Kayla Carew's Teaching Portfolio

Flyer of the SMC Common Read events The Saint Michael’s College Education Department has a common read each year. The common read for the fall 2018 semester was Girl Rising by Tanya Lee Stone. Three events were held over the course of the semester to deepen students’ and the public’s understanding of the book. I attended the author talk on October 22nd and I watched the film (which came before the book). The trailer for the movie is here for anyone interested in watching it. The author talk with Tanya Lee Stone was inspiring and moving. She began the talk by explaining how the Girl Rising movie was released in 2013. After watching it with her children, she noticed that they remembered more about the girls’ stories than about where the problem of education is in the world. She became passionate about slowing down and unpacking the information in the film in order to understand it better. This passion led to the idea of turning the movie into a book.   Stone c...

On Monday, February 5th, I went to the showing of "Screenagers" at Shelburne Community School. The movie discusses the usage of screen time for adolescents and its negative impacts. The central storyline revolves around the filmmaker's own experience of deciding whether or not to give her 12-year-old daughter Tessa a smart phone. The trailer for the film is below. The film explores the ways in which adolescents are addicted to their devices and the impacts it can have. On average, adolescents spend over ten hours a day looking at a screen. This does not include the time they spend doing homework. Another interesting fact that the movie discusses is that students who are on their phones during class are actually distracting the students next to them. Sitting next to a classmate that is on his or her phone can be more distracting than being on your own phone. During adolescence, the prefrontal cortex is still developing. This is the part of the brain that is in char...