Being an English teacher is more than reading The Great Gatsby or teaching students the difference between a simile and metaphor. It is about being able to express their ideas clearly, support them with strong evidence, and explaining how it all connects because these skills are necessary to thrive in our society. In a culture where communication deficiencies can hinder someone's goals, I try to set up my students for success by building these skills in all my lessons. I diagnose gaps in knowledge and issues in delivery then incorporate next steps in my lesson plans. I recall assigning my students an essay over a book we had been reading. Unfortunately, after spending 4 weeks teaching writing skills and reading standards, many of my students had failed the assignment. Numerous factors could have contributed to this, but it was crucial to focus on my locus of control and develop a plan with new techniques that hopefully would help my students improve. Collaborating with my professional learning team,we developed a new, alternative writing unit to meet the various needs of every student. Each student, class, and school is different. A great lesson plan will not be great for every student, so I strive to assess and improve constantly from class to class, semester to semester. …show more content…
Hearing my students stumble over words while reading, prompted me to seek knowledge about where reading fluency breaks down and understanding phonetics and processing sounds. This is an area in which high school English teachers receive little to no formal training, so I took it upon myself to take an do an independent study of it and improve my craft. It was this process that led me to University of Louisville’s Speech-Language Pathology