Posts

My Bio and Teaching Philosophy

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  My name is John Emanuelson.  I have been teaching in Asia for over 14 years.  I began my journey through the world of education working at an after school English academy in South Korea.  After 10 years in South Korea, I decided to transition towards teaching Adults English, so I completed my CELTA and moved to China.  I worked in this field for a couple of years, but due to Covid-19 and nostalgia for the classroom, I moved back into the field of primary and secondary education.  Currently, I am enrolled in a teacher training course and it is my goal to be certified by the end of 2022 or summer of 2023.   Looking back on the last 14 years, it is amazing how I got here. What started out as an opportunity to travel and experience life abroad has turned into a vocation.  I feel a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment from teaching that I have never gotten any other occupation, which is why I have committed to becoming a qualified educator.   In the time that I have been teaching, I ha
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Designing Differentiated Assessments

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This post is a continuation of module 5, which was about formative assessments.  After creating 3 formative assessments, I had to then  design differentiated assessments  to meet the needs of all students in my class, not just the high level students.  The first one that I did was on my student Louis, who is pictured here.  Louis was a student that I taught last year.  I really liked him and we got along very well, but he is definitely someone who would benefit from being on an IEP.  I did differentiate with regards to homework for Louis, but never for assessments (the thought never occurred to me).  Going forward in the future, I might try to keep that in mind, although I do worry about complaints of unfairness.  
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PBL- Rubrics, Monitoring, and Remediation

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 Rubrics are essential for measuring progress, especially when it comes project based learning (PBL).  The first link is for a  PBL and rubric  that I created when I was teaching a first grade class.  I originally created this PBL and rubric during module 3, but added to it in module 5.   To begin with, I created the standard rubric that went from 1-4 and had criteria ranging from insufficient to outstanding.  To be honest, I just copied the Moreland format since that is what I was used to being assessed on.  After that, I created a single-point rubric for the students. I really like the idea of a single-point rubric since, in my limited experience with PBL, I find the students do not look at the rubrics (even when they are in their native language). Upon completing their project and receiving a grade that was lower than expected, student always express shock.  I follow this up with the question, silly as it may seem, as to whether or not they have the rubric and the answer is, univers
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Unpacking a Standard

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  In education, it feels as though  standards  are tantamount to the Ten Commandments or the 11 general orders that I had to learn in the Navy.  Learn them, love them, and most important - understand them.  This last part, I think, is the trickiest since the standards are packed full of verbiage and ideas that are, in my opinion, not always the easiest or breeziest to read.  That being said, they are the basis of the lessons and what we want the student to accomplish in the end.  Without these standards, I think it is fair to ask what are we teaching and why.  Below is a video I made in module 6 about unpacking standards.  
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Communicating Results to Parents

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  At many of the places I have worked at in Asia, I have not had much contact with parents.  This has been because parents cannot speak English or feel too embarrassed to try and speak English and sadly, my ability in foreign languages is quite poor.  Another reason is that schools might not want foreigners to communicate with parents for fear that they might be unaware of the social customs and would either cause a parent offense or to lose face.  Either way, I have not had much experience  communicating results to parents .  Therefore, when I have to communicate results to a parent, it can fill me with a sense of trepidation.   This Canva presentation, created with Justin Sheehan, was designed to assist a teacher when communicating with parents.  It is something that I will refer to the next time I have parent-teacher conferences.  
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Response to Intervention

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Response to intervention (RTI) is a program that identifies children that are struggling as early as possible tries to give them the necessary support they need.  To be honest, there is a cornucopia of literature on it and in many ways it seems as though it can be complex to implement it.  Writing about this and how I would apply it in the classroom was one of the more arduous and time consuming assignments for me.  I did not know where to start or how to attack the assignment, so in the end I probably wrote a lot more than was necessary.   The school I work at currently might have a  response to intervention  program,  but if they do, I have seen no evidence.  The middle school is made up of three grades- 7, 8 and 9.  I currently work in 9th grade and I have a very low level class of 9th graders that I think are in need of an intervention.  Many of the students have an undiagnosed learning disability or just an absolute lack of motivation. This absolute lack of motivation is, for me,
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Lesson Plan

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Lesson planning, if teachers are honest, can run the gamut from those that see it as a necessary evil to those that loathe doing it with absolute disdain.  For me, when I first being a job, I find them a valuable too to fall back on but the more I become comfortable in a position, the less I like doing them.  That being said, creating a lesson plan can be valuable since it prepares one, if well done, prior to entering the classroom.   Nowadays, in my opinion, so much is expected of teachers in the classroom and it is difficult to be continuously aware of it without putting down what needs to be done on paper.  Even if you don't bring it into the classroom, it can still help with the instruction process since committing it to paper (should) demonstrate that you have thought about importance things such as the assessments that will be used, how to differentiate for low, high, ELL, and students on IEPs.  This is the first (extensive)  lesson plan   that I created in module 6.  
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