Educators contribute to the profession.

As a teacher just beginning a career, it can be hard to point to a particular thing and say “This! This is the thing I have done! This thing has made the profession of teaching better!” Yet it is this very task that I must complete. While I may not have made many contributions to the profession as of yet, I have made a few that, while not changing teaching as we know it, have had an impact in some way.

The very best examples of this is most certainly my lessons/resources that other teachers have borrowed for their own uses. In this small way I am able to contribute something to my fellow teachers and make an impact on the profession as a whole. The first of these resources, and perhaps the one I am most excited about, is my Blackout Poetry Kit:

This kit is a full class-set of dry-erase blackout poetry pages for use in the classroom. By having these pages be dry erase, students are able to easily use them to create Blackout poems, then erase and swap with a partner, creating new poems on the same pages their partner just did. this sort of activity has led to great conversations about what sort of poem individuals are drawn to create from a page, word choice differences between peers, and how our own identities impact our choices when creating Blackout poetry. I have yet to see a student make the exact same poem from the same page as their peers, and it can be very interesting to look back and see all the different creations from the same prompt page. My Blackout Poetry Kit has been borrowed by multiple teachers throughout practicums and has inspired other teachers to make their own kits as well.

 

I have also had multiple classroom activities and assignments that other teachers have expressed interest in using within their own classes. These are quite varied and range from simple assignment templates, to larger activities. Some examples are below: