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To reflect my strengths as an effective teacher of reading, I chose the reading conferences I did throughout the semester with my Grade 9s. The artifact is the the outline of our conferences and the questions students use to prepare for our meeting. I chose reading conferences as my artifact because I feel they best convey my philosophy that every student can become a reader and "see themselves" - ideas or experiences that they can connect to - in books. It’s one of my greatest joys as a teacher to help students develop a love for reading. Students who say they "hate" reading have probably just been reading the wrong books! Our initial reading conference has one goal - to help the student find a book they will love! If they aren't in love with their book after a few chapters, we try again! Students need to have choice based on their interests because interest equals engagement!

Reading conferences changed the way I teach and they have helped my students become better, more critical readers. For my Grade 9s this year, reading conferences became my primary tool for assessing progress, setting goals with students, hearing their reflections on their reading, and analyzing their needs. They helped my students understand, remember, extend meaning and make their reading experience memorable. My role in a conference is to gain insight into my students' minds as readers and thinkers, and to do more listening than talking. We use the questions on our outline as a guide, but oftentimes our conversations go in a different direction, and that's ok! Our discussions allow me to observe my students' individual strengths and use those as a foundation to nudge them further and challenge them as readers. I'm hoping to incorporate reading conferences into all my courses next year for independent reading and eventually for class novel studies. I hope that my department will be on board with conferences (along with seminars and discussion protocols) replacing content or study guide questions completely.

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I chose this artifact - a lesson in Grade 10 Applied English on theme vs. topic for the play Melville Boys - because I feel it reflects the ways in which I attempt to communicate effectively with my students. Distinguishing theme from topic can be tricky for students, so I wanted to make this lesson as straightforward as possible for and give them lots of opportunities to try out their ideas and receive feedback.

One barrier to effective communication is information overload, so I tried to keep the text on my slides concise and stick only to the central ideas. I wanted to allow an opportunity for shared communication and collaboration, so I included a jamboard for students to brainstorm their ideas about the topics and the themes in the play. I have also been working this year towards providing more immediate, descriptive feedback so I utilized Peardeck to have students respond to a prompt anonymously and then I could talk through their responses and re-direct or expand on ideas to make sure they fully understand. Using tools like the jamboard, Peardeck and the collaborative Google Doc allowed the learning to be more student-led as they brainstormed ideas together. In the future, I would like to go even further in making this lesson student-directed and let them decide how they will make communicate the connections between the themes of the play and the other core texts.

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To reflect my role as a teacher of writing, I chose the writing workshops I use in my classes as an artifact. I use this strategy often when teaching a new skill or type of writing (opinion paragraphs, quotation integration, or even just an inquiry question) because it creates opportunities for modeling, skill development, collaboration and feedback - and it fosters a supportive writing community in our classroom. My students really enjoy participating in the workshops and if we’re doing some writing they will often ask if we get to “workshop it”.

Something I have tried to focus on more as a teacher is modeling and sharing my own writing, and the writing workshop process really lends itself to doing this. During the lesson portion of the workshop, I often use modeling to demonstrate to students not only how to write, but how to collaborate, respond to feedback and make improvements. I’ll ask for feedback on how I could re-word a sentence to make it less awkward, or for supporting evidence I could use to strengthen my argument. Asking students to think critically about my work and normalizing feedback, helps create a safe environment for the sharing portion of our workshop.

I like how sharing can look different depending on the type of writing we are doing. If we are writing something more personal, we may just share with a partner (and I often do this until students build up their comfort level to sharing with the larger group). The more we do workshops, the more comfortable students become and the more they begin to view themselves as part of a writing community. One thing I would like to build on is having students offer constructive feedback to their peers. Often the sharing portion looks like a peer asking a follow up question, or providing a compliment or connection, but I also see value in having them offer a suggestion for improvement, or a conflicting opinion. I will need to develop more guidelines and do some further modeling around this so that the sense of community and safety is maintained.