Classes &
Sample Work
Honors Yearbook
(Adobe)
Grades 10 - 12
Yearlong Elective
The curriculum covered Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro (in addition to photography, videography, principles of design, marketing, media publishing, and project collaboration). Students followed a Design Thinking Process to produce content for a specific audience, considering their needs and revising the content thoughtfully while advancing toward a publication date. My teaching philosophy in this course was progressive: student goals, inquiries, and interests determined the units and the unique Adobe skills we learned each year. Decisions were made through democratic and collaborative decision-making that reflects real-life workplaces.
Yearbook Page Project Overview:
Students used this document to keep track of the yearbook page Design Thinking Process. It outlines each step of the project and includes all of the rubrics they needed.
Yearbook (Adobe)
Grades 9 - 12
Semester-long Elective
This course was the prerequisite for 'Honors Yearbook'. The curriculum covered Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro (in addition to photography, videography, principles of design, marketing, media publishing, and project collaboration). My teaching philosophy in this course was highly scaffolded: students progressed through four units designed to teach them the basic computer program and design-thinking skills needed to make finished products such as a print-ready photograph, a poster, a mini-documentary, and a yearbook page. In my favorite project of the course, students made a screen recording of themselves editing a photo they took, verbally justifying all of their composition and editing choices while simultaneously working on the image!
Unit Plans:
This document outlines the four units of my Yearbook course. Backward Design was considered as essential questions, knowledge, and skills were planned for each unit. Unit projects are listed.
Psychology
Grades 9 - 12
Semester-long Elective
I was the first person to teach this as a high-school elective course at my school, so I worked with the curriculum coordinator to prioritize the content and standards, and I designed the course. I taught it as a semester-long elective that focused on a combination of both essay-test and project-based assessments. At the end of the course, students completed a "resident expert" project in which they researched a unique Psychology topic and individually taught the class a 30-minute lesson on that topic that included a lecture and an interactive activity. The most exciting part of this project was that students were forced to think and plan like teachers, considering educational Psychology concepts (such as learning styles, levels of processing theory, and memory consolidation) in their lesson plans!
Social Experiment Project:
Before I used Google Classroom, I created custom websites for my classes. On this page, you can see a project in which students designed experiments, reflected on the ethics of their design, documented data, drew final conclusions, and presented their findings to the class.
G10 Global Studies (Renaissance to Modern)
Grade 10
Yearlong Core
I taught this yearlong core class alongside another grade 10 history teacher, collaborating on the course planning on a weekly basis. A staple of my lesson plans was our regular student-led discussions. To improve reading comprehension, students were required to write three discussion questions with each reading assignment. In the following class, they used these questions to conduct small-group discussions. I am incredibly purposeful in the way I teach students to write their questions, and use a rubric to assess question quality. Students can use question-starters to improve question complexity and help with academic language acquisition.
Ms. G's Student-led Discussion Activity:
This presentation explains the steps involved in teaching students how to do the activity, and I have presented it to my colleagues in department meetings and PLOs. Teachers enjoy my activity because it is similar to Socratic seminars, but is more flexible and casual.
G9 Global Studies (Ancient to Renaissance)
Grade 9
Yearlong Core
I taught this yearlong core class alongside another grade 9 history teacher, and so I collaborated on the course planning on a frequent basis. We shared common assessments but planned learning activities suited to our individual teaching styles. When I teach History, I focus on historical thinking skills like primary source analysis, and I prefer project-based assessments. I love asking students to put themselves in the shoes of historical people because it promotes creative thinking, open-mindedness, and the ability to consider multiple perspectives: as class warm-ups, my students wrote "diary entries" as Egyptian priests, Medieval merchants, and other characters of all ages, classes, and genders!
MUN-style Ides of March Project:
My husband introduced me to the dynamic world of MUN, which fits perfectly in a history classroom. In this project, students role-played and debated as historical figures, practiced persuasive writing, and collaborated to draft new legislation for Rome.
Journalism
Grades 9 - 12
Yearlong Elective
I directly co-taught this oversized elective class (of about 40 students) with another teacher in the same classroom. We collaborated on a daily basis to design the curriculum and lesson activities. In addition to writing articles for an online student newspaper, we produced the school's first yearbook in this course. After 2017, we split the course into separate Journalism and Yearbook classes because it became too difficult to produce both publications well in a single class. I became the Yearbook teacher because of my Adobe experience, and the other teacher continued to teach Journalism.
Resource: Newshound's Guide to Student Journalism
I enjoy using this resource with students because it provides fun comics and diagrams that illustrate key principles in Journalism such as interviewing, avoiding bias, verifying sources, and taking authentic photos. It forms the basis of many of my lessons and learning activities.
G10 English Literature
Grade 10
Yearlong Core
I taught this yearlong core class alongside one other grade 10 English teacher, and I collaborated on assessment design. We first focused on the analysis of story structure as we watched short films and read short stories. After that, students read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Golding's Lord of the Flies. Students wrote two literary analysis essays, a rhetorical analysis essay, and a compare/contrast research essay in this class. I also focused on creating grammar lessons targeted at common mistakes for ELLs, and students utilized "grammar journals" in order to isolate those grammar rules, revise and reflect on their writing within the journals, and receive feedback.
