Artifact Assignment

Karen Van Poperin

TE 807
6/2/2019

I work in a Title I school in Milwaukie, Oregon, which is about ten miles south of Portland. In the
past few decades, Portland is a city that has been growing in size and financial power and the towns
surrounding it have changed as well. Milwaukie was a blue-collar, logging town but now that the
economy of this region has changed for many reasons, there is a lack of employment opportunities for
many families.
At my school, over 50% of our students receive free lunch. We have many students who are
regularly dealing with homelessness, incarcerated parents, drug and alcohol abuse. My district prioritizes
trauma informed practices and social emotional learning in all of the professional development I’ve gone
to this year. I’m choosing an artifact that I have used in my social-emotional learning core curriculum
throughout this year.
I teach 25 students in a 3rd grade classroom, three of whom were exited out of a self-contained
behavioral learning classroom just last year and have severe trauma in their lives. It has been challenging
for me to navigate how to cultivate community with my group this year, but like always, forming
authentic and honest connection with each child was where to begin.
For my initial stance on quality teaching, I wrote about three components: showing care, being
present so students feel as if you and the others in the classroom are with them, and time (for practice and
to refine the way we implement theory). When we revised our stance on quality teaching through our
video project, I added a fourth component of an ongoing reflection process: that teachers must look at
what they’ve done and why, and what happened, and what would make it better.
The artifact I’ve chosen is an anchor chart of key themes that organically developed in my class
during community circle time this year. When we started this anchor chart together, I gave my students a
sentence starter that said, “One thing that would make our days together better is…” I was surprised how
many of them said something about being upset about anger- either from people in their families, our
school or classroom, or even within themselves. Together, we had a surprisingly honest conversation
about a problem we were having as real people in our classroom. We ended with a theme from that
discussion that centered around the idea that we are in control of our emotions and ourselves. As they are
3rd graders, I helped to name the theme they were talking about and we wrote it down. Of course they
need reminders about these ideas regularly, but I think the open, honest, and shared endeavor of problem-
solving really has anchored a lot of the social-emotional learning for them.
To connect this to our course readings, as Fensternmacher and Richardson (2005) says, “…Ask
what must be the case if the student is not only to engage the tasks of learning but also to succeed at
them…While there are any number of answers to this question, offered by learning theorists, sociologist,
economists, political leaders, school administrators, and teachers’ unions, to name a few, we propose the
following: (1) Willingness and effort by the learner, (2) A social surround supportive of teaching and
learning, (3) Opportunity to teach and learn and (4) Good teaching.” (p.190). I feel their engagement in
these meetings, they help me create the social surrounding that is supportive and through soliciting their
input, I witness their effort.
While these community meetings are a joint effort- as the teacher, I am still facilitating this group
discussion of young students, which aligns to the High Leverage Practices that Teaching Works discusses.
We work together through content and discuss problems we see and what we could do to help each other
through it. Students had to listen, critically think about their community and justify their thoughts, explain
their ideas and respond to others respectfully.

Peer coaching questions

1. As McBee (2007) states, “Care is one of those elusive notions that is difficult to give shape through
tangible measured study (Goldstein & Lake, 2000).” Still, it is inarguably important in quality
teaching. What are effective ways to demonstrate care for students?
2. What are questions I can pose that will elicit more students to share their thinking about specific
community-building ideas? (Teaching Works, 2014)

References
Fenstermacher, Gary D., and Virginia Richardson. “On Making Determinations of Quality in
Teaching.” Teachers College Record, vol. 107, no. 1, 2005, pp. 186–213., doi:10.1111/j.
1467-9620.2005.00462.x.

Robin Haskell McBee (2007) What it Means to Care: How Educators Conceptualize and Actualize
Caring, Action in Teacher Education, 29:3, 33-42, DOI: 10.1080/01626620.2007.10463458

Teaching Works. High leverage practices.