Showcase
Welcome to my showcase page! On this page I share artifacts that I have compiled from various courses taken throughout the Master of Arts in Education Program at Michigan State University. These artifacts are evidence of self-inquiry, self-reflection, research, and teaching practices that I have engaged in throughout my courses and serve as a testament to my growth as a professional and educator. I have grouped specific artifacts together based on their most relevant purposes into two categories: Professional Development and Teaching Practice and Inquiry, Professional Learning, and Pedagogy. These categories represent two major areas that educators explore for life-long learning. Due to their impact on educational growth, I uphold these areas to currently be the most important in my life, and I will continue to refine and improve in them throughout my career as an educator.
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Part I: Professional Development and Teaching Practice
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This category includes artifacts that are a combination of papers and projects that I created as a reflection for various topic assignments that I gave to students I taught during my internship year 2019/2020 and during Fall 2020.
Understanding Student Resistance
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In this project, I worked with a student who was facing the challenge of focusing and staying on task in class, and this was negatively impacting his learning. I had to work closely with this student for a couple months: analyze his behavior in the classroom, monitor his performance on homework and assessments, and develop and implement a plan of action to mitigate the challenges he was facing. This project highlights my ability to both anticipate and recognize environmental factors that negatively impact student learning, particularly with students who struggle with focusing and staying on tasks in the classroom.
In this assignment, I developed a lesson plan to actively engage students in learning and doing mathematics. The mathematical modeling lesson was crafted in a way to both leverage multiple mathematical competencies and use a context that was relevant to my students’ lives. I visited a local community center in Ferndale, Michigan with the intention to see what majority of my students who lived in this area enjoyed doing for recreation. In my discovery I learned that some of the students who visited this center often played sports together, mainly specifically basketball. Some of these students were even in my classroom. Using this information, I created a math task that blended real-world basketball scenarios in problems that involved solving inequalities problems. This project demonstrates my ability to select the most appropriate level cognitive demand tasks for students and assign the relevant lessons to increase student engagement and learning in the classroom.
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Community Math Project
This project allowed me to identify an underlying issue that has resulted in my students’ resistance and/or lack of motivation in the classroom. I had observed that when given time to work with a partner or as a group on class assignments, a lot of my students had a tendency to get off track and did not work to complete the tasks given. So as a plan of action I decided to implement various group activities over the course of five to eight weeks, use my observations to make connections between the specific activities, activity directions, and students’ behavior to determine which strategies and activities were beneficial in achieving student motivation and focus during class group/pair activities. This project illuminates my ability to use data from assessments to pinpoint the diverse needs and identities of my students and to be more responsive to them. Additionally, I can efficiently interpret such data and restructure group activities to improve student motivation and self-regulation.
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Expanding Your Instructional Repertoire
In this research report I investigated whether applying more pair and group activities would increase student understanding in my classroom evidenced through higher student academic achievement. This research was conducted over the course of six weeks and a series of data was collected. The findings were that applying more pair and group activities increased student focus, however student focus alone did not increase student understanding. This artifact exemplifies my ability to conduct research surrounding student challenges in the classroom, to identify links to student focus and understanding, and to develop more effective strategies and activities to increase student engagement in the classroom.
Action Research Report: Collaboration in the Math Classroom
In this project I researched how analyzing students responses to invalid math arguments could improve my ability to both anticipate student responses and provide more effective feedback to incorrect statements made by students. Data that I analyzed focused on teacher actions, practices that I engaged in, and their effects on student execution of given tasks. This research was conducted over three weeks and various data was collected from students. In comparison to the previous research assignment, Action Research Report: Collaboration in the Math Classroom, this particular research was presented on a google website that I created. This website  reflects my precise organizational skills and methods of data collection, and my effective application of math practices , argumentation, justification, and generalization.
Analyzing Student Argumentation
Part II: Inquiry, Professional Learning, and Pedagogy
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This section includes a special topics project that I researched detailing the impacts of trauma on student learning, and two research essays revealing various forms of educational inquiry.
The focus of this project was to inform the reader on the prevalence and impact of trauma in schools around the world, how to identify trauma in both general education and special education students, and how to provide effective supports. This report exemplifies my knowledge of supports that exist for special education students increased significantly.
Special Topics Project
For this research essay, I read Vivian Paley's, The Girl with the Brown Crayon. I explored narrative inquiry and Paley's nontraditional approach to inquiry; collaboration amongst her students. As I mention in the essay Paley's rationale is that noncollaborative inquiry encourages the researcher to be more unbiased and genuine than they would if they were to engage in the research process with other professionals. Students provide insight to educators about their own ways of thinking through self-reflections in the classroom. This ongoing connection that educators and students share, constantly develops new ideas, creativity, and thinking about learning. This essay highlights my mindfulness as an educator when interacting with students, my ability to utilize class experience and make connections to pedagogical knowledge, and to self-reflect on my own practices.
A Look into Narrative Inquiry
For this essay I researched the web resource titled, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, which presents personal written and oral accounts from W.E.B. Du Bois, detailing his experiences and reflections that reveal insightful examples of resilience of Black Americans throughout American history. Du Bois’ work entitled, The American Negro, is a critical analysis piece that presents statistical data of Black Americans from 1870 to 1920. In my discovery through reading, The American Negro, Du Bois' life is best described as resilience through hardship. Value of school education and the lifelong pursuit of learning are timeless and yet reoccurring themes for educators throughout history. This essay is testament of my ability to conduct valuable research on the life of persons, objectively analyze, and think critically to identify his/or/ her perspectives.