Final+Essay+Job+Sheet

ED 331 (English) Final Paper Jobsheet ‍Due By Monday, December 5th

Your job in this final (8-10 page) paper is to reflect on what you and your students have learned throughout this semester. Use your weekly writings as a resource as you synthesize what you have learned from your observations, your experiences, our readings, and our discussions.

Title: Give your paper a title. Please address both of the areas enumerated and explained below. Use subheads to separate and introduce each major section of the paper.

Section 1 (6-8 pages): Reflections on a classroom teaching experience: My ability to influence and analyze student learning. In conjunction with your required three weeks of lead teaching, you must select one lesson to narrate and analyze in detail. In this section of the paper, please describe, analyze, and reflect on this single episode, paying special attention to what students do (and do not) learn as a result of your instruction. Here are the main requirements. You must:
 * 1) undertake a diagnosis (pre-test) of your students’ learning and understanding with regard to some aspect of subject matter central to your unit;
 * 2) plan an appropriate sequence of instruction to advance your students’ learning, taking into consideration your students’ individual differences and needs;
 * 3) implement the lesson (ideally while being observed);
 * 4) conduct some concluding assessment (or post-test) to determine whether and how your instruction influenced students’ engagement and learning;
 * 5) compose a narrative of what happened in order to glean more information about the strengths and weaknesses of your lesson design and implementation;
 * 6) document the student learning that did or did not occur;
 * 7) reflect on changes in teaching that might improve results. Your paper should address each of these requirements (i.e., you should explain what you attempted to teach and why, how you diagnosed students’ initial understandings, what you observed during instruction, what you learned from the diagnosis/pre-test, how the instruction you designed was specifically intended to enhance engagement and understanding, what the effects of the instruction were on students’ learning and engagement, how the evidence you gathered supports your conclusions regarding those effects, and how you might change your teaching as a result of what you learned from assessing your students’ learning and your own performance). Reference our readings to make sense of the phenomena you observe.

Section 2 (2-4 pages): Reflections on classroom teaching experience: Who I am as a teacher. The first section of this paper (see above) is to focus on a single teaching episode. In this section, focus on your entire experience as a Teacher Assistant and pay special attention to your overall strengths and weaknesses as a teacher. If you need some help getting started here, excerpt and analyze your weekly writings, considering your strengths and weaknesses as an instructional planner; as a manager of lessons, time, and students; as a developer of rapport with students and colleagues; as one who responds to and evaluates students’ attempts at learning (during discussion and in writing); and so on. What do you think you already do pretty well? What do you do best? What are the things you know you still need to work on? What would the writers of the articles we have read say to you going forward? You may write this section in essay form or as a dialogue with another character if you wish.

Conclusion. You need a conclusion, but the content of the conclusion is up to you.