruction on the various text features, followed by examples. During the direct instruction, I included visuals to support visual learners in grasping the content; I repeated concepts as well as had other students repeat concepts and provide examples to support auditory learners. To support my kinesthetic learners, I planned a gallery walk, following the direct instruction, for students to apply what they have learned to actual published articles (see Text Feature gallery walk article A for an example).
After spending two weeks on text features, I moved on to text structure. I connected the two aspects, text feature and text structure, by asking students to explain how we can use the titles, headings, pictures, etc. to understand what kind of information we can get from the article. This is an example of one successful unit, but it is also a unit that I strategically planned in order to connect two aspects together and make it accessible to my students’ learning modalities.
3.4 Utilizes instructional strategies that are appropriate to the subject matter.
As in every other classroom, my classroom is filled with students from diverse backgrounds, diverse personalities, and diverse learning abilities. This means that each individual student in my class learn differently; therefore, it is my responsibility to cater my lessons to the learning differences of each individual student. Hence, it is highly important that I use multiple instructional strategies to not only illustrate the concept, but also to meet the needs of all my students. During our persuasive unit, students struggled with the structure of a persuasive essay; students had difficulty understanding the structure of a persuasive essay. Noting this struggle in my students, I presented a student model of a persuasive essay to my students. Together, we walked through each element of the persuasive essay – annotating as we move along (see Persuasive Student Model). During this lesson, I, using the essay example, modeled the structure of a persuasive essay. In addition, I included think-pair-share sessions where students briefly discussed with a partner on certain elements of the essay, explaining why. For example, in pairs, students had to explain why there needed to be hook, what purpose does a thesis statement serves, and so on. Following this lesson, students worked in groups to put the essay together based on the structure of a persuasive essay. In groups, students had the opportunity to discuss with their peers to come to an understanding of the essay structure. Therefore, both lessons focused on instructional strategies that support student understanding of subject matter through teacher modeling and peer-to-peer discussion.
Another example in which I used various instructional strategies to support student learning is during our poetry unit. As part of the unit, students read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “Paul Revere’s Ride”. The following day, I did a think-aloud of the themes depicted in the poem. Together, we went over the definition of theme and other literary devices, analyzed the poem in its entirety, and identified a few themes. By doing the think-aloud and working together to define literary terms and themes, I not only modeled how to analyze but also provided scaffolds to support students’ understanding of literary devices. Drawing from this, students worked collaboratively in groups, using what we had went over together as a class, to analyze one element of the poem, such as metaphor, similes, personification, etc. By working together, students cooperated and shared ideas among each other to gain a better understanding of the text.
3.5 Uses and adapts resources, technologies, and standards-aligned instructional materials, including adopting materials, to make subject matter accessible to all students. 3.6 Addresses the needs of English learners and students with special needs to provide equitable access to the content
As briefly touched upon above, I work hard to make my lessons engaging and relevant to my students’ lives. I believe that lessons should focus on student learning; therefore, to support student learning, lessons should be designed to the interests and needs of all students. With this in mind, I have, over the course of my long-term placement, gradually, when the opportunity permitted, embedded online resources into my lessons. I try to look for opportunities where I can use other modalities to enhance my students’ learning experience and support their learning.
As mentioned above, we did a class read-aloud of “Paul Revere’s Ride”. Following the class read-aloud of the poem, students watched a reading of the poem accompanied with an animation of the poem. The animation served as a visual for my students to support their understanding of the poem. Once students understood the plot, as depicted in the animation, students were more prepared to move onto the next step – analysis of the poem. Therefore, the animation also served as a scaffold to support students’ understanding of the plot of the poem. In addition, the animation not only supports my visual and auditory learners, but it also supports my English learners and my students with IEPs. The reading and animation in the video supported my English learners’ understanding of the poem because of the tone projected by the narrator and the visual presentation of the poem itself. Similarly, the video supported my students with IEPs because it provided the reading of the poem more than once.
Another lesson where I had the opportunity to include multimedia in the classroom was during a lesson on speaker and audience. For this lesson, students read the first two stanzas of Dorothy Parker’s “One Perfect Rose” (see Speaker/Audience handout). After the reading, students identified the speaker and audience of the poem, tying it to the message of the poem. Following this, students listened to and watched a live performance of Collective Soul’s “Needs”. However, I omitted the last stanza of the song without telling the students. Like what they did with the poem, students identified the speaker and audience of the song, tying it to the message of the song. Then, I presented the last stanza of the poem and the last stanza of the song to the students. Following this, we lead a discussion on how one small stanza can completely change the speaker and audience, as well as the message of a text/work. This lesson used both music and video to engage students as well as support students’ understanding of speaker, audience, and message. The use of music and video supported students’ understanding of speaker, audience, and message because the song enabled students to hear how the lyrics are sung, focusing on the tone, while the video provided a visual for students to relate the lyrics to the mood. By tying the lyrics of the song to the visual and audio hearing of the song, students were able to connect the message of the lyrics to the tone and mood of the singer – ultimately, students connected those said elements to the speaker and audience.
My experiences during my long-term placement promoted my belief and advocacy for the integration of multimedia and technology in the classroom; multimedia and technology not only engages students, but it also supports all students, including English learners and students with IEPs, in learning because they (1) serve as visuals and audios to support further understanding, and (2) make the subject matter accessible to them.