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Recommendation Letter From Katie

This letter recommends Jamie Ray for a teaching position. It summarizes that Jamie plans creative and engaging lessons using backwards design, creates essential questions and varied assessments. Jamie differentiates instruction and designed a unit on compare and contrast essays that students enjoyed. During teaching, Jamie uses modeling, guided practice and checks for understanding with the gradual release method. Jamie is developing as a classroom leader by establishing clear expectations and modeling behavior. Jamie interacts warmly with students and colleagues and welcomes feedback to improve. The letter concludes that Jamie has strong instructional and interpersonal skills to be an excellent teacher.

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761 views2 pages

Recommendation Letter From Katie

This letter recommends Jamie Ray for a teaching position. It summarizes that Jamie plans creative and engaging lessons using backwards design, creates essential questions and varied assessments. Jamie differentiates instruction and designed a unit on compare and contrast essays that students enjoyed. During teaching, Jamie uses modeling, guided practice and checks for understanding with the gradual release method. Jamie is developing as a classroom leader by establishing clear expectations and modeling behavior. Jamie interacts warmly with students and colleagues and welcomes feedback to improve. The letter concludes that Jamie has strong instructional and interpersonal skills to be an excellent teacher.

Uploaded by

jray427
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

610 E. UNIVERSITY AVE.


ANN ARBOR, MI 48109

To Whom It May Concern: April 25, 2011

It is my pleasure to recommend Jamie Ray as a candidate for a position in your school. I have known
Jamie as a student in my instructional design course, and have also had the opportunity to observe her
teach in the field. In both contexts, Jamie approached her work with responsibility and creativity.

Jamie plans for instruction using the Backwards Design planning framework to create, teach, and
annotate units of study for her students. Jamie’s planning focuses on creating coherence between
state/district standards, and the goals, objectives and assessments she determines for a lesson or unit.
Jamie designs essential questions to engage her students’ interest in a topic, and plans a variety of
assessment strategies to determine the level of each student’s achievement of the lesson or unit goals.
Jamie is able to adapt existing curriculum materials to better meet the needs of her particular students,
as well as create lessons of her own to strengthen students’ understanding of the content she is
teaching. In addition, Jamie is learning to differentiate her instruction to meet the wide range of needs
within her classroom. She designed an engaging unit to teach her students how to write a compare and
contrast essay that her students appeared to enjoy.

During instruction Jamie engages children as sense-makers while delivering focused instruction. She
breaks down her teaching into “chunks” and uses the gradual release model of instruction to ensure
that she is supporting her students as they grapple with new concepts and skills. Jamie models a skill,
provides her students with guided practice and works on checks for understanding before releasing
them to independent work.

Jamie is developing nicely as a classroom leader. She has worked on making the directions and
expectations for students’ behavior clear and models how she wants her students to conduct
themselves so they can successfully manage their own behavior. Jamie uses norms and routines in her
classroom to help her children felt safe and for the classroom to operate smoothly. I observed that she
interacts with her students in a warm and kind manner, but is able to be firm when necessary.

Jamie is also a positive team member. She contributes her ideas at meetings and listens thoughtfully to
what others have to say. She is supportive of her peers and colleagues, welcomes feedback, and is able
to incorporate other’s suggestions into her teaching to improve her practice.
Because of her interpersonal skills with children and colleagues, and her knowledge of the instructional
cycle of planning, enacting, reflecting, and revising, I believe that Jamie has the capacity to be a terrific
teacher. If you would like to discuss Jamie’s strengths further feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Katrin Oddleifson Robertson


Lecturer, Field Instructor
Elementary Master of Arts with Certification Program
ktrobert@umich.edu
734.678.5827

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