Kayli's English 486 Blog

For visual literacy, I couldn't find a specific page or section of the Common Core State Standards website that talked about the requirements for visual literacy learning, but I did find some sections that pertained to students' knowledge in visual literacy. First of all, on the "How to Read the Standards" page in the "Reading: Text Complexity and the Growth of Comprehension" section, they talk about making connections between ideas and text, being able to understand a wide range of texts,  and steadily growing in the complexity of the texts they read and understand. This could pertain to visual literacy in that students need to be able to use ideas and connections to read illustrations and graphics, and they need to be able to comprehend all different types of literature. Also on the "How to Read the Standards" page in the "Language: Conventions, effective use, and vocabulary" section, they talk about approaching language as a craft that...

For my Content Portfolio Project, I am going to make a Prezi of some of the materials that I presented on this quarter. I will also add some things I've done in other classes here at Eastern that have helped me to prepare to be an English Language Arts teacher. I will also include some common core standards and how I plan to fulfill them. I will probably use some materials from high school or books that I have read or teaching techniques that made me want to proceed with this career path. I'll organize it in different categories on Prezi.

I don't have too much familiarity with graphic novels. I read The Dark Night for a class about a year ago, and I didn't follow it very well because I haven't been taught very well how to interpret graphic novels. I didn't have a lot of experience with them in high school either because visual literacy was not a priority in my English classes. Graphic novels would be very useful in an English classroom because they teach students to be visual learners, and they could also help them tap into their creativity a bit more because of their ability to link visual art with words. Comics and graphic novels could also be helpful in a younger/lower level classroom because they really encourage left to right literacy. This could also be beneficial to students who are learning English (or even a different language) as a second language. They also encourage students to use their critical thinking skills, considering the content is all in the text, it is to be interpreted through the...

By this website, I was most surprised by the vagueness of the topics. The fact that it covers English Language Arts and Literacy, History and Social Studies, Science, and Technical subjects, and that it should prepare all students for college, career and life seemed like too broad a range of ideas to cover in one section of Common Core Standards. In order to sort of narrow it down for myself, I tried to process the standards in sections, starting by clicking on each grade separately in the Speaking and Listening section.  For sixth grade, the standards are pretty simple. The students just need to be able to basically organize their ideas and process them, use technology, and multitask. In 7th grade, I found it most important that the students have to learn how to be collaborative and appropriately contribute to group work and group discussion. They also need to know how to research and apply the information to their work effectively. Eighth grade focused more on preparedness and b...

When reading about the discussion ground rules, the first thing that came to my mind was that a teacher's choice on which techniques to use in choosing ground rules for discussion would almost fully depend on the skill level and age of the students involved. If you had more experienced or mature students, you would need less ground rules, and if you had less experienced or younger students, you would most likely need to set stricter ground rules to keep the kids on task and productive. As for the section titled "Conversational Moves", I thought that the Specific Moves were very helpful in showing how you could keep students' thoughts and ideas flowing without pause or hesitation. The Conversational Roles were helpful in the same way, showing what to do when conversations get held up or meet a dead end, there are ways to get group members' thoughts moving and exploring new areas of the topic at hand that they may not have thought about before. Another area that wa...

On the Professional Educator Standards Board, I was surprised by the amount of items on the list that I felt confident about. However, there are a few things that I need to touch up on or improve upon before I go into the workforce. I need to be better about understanding diversity and learning English as a second language, as some students will need me to provide those skills in order for them to be successful. I also need to touch up on my communications knowledge because their are a variety of aspects to that category that are vague in my mind. This includes barriers to listening and how to work through them and the factors that influence interpersonal communication. The last thing that jumped out at me as something that I don't know enough about is structured listening activities to help students improve their skills in presenting, debating, or other things that are similar. I was surprised by how detailed the elements of these standards are, and I was intimidated at first, unt...