Rhetorical Analysis Worksheet:
After reading Lord of the Flies, students were tasked with writing a persuasive speech from the perspective of one of the story's main characters. This was highly scaffolded with formative work and feedback before the speeches were performed in class: students had to complete a worksheet that guided them through the speech planning. The exciting part of this assignment was part 2: afterward, students were required to write a rhetorical analysis of their own speech (a rhetorical "self-analysis" of sorts) explaining why tone, diction, figurative language, and rhetorical appeal choices were effective for the specified audience and situation.
G9 English Literature
Grade 9
Yearlong Core
I taught this yearlong core class alongside two other grade 9 English teachers, and I collaborated with them on designing assessments. The unit topics and primary reading selections were predetermined for us, and we each customized the learning activities in our classrooms while using identical assessments.
Our Quarter 1 Class Website:
My all-time favorite content to teach is reflected in this unit: The Odyssey and the Hero's Journey! Students practiced identifying characteristics of epics in stories from around the world, identified the Hero's Journey archetypes in movies and literature, enjoyed The Odyssey reading groups, and wrote personal narratives that reflected the patterns of the Hero's Journey. I created this unit 1 website for my class long before my school transitioned to using Google Classroom.
College Writing
Grades 11 - 12
Semester-long Elective
I created this semester-long elective because I have always been interested in writing research papers and wanted to give students the opportunity to write them for college preparation purposes. I also saw that upperclassmen were not working on college admissions essays in their regular English courses, so I wanted to provide that opportunity as well. This course was divided into two segments. In the first, we practiced narrative writing skills and students produced college admissions essays. In the second, we practiced research-related writing skills and students produced lengthy research papers on topics of their choice. After teaching it for a year, the class was assigned to another teacher because I had too many other courses in my schedule. Ultimately it was phased out of the course offerings because we introduced the AP Capstone program, and the AP research course bore too many similarities to this elective.
Unit 1 Overview / Class Website:
Before I used Google Classroom, I created custom websites for my classes. On this page, you can see the unit 1 overview and links to all of the activities and assignments that helped build student understanding of narrative writing, including story structure, detail writing, figurative language, precise word choice, and many more.
G9 Writing
Grade 9
Yearlong Core
KISJ implemented this new course to provide students additional English-learning support upon entering high school. I taught and designed this course alongside another grade 9 writing teacher. We created four units on narrative, informational, persuasive, and analytical writing. The class was phased out the next year, as they decided to make the regular G9 English Lit course a double-block instead of having two separate required English classes.
Unit 3 Project: Wikipedia Article Project
Before I used Google Classroom, I created custom websites for my classes. On this page, you can see a project in which students wrote and actually published their own Wikipedia articles to learn about research writing.
Economics
Grade 9-12
Semester-long Elective
This was the first economics elective offered at my school for grades 9-12, so, I prioritized the content and standards and fully designing the course. Half of the semester-long course focused on microeconomics and the second half focused on macroeconomics. I implemented a combination of traditional and project-based assessments, and I used activity-based lessons to help students visualize economics concepts in a variety of ways!
Assignment: Google Public Data Analysis
There are so many amazing assignments and activities to highlight from my economics class (from stock market games to creating fictional, idealized governments). This assignment required students to use a public data database to search for correlations between South Korea's GDP growth rate and inflation and unemployment rates, analyzing their findings.
G7 English Literature
Grade 7
Yearlong Core
I taught an extra section of this course alongside another grade 7 English teacher. Because she was the primary teacher, I deferred to her experience and modeled my lesson plans after hers, learning a great deal from her over the course of the year.
G7 Global Studies (Modern World Cultures)
Grade 7
Yearlong Core
I taught an extra section of this course alongside another grade 7 social studies teacher who was also new to KISJ. We used co-planning time to design the units for this course, which focused on world cultures, religions, geography, and conflicts. It was a question-driven and project-based class. The final unit involved students presenting proposed solutions to one of the UNs 17 Sustainable Development Issues.
Intern:
G9 US History
Grade 9
Yearlong Core
I assisted in teaching two sections of this course for a full school year during my student-teaching internship in Haslett, MI. My mentor teacher gave me the freedom to lesson-plan and teach about 40% of the course independently. I include this course on my resume because I can proudly say that I transformed his worksheet-based lessons to student-led small-group discussion-based lessons, and it was a great success and learning experience for me.
Intern:
G9 English Literature
Grade 9
Yearlong Core
I assisted in teaching two sections of this course for a full school year during my student-teaching internship in Haslett, MI. My mentor teacher expected me to implement his plans most of the time, and gave me the freedom to lesson-plan and teach about 10-20% of the course independently. I learned a massive amount about how to facilitate reading and discussion with grade 9 students, and interestingly, I also learned how to implement standards-based grading within a point-based grading school district.