Category: Student Posts

At the beginning of the year, I felt lost thinking about how I could create lessons that would be informative, while also engaging for my students. I wanted the students to be able to learn the necessary course content, while doing so in a way that was interesting to them. This all goes back to aspects of my teaching pedagogy that include creating a culturally inclusive and responsive classroom that uses technology to further help students learn what they need to, while taking a student centered approach to their learning.

While many teachers strive to make their classrooms culturally responsive, it can be hard to change what they thought was working for so long. I want my current and future students to always be thinking about how different events throughout history would affect different groups of people and why. I want to focus as much on the experience of minority groups because their stories are often brushed over in schools and sometimes even more interesting to students than the history that is followed throughout the textbook. Going into my student teaching classroom and future classrooms, I have already created and delivered a couple lessons that are culturally responsive and inclusive. For example, the final project that I chose to include for this class is one that was based off of lessons I taught in my student teaching placement about the 1920’s. Throughout this unit, the main question students were to be focusing on was “Were the 1920’s “Roaring” for everyone?” This question assumes that students understand that the in the United States, the 1920’s was a decade that was remembered as being a prosperous and favorable time for everyone that lived through it, when it was not the case. After each lesson, students were to add what they learned that day to the positive or negative column in their learning target notes and why the events they learned about that day affected different good positively or negatively. When I teach the 1920’s again in a future classroom that I am in, I want to try out the lesson that I created for my final project in this class. FINAL I think this would be an interesting way to test students understanding of the topic so far as a formative assessment or as a summative assessment at the end of the unit.

Another aspect of this class that I was nervous about was the use of technology. I know that I want my future classroom to make use of technology, but I was unsure of how I could incorporate it. One way I was able to incorporate technology around my lessons were through the use of interactive maps. I’ve learned how to incorporate lessons that are specific to the content my students are learning, but also other ways to look at data through websites such as, GapMinder, Google Trends, Chronicling America, Two Centuries of US Immigration, White Supremacy Mob Violence, and Mapping Green Book. In my classroom this past semester, I did a lesson during my 1920’s unit that incorporated the White Supremacy Mob Violence interactive map. I really liked how this lesson allowed students to be able to visualize where and to who all these mob violence attacks were happening. This allowed students to get a better understanding of what White Supremacy Mob Violence was and how it affected different groups of people. This helped my students synthesize the material we were learning and get a better understanding.

I also want my future classroom to be student centered. I’ve noticed throughout my time in the classroom that many students don’t respond well to 50-minute lectures, even though there needs to be some kind of lecture for introducing new information. While this is something that I’m still working on perfecting, this class helped me see a few ways to go about that. This is an aspect of my pedagogy that overlaps with other areas of teaching and learning as well, including the technology aspect of things. Using these specific maps in my teaching or having students work in groups together to accomplish little tasks together will be more beneficial to their learning. Another way I’ve gone about this in my student teaching already is to relate the past to more present events and problems. One of these lessons that I was able to try out in this class that helped me before going in to teach it to my students was comparing two songs, one from the time period we were studying and another more recent song from the past five years. This lesson allowed students to hear music from the time period we were studying and understand what was going on during that time, while comparing it to something they were more familiar with from a few years ago. The lesson can be viewed here. I really appreciated taking this class because it helped give me ideas for how to construct as well as accomplish lessons that I did not think I would be able to.

8th Grade Humanities Class

For this lesson, I would use Chronicling America, the resource upon which you can look at digital copies of newspapers from a period up till about the 1960’s, in conjunction with the reading of The Outsiders text. This activity would take place at the beginning, right before students will actually begin to read the text. It would have students look up newspaper articles from the 50’s and such in the Midwest, particularly Oklahoma, where the story of The Outsiders takes place. This lesson would begin with an intro to how daily life and the roles of people in society were drastically different during the 50’s and 60’s in midwestern America and highlight some of the ways or places in which differences might be found.

Students will be introduced to Chronicling America as a resource to be able to better understand and give context to the happenings and life of the midwest in the 50’s and 60’s. The teacher will demonstrate. The teacher will then show an example of an article from the site that will set an example of highlight a part of midwest life during the time period. The teacher will ask the students to reflect and how this highlighted experience is different and or similar to experiences with this aspect of life in today’s times.

