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Personal Statement: Figurative Language

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[Address Line 1]
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To [Director of human resources or whomever],

I am writing to express my interest in the [language arts/ English] teaching position available at [The name of the school]. I am an educator that believes in the power of choice in creating passionate learners, and the relevance of utilizing student data to inform assessment.

I am a graduate of The College of New Jersey with a Bachelors of the arts Degree in English. I am also a CEAS Teacher of English, and I am a currently substitute teaching at Delran Middle School and Voorhees Middle School. In my recent experience as a long term substitute in Delran Public School District, I taught sixth grade reading and writing courses. Using the Teachers College workshop model, I taught focused mini-lessons on common core …show more content…
In college, formative assessment is stressed, but it wasn’t until I was working in the field that I understood how important formative assessment can be for addressing the individual learning needs of students. I utilized an assessment on writing fiction narratives to assess how students used figurative language and description in narrative writing. I learned that most of the students could define and identify figurative language, but they struggled to write it. I modified instruction by designing a lesson that gave students the opportunity to see the examples of figurative language created by their peers, and challenged them to practice their skills. In this lesson students picked out something to describe from a hat, and then in their groups formulated their figurative language before sharing their examples with the class. When students later wrote new fiction narratives, they utilized more figurative language. This taught me that by utilizing student data I could respond to the needs of the learners in my

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