Artifact 3: Unit Anticipation
The rationale for including these two artifacts is that they correspond to C1 (act as cultural facilitator), C3 (plan teaching and learning situations), and C4 (implement teaching and learning situations). These are anticipation checklists I created to start off each unit I taught (these ones pertain to a unit on Othello I taught in my Secondary 5 English classes, and a unit on speculative fiction I taught in my Secondary 4 English classes in FE3).
They demonstrate C1 (act as a cultural facilitator) because each prompt was connected to a major theme or idea in the play/novel that we were about to read, rephrased in such a way to make it relevant to students' lives as teenagers, and finally, was connected to larger cultural events and concerns. For example, prompt number 8 on the Othello anticipation guide ("When two people are truly in love, any differences in their race and background do not matter") allowed me to begin the discussion around racism in Othello, which formed one of the main critical lens through which we analyzed the play as a class. I not only lectured on the development of modern racism over time, but gave students the opportunity (through assignments, activities, and class discussions) to consider and debate whether Shakespeare's depiction of Othello combated racist stereotypes at the time, or fed into them. My own views were never imposed on students, instead, I wanted them to form their own critical opinions of the play and learn to express them analytically. To do this, we watched videos of Black actors who had played the role of Othello debating this question as well, pulled out relevant lines depicting racism and stereotypical behaviour and close read them as a class, in small groups, and in individual assignments.
These checklists also demonstrate my attainment of C3 and C4 (plan and implement learning solutions) because they demonstrate how I lead classroom discussions. As you can see, each checklist served as a discussion prompt list. Students were given this list of statements and asked to evaluate whether they agreed (true) or disagreed (false) with each statement in 5 minutes. We then went through each statement as a class and discussed student's responses to each one at length. These were designed to prime students for the themes we would cover in the unit.
Additionally, these were designed to make the upcoming content more personally relevant to each student and gave them the opportunities to discuss high school experiences in an educational context and relate those experiences to the readings we would be doing in class. Students came to really enjoy and expect these pre-reading discussions, which often took a whole period and became part of our classroom routine every time we began a new unit.