The teacher uses understanding of individual differences and diverse cultures and communities to ensure inclusive learning environments that allow each learner to reach his/her full potential.
Maine Common Core Teaching Standards
Artifact: Text Set with Text Complexity Analysis
I decided to represent Standard 2 with a text set I created that includes a text complexity analysis of one of those texts. When I was building this text set, which is meant to accompany a unit where 12th-grade students answer the question “What does it mean to grow up?,” there were a lot of factors I kept in mind. First, I wanted to make sure I was choosing texts that came from a diverse group of creators because growing up is a concept that differs widely between cultures. I also had to consider the types of texts I included, so I included a young adult novel, a graphic novel, a full-length movie, a short video, and a poem. In this assignment, I was also tasked with determining the difficulty of one text by providing quantitative and qualitative assessments of the text as well as identifying the challenges it could create for readers and how I would differentiate my teaching of the text. This artifact goes with Standard 2 because it emphasizes diversity by examining a wide range of cultures through many formats that represent varying levels of difficulty. This allows students to be exposed to new perspectives in ways that engage a variety of different learners in ways that are meaningful and authentic.
The creation of this artifact challenged me to think beyond my own realm of understanding into the perspectives of many other people. As someone who wasn’t exposed to a lot of racial and cultural diversity in my own K-12 experience and as someone who rarely struggled in school, it would be very easy for me to teach only what I’m familiar with. What this artifact demonstrates about me is that I can find and incorporate resources that have little to do with my own experiences as long as I make a conscious effort to do so. This is something that I am definitely still working on, but with practice, I hope this will become second nature to me. I also recognize that this text set by no means represents everyone, and I could definitely revise it at this point to include even more diversity in terms of the cultures presented, the formats of text used, and the complexity of the texts.
