Secondary Educator Licensure Portfolio

As part of the course Adolescent Development, I am meeting with an English Language Learner at Winooski Middle/High School.  Because of confidentiality, I will refer to him as Adam. He is from Iraq and moved to the United States in March of 2014 after briefly living in Amsterdam, Germany. At 26 years old, he is continuing his education in America while living self sufficiently. While attending school full-time by day, he works as a part time taxi driver by night and on the weekends.  He fluently speaks Arabic and is now working towards fluency in English as he acclimates to his new life here in America.

As part of the class Adolescent Development, I will be tutoring an English Language Learner (ELL). An important part of effective communication is understanding what vocabulary is best to convey the necessary information.  English Language Learners are usually students who have moved to America.  While they are often intelligent and motivated people, the language barrier we face as educators presents a challenge as they continue their education here.  To aid teachers in this step, the organization WIDA provides resources which help educators identify where a student is in the language learning process.  WIDA breaks down English into five language proficiency standards, which are social and instructional language, the language of language art, the language of mathematics, the language of science, and the language of social studies.  Within these settings, WIDA has stages which assess ELLs' ability to comprehend and exercise language.  These stages include: e...

In the class Adolescent Development, I have found myself turning more and more often to Bloom's Taxonomy in developing lesson plans.  "In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching,"  (Armstrong). Bloom's Taxonomy is a set of six cognitive processes, which encompass the spectrum of how individuals demonstrate knowledge.  The taxonomy categorizes the ways in which learned material can be assessed through observable action.  This makes the theoretical work behind Bloom's Taxonomy extremely useful for educators.  At this stage in my eduction, I have been referencing the graphic below regularly to guide my development of lesson objectives.  To avoid producing immeasurab...