English 10 | Justin Bolivar e-portfolio

IB Unit Question: “How does it feel to get inside someone else’s skin and walk around for a while?”
Area of Interaction Focus: Heath and Social Education
Significant Concepts: Use empathy to identify with characters in the novel, and be able to establish an understanding of the novel to relevant social and historical issues.
Final Assessment Task: Students will create a visual journal that is an ongoing reflection of their reaction to the novel.
Approaches to Learning: Making connections, self-awareness.
Team taught with my school advisor for two weeks, and independently completed the novel with the classes, as well as assigned, collaborated, and marked a visual collage assignment looking at different aspects of the novel. The feedback that I received from the students around the visual collage was that it helped them really think about the issues that come up in the novel, and challenges them to think about how they would represent it. Rather than having students write an essay, they can express visually the important components of the novel. In addition to creating the collage, students also presented their collage and explained the choices that they made based on their chosen topic. *See exemplars below.
While teaching this unit, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to assess approximately thirty visual response journals using the IB rubric, and report out an IB mark out of 10 for each criterion.

IB Unit Question: “How do different types of love affect our decision making?”
Area of Interaction Focus: Heath and Social Education
Significant Concepts: To understand and appreciate Shakespearian language, learn about character relationships, and review poetic devices.
Final Assessment Task: Write a letter from one character to another using Shakespearian language.
Approaches to Learning: organization, reflection, thinking, making connections.
I started the play with the class, and began by talking about Shakespeare’s life and influences. We spent some time looking at iambic pentameter, so that they students could better understand Shakespearian language. To approach the play, we read collaboratively as a class, as well as engaged in different visual representations of the play. An important focus of our study of the play was to look at performativity, and how reading the play as a class was different than watching a performance. We actively read the play, and as a guide, I provided references for what was happening, and the importance of the language Shakespeare used.

Examples of class materials:

To Kill a Mocking Bird: Collage Assignment, Rubric, and exemplars (click to enlarge)