Kelsea Pinkston Teaching Portfolio

Pre-assessment and Differentiation in a 9th Grade Beginner ESL Class Objective: Students write an exemplification paragraph The goal of this lesson is for students to write an exemplification paragraph. So, the first step is to pre-assess for students' current knowledge and skills.  Pre-assessment activity: Quiz Students will take a quiz to see what they already know about the topic. This quiz will include lower-order skill tasks from Bloom's taxonomy with activities like identifying parts of a paragraph (topic sentence, concluding sentence, etc.) and putting these parts in the correct order. There will be questions about the purpose of an exemplification paragraph and what makes it different from other types of paragraphs (persuasive, descriptive, etc.). There will also be a section for them to write a paragraph. After collecting and sorting students into groups based on the number of correct answers, students will go to different parts of the room to do different...

Project-Based Learning Plan: Team Debates 9th Grade Project Objective: Students will be able to debate a topic respectfully and logically. Procedure: Students brainstorm meaningful debate topics. The teacher provides a list of some interesting debate topics that students can choose from or they can create their own. Then, these are shared with the class, and the class votes on the 3 most interesting/meaningful debate topics. Students are graded according to the rubric. Students form debate teams and begin research. They are assigned roles (1st speaker, 2nd speaker, etc.) and need to create at least 3 compelling arguments and some possible rebuttals. There are topic research and debate preparation worksheets to be completed individually. Then, they will share their individual work and collaborate to come up with arguments as a team. Students are graded according to the rubric. The teacher teaches debating skills, critical thinking, respectfully arguing, etc. as students wo...

Formative Assessment in the Classroom What is formative assessment? Assessment is generally divided into 2 categories: formative and summative. A lot of people picture a final test when they think of assessment. This falls under the summative category and is typically used to see what a student has learned and to determine a student's grade. Formative assessment, however; serves a different purpose. Formative assessment is a tool that the teacher can use to adjust future lessons, differentiate the classroom to meet students at their current level, and see what general progress has been made. This happens while  the student is learning rather than after . Some examples of formative assessment methods include a pop-quiz (not graded), observations, exit tickets, entrance tickets, discussion, graphic organizers, and more. Is formative assessment necessary? Formative assessment is very important in the classroom. According to Andersson & Palm (2017), "An earlier ...