Artifacts and Characteristics of the Novice Teacher # 1

The artifact that best represents the first Characteristic of a Novice Teacher is my final inquiry project that I completed for my Reading 422 class. This project reflects that I believe in life-long learning because this is not only a skill that I learned myself, but it is a skill that I can easily instill in my future students each and every year.

With this project, I was asked to read a novel which was also made into a movie. While reading the text, we were asked to come up with a wondering within the book and then we were to inquire about the question to find the answers to our curiosities. Once we began our inquiries we were then asked to inquire about even more sub-questions which would help us discover even more information regarding our topic of interest.

For my own inquiry project I read the book titled Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. This text was about a man who decided to leave his life behind to create a new one that required no money and no plan. The main character hitchhikes his way to the Alaskan frontier and manages to live in the wild for several months. Due to the main topic within this novel, this sparked me to want to learn more information about the Alaskan wilderness and the concept of hitchhiking itself as well. After researching about these inquiries, it enabled me to see this text in a whole new light because I had an even greater respect for the main character who managed to survive as long as he did in the wild.

After completing this inquiry, we also had to watch the movie to see the differences and how well the director implements the topics we inquired about. Once I finished this assignment, I was truly changed as a reader. Now whenever I read, I find myself asking questions about events and places within my novels. This then forces me to want to learn even more information regarding my inquiries and this alone is something that I want to instill in my future students. It is so important to gain interest within one's reading, and by allowing the students to research something within a text that they are intrigued by it engages them fully and gives them power over what they are learning.

Since this is something that effected me so much, I really want to implement this concept into my future classroom. Due to this, I feel that this artifact greatly reflects my ability to show that I can implement life-long learning into my current and future instructional activities. After all, if a person does not continue learning throughout his or her life, then they will never be able to progress with society itself, so this is definitely a skill that needs to be instilled within the students of the future and the students of now.

Artifacts and Characteristics of the Novice Teacher # 2

The second characteristic for being a novice teacher involves effective communication. I feel that I am going to be a very effective communicator not only to my students, but with the parents of my classroom as well. Parent communication is vital in order to make a classroom run smoothly, whether it is for volunteers with a class party, or keeping a parent updated on what is going on within my classroom. To help show that I am an effective communicator, I will discuss my artifact involving my Scholastic homepage.

The Scholastic homepage is a tool that teachers can use to inform the parents and students of news, class assignments, resources to use and it can serve as a calendar for the year. I plan to implement this type of communication with my future classroom. It is easy to access online using a username and password that the teacher provides, and for those who do not have access to the internet will also be able to see the webpage because the information can be printed in a hardcopy form.

In my homepage that I created, I listed classroom announcements, posted the class spelling list for the week, and showcased some valuable resources students could use to help improve their academic abilities. On the Scholastic homepage there is also an opportunity to post suggested books for students to read. In the future, I would love to use this to post books that would not only interest the students I have, but also help reinforce some of the topics we are discussing at the time in our classroom. Within my homepage, I also had an introduction page and this was where I wrote a brief introduction to the parents about myself. I provided a professional picture of myself and this provides an inviting feel to the homepage itself to make parents feel welcome to communicate with me.

Lastly, this homepage has a feature that enables me to see how many people have viewed the page. The students have a login separate from their parents, so I would be able to see how many students use the page for assignments and help. By using this feature, I will be able to see how effective the homepage is as well. Overall, the homepage is a great tool because it is user-friendly, and a great way to tell parents what is going on within their child’s classroom each week. I feel that it is a great tool for effective communication, and something I want to definitely use in my future.

Artifacts and Characteristics of the Novice Teacher # 7

In the Benedum Collaborative, the 7th characteristic of the novice teacher is someone who effectively integrates content and pedagogy. One way that I can represent this characteristic as being a part of my own personal teaching is through my science learning cycle artifact. With this assignment, I had to create a 3 day lesson involving some form of science concept that would allow my students to fully engage and investigate what they were learning. There were 5 stages within the learning cycle that I had to present and they included the engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration and evaluation phases. For my particular learning cycle I taught my 3rd graders at the time about vertebrates and the sub-classes within this category. The students first had to be engaged in the lesson and I had to encourage their exploration. So, to do this I had the students create backbones by using pipe cleaners, Cheerios, and Fruit Loops. Then I had the students investigate their backbone replicas by having them bend and twist their examples to match pictures of snakes and birds. After these two phases, I then moved into the more in depth content and explained the facts about the backbone, what the differences between vertebrates and invertebrates were, etc. During this phase I also had the students complete a picture sort to help me assess their learning from my lesson. Next, I elaborated even further into the different classes of vertebrates by showing the students pictures and having them look for information in their textbooks to help them complete a characteristic checklist that I had created for them. Lastly, I evaluated the students over the entirety of my learning cycle by having them complete a written assignment. I gave the students a rubric that had been simplified into terminology that they could understand, and the students were given one type of animal. They were then supposed to create a newspaper article that told all about the animal such as their class, whether it was a vertebrate or invertebrate, name 3 distinctive characteristics that its class had, and they had to define the terminology within their paragraph. The students were also asked to depict the animal so that their article would have an image to go along with it.

Overall, I would say that my science learning cycle would be a great representation for the characteristic of a novice teacher being able to effectively integrate content and pedagogy. This is something that I am very passionate about. Also, I truly feel that this characteristic is present in many other artifacts as well. However, this learning cycle is by far my best example.

Artifacts and Characteristics of the Novice Teacher # 4

The artifact that I brought for seminar was my workstation project from Education 461. I feel that this artifact represents an example of how I am a facilitator of learning for all students. This particular project includes numerous lesson plans and a total of 9 workstations that all deal with different styles of learning. I feel that every student in my classroom would be reached at some level no matter what way he or she learns best. This 2 week unit on poetry incorporated materials that ranged from all reading levels, the activities were designed according to the levels the students are categorized under, and I made sure to supply students with a variety of activities as well so that the learning environment continued to stay new and engaging for the students.