For Competency 4: Think Critically and Reflectively, I have chosen to use three different artifacts to

explain how I have met the criteria. The artifacts include: My Multicultural Teaching Philosophy
Statement from EDCI 585 Multicultural Education, Case Study Report from EDCI 557 Assessment of
Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners, and Curricular Artifacts from EDCI 585 Multicultural
Education.
As part of EDCI 585 I had to develop a Multicultural Teaching Philosophy Statement. This artifact will
demonstrate my personal vision of inclusive education. Through the process of developing this statement
I had to reflect on how my practice of teaching has evolved over the last fifteen years, as well as what
experiences I had as a learner that helped to define teaching to me. As I was writing this statement, I was
also reflecting on what I had learned about the different aspects of multiculturalism, how perspectives
have changed over time, and what I currently do for my students from a multicultural stance. Through this
experience I have been able to gain a deeper insight as to who I am as a teacher and how multiculturalism
is woven into my own pedagogical approach.
For the second part of this competency I am using my Case Study Report from EDCI 577 to show how I
can identify the relationship of English language learning in the broader field of education. Throughout
this program I have been fortunate to work with students in my classroom as I learn and use tools that will
help me evaluate language development. I then use this information to plan lessons for them. My
advantage is that I have background information on my students, as well as a personal teacher-student
relationship. This class, however, allowed me to think outside of that box and assess a student that I had
never met. In this report I show how I use the knowledge I have gained in my ELL courses and applied it
in a way that will help make informed decisions for future lessons in reading, speaking, writing, and
listening for this student. As I was completing this assignment I quickly realized that, although this
student was new to the United States and came from a Spanish speaking country, she had a basic
understanding of communication skills in spoken English. This is something that was not apparent in her
profile. This helped me to understand how valuable it is to be able to use standardized tools when
assessing these areas, especially in students that I may not know personally.
In the final area of this competency, critically evaluate theory and practice, I will use my Curricular
Artifacts assignment form EDCI 585. This artifact caused me to take a look at curriculum in a way that I
had never thought to do before.

studies curriculum until this assignment. As a practice, the textbook is a resource I use when teaching that
adds to the lesson. In this case, however, I needed to look critically at academic language, content, bias,
and assumptions about the audience (in this case first graders), among other things. I was surprised at how
disjointed the content is at a surface level. It takes a deeper understanding to connect a theme within the
As I completed
this assignment I can easily see how using the textbook alone would allow my students to have many
misconceptions and gaps in their understanding of historical events, and how important it is to add to the
chosen curriculum to in order to include a depth of knowledge that can be built on in years to come.