Laura Harrington
Kindergarten Teacher. Literacy Fanatic. Lifelong Learner.
Discovering My Linguistic Heritage Project
In this project, I inquired about my family’s linguistic roots. I researched four generations on both my maternal and paternal sides of my family to learn more about my genealogy and linguistic heritage. This artifact highlights my findings and clearly demonstrates my ability to inquire about my own history. This project helped me learn more about my family and showed me how inquiry can be used as a tool to discover one’s history. While completing this project, I realized that it was especially engaging because it was about my own history. By making projects personal in my own classroom, I can engage my students in new ways.
Inquiry
Using Artifacts to Increase Student Engagement
For this project, I developed an inquiry question to investigate how the use of primary sources and historical artifacts would increase engagement in social studies lessons in an elementary classroom. I conducted research in my own classroom by teaching two different lessons, one using artifacts, and one without, to determine whether artifacts increase engagement. This presentation shows my ability to create an inquiry question, conduct research in my own classroom, and clearly explain and orally discuss my findings.
Maximizing Instruction Through Conferencing
In order to strengthen my own teaching practice, for this project, I decided to inquire about the implementation of effective writing conferences to maximize instruction. I began my inquiry by reviewing literature on the subject and then using this research, created a conference schedule and protocol that I implemented in my classroom. I then studied my students’ writing before and after conferencing to evaluate the effectiveness of my project. This artifact shows my ability to create an inquiry project in order to enhance my own practice and then implement and analyze my plan.