Teaching Artifacts

Below you'll find a sampling of assignments and classroom documents that show who I am as an educator. I am a co-creator alongside my students and they build knowledge together. I have been inspired by the work of many pedagogical thinkers like Penny Kittle, Randy Bomer, Sarah Zerwin, bell hooks, and Lynda Barry.

Reading Response

2-Page spreads allow students to respond creatively to texts in a way that offers agency and opportunity for focused mini-lessons for critical analysis.

Anthology + Chapbook

Culminating assignments for genre studies of anthologies and poetry. Students collected, organized, and introduced thematically linked works for the anthology, and wrote and collected poems for the chapbook.

Reflection on Process

Students have multiple opportunities to examine their decisions along the way and play a part in assessing their work. The process becomes as important as the final product, and students can point to decisions they would make again or not in the future.

Grade Cycle Letter

Inspired by Pointless by Sarah Zerwin, students write a reflective letter offering evidence of growth toward learning goals, some set by me, some self-set. It's one of their favorite assignments.

Analytical Essay

Students have clear guidelines for how each part of the writing process will unfold, with teacher support and conferencing along the way. At the end of this year, many students said they felt most proud of this essay.

Classroom Community Norms

Each year, students and I co-create norms that help us achieve our goals. We re-visit them as-necessary, or at least once per semester.

Real-World Writing

In an interdisciplinary art unit, students did a deep-dive into the genre of critical reviews and then wrote their own review of a work they were familiar with.

Writing Process

Students take ownership of the writing process throughout the year. I adapted these notebook-sized mini-lessons from Randy Bomer's Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms .