Goal 4: Teachers possess current academic content knowledge.

4a Demonstrate knowledge of the content area taught, including structure of the curriculum, the tools of inquiry, central concepts, and connections to other areas of knowledge.

• Refer to my paper on my content knowledge in which I discuss how I came to teaching English, and my academic background in the content area. In this paper I discuss how my writing knowledge and academic success has led me to be a credible teacher with a wealth of knowledge.
  
• Refer to my evaluations, that I wrote for class as well as my paper that links each of these evaluations to the standards necessary for learning in my content area. These tests and formative assessments link back to the standards and show that I was continually getting students to succeed in understanding the standards through my own mastery of the content.
  
• Refer to my teacher work sample where I connect what we are learning to the standards created by the state of Alaska for the students of the same age.
  

4b Connect the content area to other content areas and to practical situations encountered outside the school.

• Refer to my paper on collaborating with my fellow MAT students in order to make an integrated unit on the atomic bomb. In this paper I show how I link the content and standards in the English curriculum to other content standards in order to create a small learning community and a teaming process that facilitates success. By creating a unit that pulled in different content areas students were able to learn the information by forming similar neurological pathways throughout their brain making it easier to link content to their schema.
  
• Refer to my Teacher Work Sample as well as my paper where I defend the purpose of my unit plan. In this paper I discuss the way that my unit relates to other content areas, practical situations outside the school environment, how my personal knowledge is demonstrated through the curriculum, and how I facilitated further inquiry from the students. This paper proves that I am conscious of what students can do with my content, and that my knowledge of the content helped students become successful learners.
  
• Refer to my final project for our alien unit (page 2), you will notice that on page two I explain the skills that they are getting out of this creation and how they will be able to use this assignment outside of class. This reminds the students that even though the assignment is a fun way to learn new things it is also giving them skills that they will be able to use in other classes and outside of the school environment when the graduate.
  

4c Commit to professional discourse about content knowledge and student learning of content.

• Refer to my evaluation from my host teacher and supervisor. You will notice that they ranked me higher than average, showing that I am able to work in a group and have done so throughout the year. These master educators continually engaged with me about the school, the standards, and the content that we were teaching. The fact that they rated me so highly shows that I contributed to the professional discourse well.
  
• Refer to my comments about how I contributed to the English content area of Thunder Mountain High School and enabled students success through teaming and maintained discourse with other teachers. In this paper I explain how teaching the science fiction seminar enabled me to talk with the science teachers at the school, and having a history teacher next door that was teaching similar content helped me team as well.
  
• Refer to my evaluation of time at Tohatchi High School where I contributed to the discourse of the English curriculum in order to maintain standards and work with other teachers to create a professional discourse. The turn-over rate at the high school was so quick that by the end of the year I found myself collaborating with other teachers on content and curriculum plans, in this paper I discuss these issues.