Month: April 2019

I was really worried coming in to this class that it would be along the lines of the way I learned Social Studies growing up. I hated social studies until I made it to high school and had a teacher that refused to teach to the SOLs in the way that we had been taught before. She brought history to life for our class and helped us make personal connections to it that deepened our understanding of the content. That was the only year I came one question away from getting a perfect score on any SOL test. (You probably know Mrs. Canipe, Lynne, so this shouldn’t surprise you.) I was really glad to come into this class and discover that we would be learning to keep kids engaged in a way similar to the way that Mrs. Canipe taught. I don’t remember any specific things we did in her class as far as strategies go, but I would not be surprised to find that we did a few of the activities that we learned about this semester in her class 13 years ago. To me, Mrs. Canipe is my Social Studies teacher role model/goals and coming out of this class with the strategies and activities we learned about this semester, I feel like I am on the right track to becoming a teacher who teaches social studies like Mrs. Canipe.

One lingering question I have from class last night is how to teach hard history to primary students. Most of the suggestions we had centered around the students diving into the information themselves from credible sources, but how do you give kindergarteners and first graders who are just learning to read valuable information that they can still understand? By picking things for them to read myself does that take away from those sources because the students did not have the skills yet to pick for themselves? Bringing in an expert to discuss the topic is a way around that, but as someone who has no expertise or experience in some of these areas, how do I know the expert I bring in is giving my students the most recent and truthful information? New information is being brought to light all the time and many people claim to be experts but have not kept up with the newest information.

After reflecting through class last night I think the best way to handle hard questions like this is to have an open line of communication between the teacher, the parents, and the students. That way their can be discussions on all sides to generate ideas for how to answer hard questions. Even if the teacher doesn’t agree with the parents ideas on how to answer something, the parents were still made aware and given a voice in their child’s classroom, making them less likely to be angry over something you tell the students. Utlizing your teaching team and running everything through your administration is another great way to bounce ideas back and forth to put the most effort into not saying something offensive without meaning to.

I absolutely loved the Question Formulation Technique. How to get students to develop good research questions is a question I’ve sort of had in the back of my mind all semester without every fully realizing it until seeing this activity. This is a great way to teach students how to develop good research questions, in any content area, without telling them that’s what they’re doing.

For my other class, 21st Century Teaching and Learning, our final project is a PBL unit. I am doing a third grade science unit titled “Save the Bees!” I have rearranged my calendar to include the QFT on day 2 before diving into the research on day 3 and after a guest speaker on day 1. I think this will be a great way for the students to come up with the driving questions for our PBL and help get them even more engaged and motivated to do the research and the work that this project will entail. They can draw on their experience with the guest speaker from the day before and really begin to dive deep into what they want to learn about bees.

I really enjoyed the jigsaw piece of the activity we did in class last night. I immediately started thinking about how to work that into the biography lesson plan on Maggie Walker that I’ve started. Which then made me realize that it’s not easy to adapt this activity, and most of the others we’ve done in class, to the lower elementary grades. All of the examples we’ve been given have been geared toward a fourth or fifth grade classroom. Working on the biography lesson plan has really made me realize that I have no idea how to scale materials back for a younger audience. I have had the basic idea for my Maggie Walker lesson plan in place for over a week, but I’ve been stuck because there is no content written for primary students yet. I need to pull and scale back the information myself and I have no idea how much or how little is appropriate to include in a lesson on her for first graders. The SOL just says students must know her contributions, but it doesn’t define what those contributions are. I really enjoy the activities we’ve done in class to date, but I would appreciate one or two geared toward first or second grade.