When I think of an area of my instruction where there is room for growth, I think of a graphic organizer I created for my 7th grade students for a compare and contrast assignment. This graphic organizer represents an area of improvement that is aligned with TESS Domain 3a: Communicating with Students because my challenges with this artifact in the classroom were related to how instructions were communicated to my students. 
For this assignment, students were expected to read a Johns Hopkins article on leukemia and compare and contrast that information with how leukemia is represented in the fictional book, Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie. The graphic organizer, shown in Figure 1, was intended to help students break down this task into organized steps. During the lesson, I explained each step and provided an example on the first page. My goal in asking students to summarize and paraphrase was to take what they were reading and put it into terms that helped them understand the main points and then write those ideas into words that were easy for them to understand. I intended for students to use these two steps as methods of comprehending the text before they tried to connect it to the book. 

     However, I made an assumption that my students would know the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing. After my students began working on this assignment, I received many questions about what I meant by those two terms. Some students thought this was asking them to repeat the same step twice. It is important for me to strategize about how I can change this graphic organizer to make the steps more clear because having the skills to summarize and paraphrase a text benefits students in their reading comprehension. Making the instructions and expectations of an assignment clear matters because students need to be able to complete the work independently without confusing the steps. In order to improve this graphic organizer, I plan to explain the differences between summarizing and paraphrasing up front and include brief definitions of those terms on the assignment (see Figure 2 below). My hope in making this adjustment is to clarify the difference between these two tasks so students can be successful in completing the assignment independently and confidently.