In the future, my goal is to teach students, specifically highschoolers, an English curriculum. Because of this, I wanted to put myself in the shoes of a teacher in order to better prepare myself. For my Capstone project, I created mock lesson plans as if I was an English teacher. I created two main units based on my own interests. One of them is called Passing Gatbsy, in which the unit is based around the books Passing by Nella Larsen and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The other is a Cinema Studies unit, which works as an abbreviated introduction to film course. I started with an inquiry into teaching in a way that was creative, engaging, and effective. I also wanted to explore how to incorporate film into an English classroom, as I am a CTE DigVid student, and film is a passion of mine. I figured that the best place to begin my research was all around me, interviewing my own teachers as guides. From there, after conducting my own research, I began to assemble my lesson plans. Each lesson plan, done in a UBD (understanding by design) format, contains several links to resources that I created or curated for the course, including relevant articles, project descriptions, and slide decks.

For research, I emailed (see above) several of my teachers, both past and current, asking if they would be willing to talk with me about the process of creating lesson plans. In addition to physical notes (see above),I voice recorded each interview, which can be found in this Google Drive folder.

In addition to the research via teacher interviews, I also researched on my own. For the filmmaking curriculum, I watched and took notes on (see above) several films and analysis videos. I also physically traveled to the Museum of Moving Images (see above) to deepen my understanding.

You can find the links to the lesson plans here:

Passing Gatsby UBD

Cinema Studies UBD

Each UBD doc contains hyperlinks to the other learning resources.

[Annotated Bibliography] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z3nk-BjRiqpxi5nvDKiqjkPNWpBvw3fwhA4iEyJHx1E/edit?usp=sharing)

Softball has been a large part of my life for as long as I can remember. Many months ago, when brainstorming ideas for my capstone project, I knew that I wanted to do something having to do with softball. After a lot of thought and talking with family, friends, and coaches, I decided to create and host a clinic for younger softball players. I spent months doing research, reaching out and communicating with people and organizations, and planning specifics of my clinic. I had everything planned out down to the small party favors that I would give out at the end. At the last minute, disaster struck. I was informed that I wasn’t going to be able to host my clinic at the field that I had planned to. In panic, I tried to find a new field to run my clinic but I was not able to. Every field that fit my criteria: safe, reliable, somewhat close, etc, was filled and therefore my clinic that I had spent months working on and planning, could not happen. Not that my two hour clinic would’ve been life changing, but now these kids aren’t able to improve their skills, meet other young softball players, and grow their love for the sport. Once I got over the frustration and sadness that I felt, I became frustrated for a different reason.