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...

Hey, everyone! This past week my classmates and I practiced our teacher skills in a 15-minute vocabulary lesson for our Literacy course. For my lesson, I aimed to build a solid foundation about triangles in order to deepen my students' understanding of the Pythagorean Theorem. Click here if you want to critique my teacher presence and/or learn how to classify triangles based on their side lengths, and click here to view my lesson plan.           For my lesson, I focused on the following terms:  scalene triangle, isosceles triangle, equilateral triangle, right triangle, and hypotenuse. I chose these terms because they are crucial to understanding the various types of triangles and how they relate to the real-world. According to “The Power of the Word,” these are important terms to teach because they are representative, repetitive, and transportive to other class projects, and make up a tolerable cognitive load.  I started writing my ...

This semester I am taking two education classes: Literacy and Curriculum. The first substantial assignment for each class was a short presentation using technology. The Literacy project assessed our expanded definition of literacy, how literacy is relevant to our content area, and the implications of our future teaching decisions. I created an Adobe Spark Page video for my " What is Literacy ?" assignment presentation. The Curriculum project assessed our educational philosophy, theorists associated with it, those who influenced our views, and how the philosophy will impact our future classroom. The philosophy I chose was  Progressivism . I used Slidebean to present my work, but to share the slides, I uploaded screenshots into an Adobe Spark Page video.  The main ideas of the Literacy project and of the Curriculum project are closely related. The Literacy presentation focused on redefining literacy and what it means in our content area. The Curriculum p...

The second YA novel that my PLC group read was  Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, the novel that the new major motion picture Love, Simon  was based off of. In the novel, 16-year-old drama-loving Simon Spier explores his sexual identity as he works up the courage to come out to his friends and family. Only two people know that Simon is gay. The first person to find out is Blue, an anonymous classmate who has been corresponding with Simon via email since the summer. Blue is also gay and has yet to come out. The two talk using nicknames in order to maintain their identities. As Simon's feelings for Blue become real, he has to decide whether or not this relationship is worth the potential hardships.  The second person to find out about Simon's sexuality is Martin, a fellow drama-lover and the grade's class clown. Unlike Blue, Martin knows Simon's identity. He uses Simon's secret as blackmail in order to force Simon into being his wingman. Wil...

Hi guys! Today's blog is brought to you by myself, Rylee Booth, and Allie Cullen (check out their blogs if you have time!). Adolescence is a time when emotions essentially control the mind and make it difficult to think rationally. There comes a time when an adolescent begins their journey into adulthood and must learn how to think, act, and regulate for oneself. The purpose of a coming of age ritual is to break from the norms that characterize adolescence. While some coming of age transitions are planned and purposeful, some events force adolescents into the transition to adulthood.  As Maslow’s hierarchy illustrates, safety is imperative, on all levels, for self-actualization to occur. In accordance with this philosophy, Vygotsky emphasizes the importance of social interaction through his concept of scaffolding, and how it is essential to cognitive development, especially throughout adolescence.  Using the various philosophies of Maslow and Vygotsky to guide our design...

In my adolescent development class, we were assigned a weekly placement in a neighboring school. Different students in the class have different roles in each of the schools they visit. I have been paired up with a 16-year-old girl named Binsa from Nepal (note that I have changed her name for privacy and confidentiality). Binsa came to the United States in 2015 and is in the beginning levels for speaking, listening, reading, and writing English. Nepal is a Himalayan country in South Asia landlocked between China and India with the rough population of 27,474,000. The official language is Nepali and it's spoken by 44.6% of the population. Hindu is the predominant religion in Nepal with 81.3% of the population practicing. Nepal was closed to the outside world until the 1950s. It is one of the world's poorest countries with the bulk of the economy relying on tourism and aid from other countries. In April of 2015, a devastating earthquake hit, killing thousands of people, des...

Teaching styles vary from teacher to teacher. However, most teachers have one or two educational theorists that they relate to the most. After learning the basics of about five theorists, I found that I relate to Abraham Maslow and Lev Vygotsky. Maslow was an American psychologist who created a hierarchy of needs, predicting that in order for a human to reach self-actualization (in order for students to focus and learn in school), he or she must fulfill basic human needs first (they must have a solid foundation in which they feel comfortable in). The below chart shows Maslow's hierarchy of needs in greater depth. The base tiers of physiological and safety needs emphasize the need for a guarantee of food, water, warmth, rest, safety, and security before anything else can be considered. The middle tiers include belongingness and love needs as well as esteem needs. These incorporate the need for intimate relationships, friends, and strong self esteem that can be focused on o...