EDSE 380 Blog

 My mentor teacher this semester is a Ball State University Alumni, and is in her 3rd year of teaching. Although she's a younger teacher, it's very evident to anyone who walks in her classroom that she 100% knows what she's doing. One of the best things that she does, and that I've learned a lot about, was the way she scaffolded . Of course I've always known about scaffolding, what purpose it serves, and why it's a good teaching tactic to use, but I just hadn't had a whole lot of teaching experience with it.  My mentor teacher is in the middle of teaching 12 Angry Men . When she introduced the movie/play, she started the first day discussing differet crime shows, degress of murder, and the way the court system works. The days that followed included, mini-assessments over the new information, an introduction to the 12 jurors, court terminology, and a fun and engaging assignment that required students to pick characters from movies/shows and actors that they t...

 Throughout the past few weeks, I have been conducting my learning segment for EDTPA. For starters, the unit I've been teaching is Argumentative . In the beginning, students were tasked with taking notes on different argumentative factors like claim, rationale, evidence, and counterclaim. Following the introduction of that information, and practice with it, students were then introduced to rhetorical appeals(ethos, pathos, logos). After conducting these scaffolding  lessons, students arrived at the point of a unit where a "bigger" assessment needed to be done(their summative assessment is going to be an argumentative paper, this assessment was addressing claim, rationale, evidence, counterclaims, ethos, pathos, and logos). Students had 3 days to complete this assignment in class(the 3 days leading up to Thanksgiving break) and were given the option between 3 different Procon.org articles.  After giving students the proper amount of time needed to finish this, they then tu...