ELL Capstone Portfolio

Abstract

The capstone illustrates my philosophy of implementing culturally responsive teaching in various contexts, with more detailed elaboration in each domain of different aspects in teaching. The last part of application explains the difficulties which I encountered in my practicum and how I want to further explore into the profession of teaching. My philosophy is to hold a pluralistic attitude towards the different cultures of my students and their funds of knowledge. I envision to become a teacher who can find out the individualized needs of each student exactly and build on these funds to achieve an effective teaching. In order to realize the philosophy, I studied not only at the classroom level of planning, instructing and assessing, but also reach out to the community for resources of teaching. Furthermore, second language acquisition theories also provides a tool to facilitate my work. In practice, I mainly encounter the three problems of how to track student thinking, parent involvement, and interaction in class. All three problems try to answer the questions of what is the funds of knowledge, how to find the funds, and how to build on these funds. In the section, possible directions to solve these problems are proposed, and yet more exploration waits ahead to delve into the profession.