Chiara Ojeda's Teaching Portfolio
I'm a superteacher on a mission. Here's my journey so far.
This is by far my students' favorite project each month and one of the most rewarding assignments I've created, engaged in myself, and shared with other professionals. Students must think critically about who they are as professionals and must then use design to communicate that vision via a Slideshare.net presentation.
To say that I am Chris' teacher equivalent of a hype girl would be an understatement. Chris was the type of student and the type of professional who inspired me to continue pushing my skills and reinvigorated my love of immersive design.
In this assignment, students must choose from a list of discussion questions related to a public speaking, design, or communication related topic and conduct research that helps them answer a set of questions. They then lead class discussion on that topic.
After studying Joaquin Torres Garcia's Universal Constructivism movement, students engage with the artist's theory and process by creating their own universal constructions.
Analysis is one of the most challenging skills to apply, especially in a four-week course and especially on the subject of presentation delivery. In this presentation, students choose a TED speaker and analyze his or her speech using the class's discussion of Garr Reynolds' "naked delivery" as a guide. In addition to analyzing this style of delivery, students apply that style of delivery to their own in class or online presentation.
The treatment and representation of indigenous peoples by Spanish colonizers is a major theme of literature, art, and film of Latin America. As a way of creating a thread of connection between the various humanities studied in Latin American Humanities, students begin this course by analyzing La Ley de Burgos, the first set of laws designed to govern the Americas.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is a word often thrown around in teaching circles, but what does that truly mean in terms of crafting and executing curriculum and instruction? For me, critical thinking is best measured via lessons, activities, and assignments that challenge students to implement what they learned rather than testing their rote memorization and test-taking skills. Discussion and analysis form the basis for critical thinking in my courses.
Design
Design plays a major role in every aspect of curriculum building for me--from lesson plans and lecture notes to supplementary materials, assignment instructions, and activities. Thorough instructional design is not an option; it is a necessity of a well executed traditional, online, or hybrid course. Further, my students learn that good design helps them create assets that are audience-centered and apply design to a variety of projects.
Application
While the conveyance of information is one task of an educator, it is the least important. In order to bring information to life and motivate students to seek out intrinsic reasons for learning content, it is more important to place that content within an applicable context. While my classroom includes instruction on core concepts, my major focus of any lesson or unit is putting that information into practive through student-led discussion and activity.
Curricular Best Practices
My four curricular guiding principles
Challenge
For the past 11 years, I have firmly believed that existing outside of the teacher comfort zone--away from pre-built lessons, repetitive, unchaging course structures, typical assignments, and classroom teaching only--has and will continue to help me create formative experiences for students. But, it's even more important to help my students exist outside of their cognitive comfort zones. My students' ability to take on a challenge --analyze poetry, a film as text, a presenter's delivery or visual design, or complete a Pecha Kucha or Ignite persuasive presentation--never ceases to amaze me.
This is the most challenging assignment in my current course. Whether on campus or online, students must tackle three specific challenges: First, students must choose a personal, defensible, and novel topic; secondly, they must present that topic using the Ignite model, which allows presenters 20 slides that autoprogress after 15 seconds; thirdly, students must organize their presentation using strong rhetoric and Nancy Duarte's "sparkline" model.
While many composition courses devote equal time to three major literary genres--short fiction, poetry, and drama, in my composition II courses at Valencia College, students focused almost entirely on the close reading method of analyzing poetry. Beginning with the initial reading, each week, students tackled another facet of literary analysis, culminating in a research paper on a poet of their choice.
Icon Credits
Gears designed by Dasha Shevyrenkova from The Noun Project
Thinking designed by iconoci from The Noun Project
Type Design designed by Andrew J. Young from The Noun Project
Mountain Climber designed by Juan Pablo Bravo from The Noun Project