Category: Student Posts

Going into this assignment I was fairly wary. Though I felt reasonably comfortable with historical inquiry the crafting of a broad question to guide the lesson was an intimidating task. Overall, I am pleased with the end result. I feel have taken some of the first steps towards building a coherent and engaging lesson. I remain mindful that I am still a novice, but enjoyed how the lesson rolled out in practice. I enjoyed using a variety of sources, and felt as if our class really engaged with them. Having experienced the occasional struggle with SHEG style lessons in classrooms accustomed to lecture, I believe the true challenge shall be in hooking the students. For as was mentioned following my lesson, high school age students may not be as willing to initially share and question without directed prompting.

In retrospect, rather than printing out an annotation guide I should have created and distributed a SOAPSTone worksheet. I was very lucky to have aid in using the technology, and in the future I shall strive to be more fluent in its use. I really loved the graphic organizer used during the Vietnam unit, and wish I had thought to create one for my class. I know from my time in my student teacher placement, and from this lesson, that when I write with a document camera I need to slow down, for I have a tendency to get nervous and scrawl which helps no one when teaching.

Gathering the sources and getting to work on a Modern World History lesson was a great deal of fun. For though I love the classical world, I find sourcing for the modern era not only a tad more accessible but also a joy to read. Since I would like to explore teaching SOAPStone more I am going to try to focus my next lesson upon this. I am hoping to use sources from the early modern era and hope that I can use the feedback I have received to make it a more successful lesson.

I really enjoyed teaching my Gold Rush lesson to the class. I was confident and felt it went smoothly. I used technology in my lesson, with myself using a PowerPoint and the students using links from our blog, and I was happy there were no hick-ups or errors. Everyone was able to access what they needed. Students seemed interested in the topic and engaged in what they were learning about. I enjoyed hearing the conversation amongst students discussing what they just read. I believe I accomplished my goal, being that students would learn how the Gold Rush affected the lives of other population groups. I feel like it was not too complicated and students understood the content well.

If I could do it again, I would assign students a single link to read, then put them into groups where they can educate and share with their peers what they learned. While I did not feel that each individual link was too long, I can see how reading all three in one sitting can accumulate to a lot, and real middle-schoolers would probably zone-out, take a very long time to read it all, etc.
Also, if I was doing this with an actual class of middle-schoolers, I would have had them take notes, or perhaps even provide them with some sort of graphic organizer, to help guide their reading.

Inspired by our previous class sessions, I enjoyed creating this lesson. I am proud to see an improvement in the way I construct lessons; if you asked me four weeks ago to do this assignment, it would have been quite a disappointment. Overall, I am pleased with how my lesson went and the positive and constructive feedback I received.

Class: High School Modern World History

Lesson: Students will begin to examine European motivations in the ‘Scramble for Africa’, this would be set as an introductory glimpse of colonialism.

Question: What were the attitudes of Europeans towards the acquisition of Africa?

Process: The teacher shall present a very short power point. The students will respond briefly to one of the political cartoons with minimal context. Following this students will read and annotate primary source documents materials and analyze the documents with an elbow partner. Students will answer the following questions with their elbow partners. Students will then discuss their answers to the following questions as a class.

Product: Students will annotate the primary source documents, these can be used later when asked to write an essay as a ‘unit capstone’.

Question 1: What were overall European attitudes to the Scramble for Africa?

Question 2: Look closer as the documents arguments, do they differ? If, so how? Do different countries approach African colonization in different ways?

Question 3: Do these documents support the political cartoon? How so? If not, how do these documents differ from the image presented in the cartoon?

Materials:

Source Handout:
ScrambleSources