Reflection 

 

I chose to revise my exploratory essay, digital literacy blog post, and group literacy history project because I wanted to reimagine these three things in a new way that I could envision being used in the classroom. I altered my exploratory essay into a letter to my students because I realized that my original essay was meant to be read by students, in order to convey to them the importance of believing that their voice matters. As I began to write this letter, I then felt inspired to create a lesson plan that would also emphasize the importance of voice. Thinking about creating an engaging lesson plan then made me think about our blog post on digital writing and the argumentative blog post I had recently created for English 324. This encouraged me to create a lesson based on having my students create their own argumentative blog posts, and then I revised my group literacy history project into its own argumentative blog post format with the idea that I would then have multiple examples of an argumentative blog post to show my students in order to guide them in their own writing. Additionally, I decided to turn my literacy history group project into a blog post, so that it would be receptive to an audience of teachers because that was the intended audience of our research. Also, using Medium made me realize that I would want to give students an opportunity to post on this site, so they could see how actually having a broad audience for your writing can make the writing experience more meaningful. Overall, I hope that through these three revisions I can shows students that their voice matters and that their ideas can go far beyond just earning a grade.

 

I can definitely see using these three revisions in my professional portfolio for teaching because I think they demonstrate the practice of multiple educational standards I have to fulfill. In relation to the ten InTASC Standards all teachers must demonstrate, these three pieces will enable me to fulfill standard three, four, and eight. InTASC standard three represents the creation of learning environments, and my ideal learning environment is addressed to my students through a letter; which discusses possible student concerns and establishes a safe, positive environment open to exploration and learning through making mistakes. Standard four refers to the fulfillment of content knowledge, which I will demonstrate through my argumentative writing lesson plan and a model of argumentative blog posts. Finally, standard eight refers to instructional strategies, which I will demonstrate through enabling students to develop deeper understandings about digital literacy, argumentative writing, and voice. I think that these three revisions could definitely be implemented into my future classroom in a way that I hope will encourage students to look at writing in a new way.