Chelsea Womack

Rationale Reflection
Standard 3
Example 1:
Artifact: Expert Study
Topic/Title: Low Income, High Poverty Students
Medium: Reflective paper
Technology Used: Microsoft Word
Example 2:
Artifact: Curriculum Based Assessment
Topic/Title: Forms of Government
Medium: Written assessment plans
Technology Used: Microsoft Word
Example 3:
Artifact: Impact on Student Learning Project
Topic/Title: The Enlightenment
Medium: Written lesson plans, Website
Technology Used: Microsoft Word, Internet Research, Weebly
Standard 3: Middle Grades Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
Middle level teacher candidates plan interdisciplinary curriculum based on core and
elective curricula that are relevant, challenging, and exploratory. They understand
and apply the major concepts, principles, theories, and research unique to effective
middle level instruction and assessment, and they employ a variety of
developmentally responsive strategies to meet the varying abilities and learning
styles of all young adolescents.
For my expert study, I chose to focus on my final social justice reflection paper
for my Foundations 2400 class. Specifically, I looked at the impact of social justice
and social norms within a middle school classroom. Although this artifact did not
deal with any specific area of academic content, I explored the potential to include
social justice within the social studies curriculum. In order for students to
understand how far our society has developed throughout history, they first must
understand the role that social justice plays in our society. Before they can see the
potential for further progress in terms of how our society can develop, they must
understand the leaps and bounds of progress that we have made as a society
throughout history. Social justice is an important subject to include in the social
studies curriculum because of its relevance to young adolescents and their
development. Young adolescents have become the targets of advertisements telling
females that they need to be skinny with perfect makeup and telling males that
they have to be masculine and show no emotions. Its difficult to focus on anything
other than these messages because of how common they are and how embedded in
our society they are. Young adolescents cant go anywhere without seeing a
message that shows them what the norm is and to not fit into that norm means
that they are categorized as the other. As an advocate for my students, it is my
goal to help them understand where these social norms have developed from. In
order to do this, we must focus on those norms within history. Because students can
understand the relevance of social norms on their own lives, including social justice

within the social studies curriculum is creating a meaningful learning experience

and students can understand the importance of its inclusion. Not only are students
gaining a competence in the subject matter, but they are also receiving real world
lessons that can be applied outside of the classroom setting. By expressing an
interest in exploring social norms and a desire to defeat these social norms within
the classroom, teachers have the ability to improve student confidence.
For the Curriculum Based Assessment (CBA), I chose to create an assessment
that analyzes students understandings of government structures. In doing so,
students have collected research on a form of government and they will
demonstrate their knowledge of this government by completing the individual
journal prompts. These prompts ask for specific knowledge regarding a made-up
country that demonstrates the students individual understanding of the structure of
the government. This artifact demonstrates my ability to create assessments that
reflect the content of the curriculum in challenging and abstract ways. Rather than
giving students a test on the different forms of government, students are engaging
their creative thinking by immersing themselves inside of the history. In doing so,
the lesson becomes more relevant to the students and allows for students to
develop a deeper understanding of the content. Throughout the duration of a
students history education, they will come across countries that operate under
different forms of government. By approaching forms of government using this
strategy, students are collecting an understanding of government forms and
structure as an entire concept. In this approach, students are understanding a
specific form of government as an umbrella and the individual countries that fit
underneath that umbrella. This is beneficial to student because they are collecting
the main concept of the government rather than just identifying a few random
countries that operate under the same government structure without ever truly
understanding how that government works. This standard has required me to
approach my teaching as a more conceptual strategy rather than a collection of
individual bits of information. By practicing teaching in this way, I, myself, have
developed a far greater understanding of history than I ever could have imagined.
For the Impact on Student Learning Project, I chose to create a unit on the
Enlightenment that required students to engage with the material in more mediums
than they might normally be exposed to. In this unit, students explore the historical
impact of the Enlightenment while navigating through narratives, online resources,
vocabulary puzzles, and visual images. By taking this approach of instruction,
students of various learning styles were able to benefit from the instruction. Not
only does this approach allow me to reach various learning styles, but by mixing up
the ways in which I present information to students, I am constantly keeping them
hooked and engaged with the material because the only thing that they can expect
is that they will constantly see something new. This artifact allowed me to observe
individual student growth and the benefits of incorporating multiple forms of
instruction to students. The post-assessment that I had students complete at the
conclusion of the unit demonstrated my effective use of teaching methods that
successfully benefited students of all learning styles.