Shawn's 493 Blog

Through the work of Richard Beach and his colleagues I was able to learn not only multiple ways of evaluating my students’ work but also multiple methods of giving them feedback that can prove beneficial to their writing.             Regarding how to pick evaluation criteria for the work of my students Beach’s work gives several suggestions but these suggestions depend on what I am having my students attempt to accomplish. For example, if I simply wish for them to retain knowledge of the events and characters with a work of literature I could do a simple “objective test” (Beach 223) in which they are examined using questions revolving around a certain story, to determine how much of it they had retained. However, if I was trying to evaluate the ability of my students to analyze a specific work to make a claim about said work regarding its theme, characters, or events, a writing assignment or essay would be much more appropriate a...

            My reaction to the writing template that is meant to be paired with the Common Core State Standards for California is a mixed one. On the one hand, I can see its benefits. It was clearly designed to help teachers, especially new ones with the process of instructing their students about reading informational text and writing about it. But on the other hand, I can also see how many teachers including myself would find a template like this very restraining and limiting in the aspects of personal choice when it comes to determining how to instruct students in the various reading and writing standards, which, goes against the main purpose of Common Core’s ability to allow teachers to teach lessons without being restrained by having to teach subjects a certain way. Because I can see this template’s positive and negative aspects I’m going to discuss them both and let my fellow colleagues decide if one outweighs the other in terms of its effectiveness ...

            When I first heard about the Common Core State Standards I was transitioning from high school into my Freshman year of college. I kept hearing negative things about them from teachers in my own family such as, “If all states adopt the same standard it leaves little wiggle room for individual children” and, “Oh this will be great, even more standards that restrict our way of teaching.” Knowing nothing about teaching at the time, I decided to accept these words as truth and brace myself to deal with all the negative consequences that Common Core would supposedly bring into the world of teaching.             Five years, and a few months of practicum later I realized that the statements I had heard from the teachers that I had come to know could not be further from the truth, rather than restrict teaching or make things more difficult for individual children, Common Core has instead opened th...

                I have been a large supporter of class discussions since I first enrolled at Eastern Washington University and started my journey towards teaching Secondary Education. Because of my experiences at EWU I have come to view class discussions as a way for everyone to effectively voice their opinions on the issues and topics a class is learning about that can come up both in the classroom and in our everyday lives outside of it. This can allow a class to learn just as, if not more, effectively from each other than they can from an instructor alone.                 However, my experiences within my practicum as well as my own experiences from my years in high school have also shown me lots of ways that a discussion can go wrong, from students who monopolize the conversation and get everyone off track to students that do have...