McCloy 1

Rebekah McCloy

Dr. Megan Marshall and Professor Ian Nolte

ENG 420

7 December 2020

As a Growing and Emerging Teacher: Reflection

I believe that each of my artifacts on this page helps lead students through the writing

process in a manner that will be of great benefit to them. First, my grammar mini-lesson was on

noun phrases. After defining and giving examples of noun phrases, I have the students practice

writing their own sentences with noun phrases. With this mini-lesson, they do have a homework

assignment that has them dealing with locating all of the noun phrases within a famous speech.

This mini-lesson only involves a small part of the writing process, as it only deals with students

being fluent in writing and locating noun phrases. Noun phrases are a grammatical concept that

students may find themselves using in larger writing assignments. This assignment gives

students the familiarity with noun phrases that they need in order to use them properly and

intentionally in their writing.

My three-day lesson plan for the eighth grade on literacy narratives deals with the writing

process a little more in-depth than my grammar mini-lesson does, as it actually has students

learning about what literacy narratives are, writing them, doing a peer review, and revising their

literacy narratives (likely for homework). This particular lesson plan is designed to just give

students a brief look into what literacy narratives are and how to write one. This artifact includes

three relevant activating strategies to help the students in the writing process for this particular

assignment. The first two activating strategies are designed to get students familiar with
 McCloy 2

retrospective writing, as they will definitely have to reflect upon their lives in order to complete

the literacy narrative assignment. The third activating strategy has students engaging with their

literacy narratives, as they are to do a self-assessment on it. I believe that the activities that I

chose to go in this lesson plan will benefit students because they enable students to have a brief

introduction to the writing process and how it works, as they work to complete and improve

upon their narratives. This is a skill that the students will need as they continue their middle

school education and move on to high school and college, should they choose to continue their

educations past high school. The contents of this lesson plan can help prepare students for the

writing they will do later on.

My fifteen-day unit plan is about a tenth grade English class learning how to write

research essays, actually composing research essays, completing peer reviews, revising based on

the feedback they receive, and taking the information they have gathered to make a mini-video

documentary. This is a more in-depth look at the writing process than either of the previously

mentioned assignments. It is meant for a higher grade level and is about a more time-consuming

writing form, research essays. The first two weeks of the unit plan revolve around what research

essays are, how to find and properly cite credible sources, writing a research essay on a topic of

their choice, peer reviews, and revisions. Experience with these elements of the writing process

will serve the students well in their education, as they will be expected to write longer essays of

the same type later on in high school and in college, should they decide to attend college. I think

that it is important to prepare students as much as possible for what will be expected of them as

they further their educations.

The unit plan also involves several discussion boards (for the cohort learning from home)

and think-pair-share type (for the cohort learning in class) activities. I believe that these types of
 McCloy 3

activities can be very beneficial to the writing process, as students are able to discuss their ideas

and plans with their peers. Students are able to get feedback on their plans before they even

begin writing. I think that this makes it to where the finished products end up being better than it

might otherwise have been. The final week of the unit plan has the students doing a mini-video

documentary project, as they take their research essay topic and make their own, shorter version

of a documentary. While this assignment is certainly meant to be fun for the students, it is also a

way for the students to learn their research topic even better. People tend to learn better through

experiences. Therefore, the experience of creating a mini-documentary should benefit the

students and make learning extra fun.

Both my three-day lesson plan (day 3) and my fifteen-day unit plan (day 9) implement

peer reviews. The three-day lesson plan has students doing traditional, in-class peer reviews, as it

is designed for a non-pandemic time classroom. Since this is designed for an eighth grade class,

it is a far less detailed peer review than what is used in the fifteen-day unit plan. This peer review

just has students providing their peer with, “what works” and “what needs work” within the

essay (Murray 272). The students are also to point out any grammatical or spelling edits that

need to be made to the essay. In the fifteen-day unit plan, students are able to do the peer reviews

completely online. They will have been informed of who their peer review partners are prior to

day nine of the unit. On day nine, students are to go to the discussion board on Schoology, find

their peer’s essay, read it, and prepare and provide feedback to their peer. Feedback will be sent

back to the essay’s owner as a reply on their original discussion board post. Students will be

completing this peer review activity using a series of questions posted to Schoology that come

from Georgia Heard’s The Revision Toolbox. Responses are to be at least a few sentences long.
 McCloy 4

My artifacts have each part of the lesson building on the next. For example, in the fifteen-

day unit plan, students first learn what research essays are before moving onto how to find and

cite research. There are several stepping stones that lead students to the end goal of creating a

mini-video documentary that is based off of their final research essays. Many of my assignments

come from the resources we have used in this class. Throughout the different artifacts, I use

daybooks (Murray), brainstorming (Murray), peer review questions (Heard), various writing

activities (Gallagher), grammar examples (Weaver), and more. These activities come from

people who are well-practiced teachers. I believe that one of the areas where I could use more

practice is coming up with strategies of my own that will work and be effective like the ones

these people have created. I do, however, think that one of my strong points is coming up with

interesting final projects that help the students to take what they have learned and put it into

practice in some way.