Students will then be asked to go into the Chronicling America sight and choose their own article or part of an article that highlights an aspect of midwest life at this time. They will be asked to provide a screenshot of the part of the newspaper they are using and in at least 3 sentences, describe what is going on and some similarities and differences between that idea, place, or object in that context and the context of the world in which they are living in today.

As an exit ticket, 3 students will be asked to share something that they learned from their research in terms of what may be different or similar between the midwest life of that time, around when The Outsiders text is centered, and the time and context of their lives today.

 As we wrap up our term, it is time to reflect on the learning that has taken place in Methods. I can honestly say I was apprehensive about taking on this journey: the outlier older student who was not teaching history rather, economics, for student-teaching. In addition, with very little interest in, or experience with, social media, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about posting to a blog. It has been interesting and engaging, however. I have truly enjoyed learning from Peter and from my peers. I have enjoyed the process of creating, enjoyed viewing my superstar-peers’ work, and have found myself very interested in the variety of tools and platforms we’ve been asked to play with. From learning WordPress to Google Forms, from exploring data visualization tools, to spending more time developing historical thinking skills, I am walking away with so much practical knowledge and a new set of skills with which to create and facilitate captivating activities for students. As I continue this journey and have my own classroom, these are skills that will inspire me to emphasize primary source materials in innovative ways. My students will have digital based access to content, encouraging comprehension through deeper analysis: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading. Guided by the foundation lesson posts that follow, I will continue to practice the work that has just begun.  

Context of the Lesson

This unit focuses on exploring, breaking down, and understanding the use of literary devices in The Outsiders so students can have knowledge of the different components that make up narratives. Students will 1st learn how to identify different literary devices within the chapters of The Outsiders. By the end of the unit students will be able to have a better understanding specifically of mode/tone, setting, symbolism, and biases through participating in discussions and activities.

The students will be able to have an understanding of the literary devices tone and mode and be able to identify where it shows up in The Outsiders by writing responses to reading questions.

1. Students will begin by completing a warm-up writing prompt that will begin to introduce the students to mode/tone
2. Students will complete a reading reflection by responding to specific questions that deal with identifying mood/tone in the chapter along with other main ideas. 
3. Students will complete filling out their literary device organizers with mood/tone covered in chapter 5. The teacher will walk around observing and the ideas will be discussed out loud as a class. 

Strategy Used

The strategy that I used was think, pair, and share. Throughout this unit plan and this specific lesson, I had plenty of times woven into the instruction where this strategy would show up. Prime examples of this were after any of the write-up times. This could have included either the warm-up questions or the reading responses. I had students think about the answers to the questions and or what they had written or organized their thoughts into. After the thinking, they were asked to share their ideas and such with partners at their tables. The fact that the partners were already chosen by expectation that it was their table mates checked off one of the parts in which Jennifer Gonzales said was key to getting the most out of this strategy in her post of it. Another one of the checklist elements that was being done, was that I wouldn’t just sit at my desk chair or be on my computer while this was happening, but rather I would walk around, listen to the conversations being taken place, and engage and respond to the conversations. The last element that was present from this checklist was that after students had gotten the opportunity to share in pairs, I mostly always opened it up to the class and had at least a couple people share out loud to the whole class their ideas.

What I learned from the experience

I learned that this strategy was great and effective for many of the same reasons upon which Jennifer highlights in her post. First and foremost, this was a helpful strategy because it served to break the content into smaller size pieces. The reading and deeper understanding of The Outsiders text and such is a lot of work and can be complex and overwhelming. This strategy allows students easier and more wholesome opportunity to interact with the text and their ideas and their thoughts. Another reason is that it allows the students to be active in the classroom and in their learning. The students are no longer just sitting there all day and just getting information. They are doing work to verbally process it and be able to take ownership of their learning. The last big benefit is the idea that it gives an opportunity for me to formally assess the students. Just by toning in to the conversations and engagement of the students, I am able to begin to grasp an idea of those students who are understanding the content at hand and those who might need more guidance and help.