Winter Quarter 2025
Rubric Differentiation for MLL Students
During our winter quarter, we were tasked with differentiating our lesson plans for MLL students. During the first semester of my internship, my MLL students were mostly Level 5 language learners. For my evidence of applying the concepts of differentiation, I focused on differentiating the rubric my students used twice during the unit. The rubric is used once at the midpoint of the lesson by the students themselves to self-assess their progression to meeting the unit requirements and at the end by myself as the teacher for their final grade on the project.
Because my students are mostly level 5, this means they are capable of full sentence reading and writing, will be grammatically varied, may need some additional scaffolds, but do not need the symbols or visible actions to help them comprehend the language they are being presented with in my lessons. They are close to exiting the WIDA process as a whole but still need some support along the way.
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While making revisions to the modified rubric, I made sure to bold the key words, re-worded in first person language, provided the definitions for the design principles, and provided the definitions of some of the bigger words in the descriptions. I did not use symbols or pictures because a level 5 language learner does not necessarily need these as described in Fairbairn & Jones-Vo (2019). I also plan on live demos in class using the graphic design tools and sharing my own work of posters I have designed in the past, as well as examples from other students that show what is worthy of each score 1-3. This artifact of the differentiated rubrics exemplifies our MIT Strand Four: Planning, Instruction, and Assessment. It shows that I am capable of designing and enacting meaningful instruction and assessment to develop students' identities, knowledge, skills, understandings, and dispositions to bring creativity and innovation to the world's most pressing issues.
In addition to modifying the rubric linked above, I also created table tents for my students with additional key points to help them during class instruction and design time. This will be used as a language scaffold for all levels of language learners. My table tents were focused on defining the tools most commonly used in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, listing each symbol of the tool, and common situations/examples when you as a designer would want to use these tools. For example, the lasso tool in photoshop is a great asset for separating shapes, removing backgrounds, and developing the layers for vector designs. Not all cultural backgrounds will be familiar with the shape of a lasso, so having the symbol/icon for the tool on a table tent will be beneficial.
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Reference:
Fairburn, S. & Jones-Vo, S. (2019). Differentiating Instruction and Assessment for English Language Learners (2nd ed.). Caslon Publishing.
Building Community in the Classroom
For this artifact, I chose two community connections activities that I collected in for my upcoming internship. I used the community connections activities to build up knowledge in community of one another in the hopes of easing anxiety for future art critiques of each other's work. The community connections were fantastic, each round I grew in my understanding of each student and students grew in their relationships with one another. I will continue to utilize community connections activities into my own classrooms beyond my internship because of the positive effects these community building activities had on my students.
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These artifacts exemplify our MIT Strand Three: Learning Environment. By enacting community connections in my classroom, it shows I am capable of facilitating an inclusive and culturally sustaining learning community in my classroom that fosters a sense of belonging and agency for each student. The activities center the humanity of each student and provide a gateway for students to learn more about each other.
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Reference:
“Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students" (2015) by Hammond, Zaretta.
Student Interviews- Building Rapport
During our winter quarter, we were tasked with interviewing multiple students to gather data about them in preparation for our spring internship. I chose this artifact of my summary of my interview of one students, DC. This artifact exemplifies MIT Strand Four: Planning, Instruction, and Assessment because I learned more about their interests, hobbies, and activities they are drawn to in their free time that I can leverage for lesson planning. I also learned more about their assets of their prior knowledge and interests that would serve particularly well for drawing inspiration for art in future lessons. This activity showed me the value of data gathering of my students and the power of allowing them to express themselves in the formats they choose. I also got to explore alternative ways of adapting our unit structures (advanced Canvas access, utilizing their personal interests to heighten engagement, giving flexibility on due dates, making space for more complicated subject areas in assignments) to accommodate these students to alleviate stress and keep them engaged. Not every strategy worked, but it gave me confidence to trial new methods and seek guidance from the students themselves on what works best for them even when documentation, like an IEP, has conflicting information. This activity also showed me that perceptions can be wrong and that it’s best to use your own judgement on how to meet the needs of each student when possible.
Below is an excerpt from my narrative I wrote for this assignment submission regarding my experience with interviewing student, DC.
For this student (DC), I specifically chose her for this assignment because I have not yet heard her speak since joining the classroom in October. She has always been very quiet and current labeled in her IEP as “functionally independent, non verbal, requires plainly stated directions, step by step guidance”. I have been working on growing a relationship with her because of her quiet nature and it took many weeks before she felt comfortable speaking with me in between projects/task work. She often needs written directions, frequent check ins, and paper handouts for assignments to keep her on task. These are examples of how my mentor teacher and I support her with additional scaffolding during projects which is in line with her IEP.
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When I asked her if she would be interested in doing this interview assignment, she seemed really intrigued. I let her pick out which questions she wanted to answer from the template list in the assignment to give her some agency and confidence to answer, supported by student choice as discussed in Chapter 3 of Fairbairn & Jones-Vo. We ended up chatting for a while as we have similar interests in paranormal activity and she knew of some Appalachian folklore I grew up with, which is not commonly known in the PNW. My mentor teacher was shocked, she advised she had never heard this particular student engage in conversation for that long.
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DC shared that she reads non-fiction in her spare time and cited Aristotle’s metaphysical philosophy as one of her current interests. This blew my mind as this conceptual study is well beyond my own educational background and I only know the foundations of philosophy as a whole. We talked about how difficult it is for our brains to decipher what’s real and what’s not, and how religion affects what we determine as reality. She grew up in a highly conservative Christian household which has led her to study how brains adopt religions as reality. This led me to drive our conversation on surrealist artistic expression that is centered on unrealistic scenarios using real-life elements, similar to how religious stories are told.
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Reference:
Fairburn, S. & Jones-Vo, S. (2019). Differentiating Instruction and Assessment for English Language Learners (2nd ed.). Caslon Publishing.
Building Academic Language through Anthropomorphism
Link to lesson plan here.
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In preparation for my spring internship, my mentor teacher asked me to teach a two different levels ceramic unit on anthropomorphism. I chose my intro lesson for this unit (linked above) with a jigsaw activity as my artifact because it exemplifies MIT Strand Four: Planning, Instruction, and Assessment. This intro lesson shows that I am capable of designing and enacting meaningful instruction and assessment to develop students' identities, knowledge, skills, understandings, and dispositions to bring creativity and innovation to the world's most pressing issues. The concept of anthropomorphism was new to all students and ensuring students were given the language building blocks to be able to articulate and express themselves using anthropomorphism was a goal of mine in designing this unit.
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In the screenshots from my intro slide deck above, I made sure the concept of anthropomorphism was presented to students in an accessible way by providing memes and language breakdowns of the large word to help them better understand the terminology. In addition to the scaffolding for language, the jigsaw research activity gave students multiple entry points to learn from one another examples from local indigenous artists in the Everett community, art from the origins of human history, Asian and Pacific Islander artists, black women artists, and lesser known historical examples of anthropomorphism in art. The jigsaw activity was accessible to all levels of language learners thanks to the scaffolding and role responsibility for group members. The activity also had high levels of engagement because students were learning from one another about the diverse examples of anthropomorphic art and in turn using those examples to generate their own ideas on how they wanted to make their anthropomorphic pieces.
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Reference:
Gibbons, P. (2015). Chapter 8: Developing an integrated curriculum: Learning language, learning through language, and learning about language (pp. 206-231). Scaffolding language scaffolding learning (2nd edition).
Examples of student work from Anthropomorphic Unit:
