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"Although the trauma they interrogate may be their own, students may be able to find refuge in safe spaces that benefit them while developing a keen awareness of the need and strength to support others" (Taylor, pg 465).  As teachers, we have to be mindful that we may have students who have faced or are facing traumatic situations. Choosing text that relates to situations they have been through or may be going through, allows them to open up for conversation and overcome traumas they are struggling with. For teachers who strictly stay focused in textbooks and curricula, we are telling our students their trauma and experiences aren't allowed inside the classroom.  Teachers have to understand our students' have lives outside of the classroom, and the best way to teach them, is to allow them to bring their outside lives into the classroom. Having conversations and allowing our students to be open and share their experiences will empower them to take a stand and ...

You might be asking yourselves, what exactly are assessments for?   Learning! What?! They’re actually meaningful tools that provide students with timely and meaningful feedback, informs us about how well the students are doing, and gauges the effectiveness of our classroom practice. It’s an ongoing process that involves monitoring of progress.  When determining which assessments might work in different situations, there’s a few questions we should explore such as: What we can measure, the meaning of different modes of assessment, the weight we place on assessments, and what learner the assessment is for. That being said, assessments must be an essential part of our role as classroom teachers. I’m used to classrooms where work is assigned, handed in, receives a grade, and the cycle goes on and on. What it should look like is: meaningful and effective feedback, assessments for learning, not of learning, and students should be engaged in conversations that pro...

                     Week 5: Connecting Written Text with Symbols and Imagination             September 21 2019 As urban educators one of our duties is to help students become engaged in everyday subject matters that should be culturally relevant. In this case of teaching literacy, it can be a hassle to bring some imagination to the table. The question is "How can we connect our students favorite iconic figures to the written text that is given"? I can recall when I was in third grade my teacher had me and my classmates to pick our favorite character from our chapter book from which we read for our reading log. By the end of the week we had to be able to act it out in class. Now at first I didn't understand why we had to do it because the chapter book was called "The Giver". It was briefly about a boy named Jonas living in a utopian society and is the "Receiver of Memory" of the c...

For most of my life I lived in Gary, Indiana. All the children I went to school with were in low income families and got free or reduced lunch. Since I can remember, Almost every black boy I went to school with was behind. No African American boys liked to read aloud, most didn’t like school, and some would even act out. Almost all the time teachers would label these students as troubled boys, class clowns or bad eggs. Within the first week of school, teachers would give up on them, isolate them, get them out of the classrooms, or suspended. I can’t recall a time when a teacher said, “okay so you don’t know this… but you do know this so let’s work from there.” Teachers from my hometown seemed to label these boys as “behind” and just leave them there. In Chapter 2 the authors quote Graue “The hidden curriculum is one that consistently places the blame and burden on minoritized children and their families for their lack of readiness”. They also talk about how student’s literacy p...