Elem Social Studies 16 (Stephanie)

The presentations on virtual field trips gave me such a better perspective on the possibilities within the virtual experience. I really enjoyed how each individual approached the assignment in their own way and that we had the opportunity to see content from varying grades and subject areas. For my assignment specifically, I do wish that I had more time for my peers to actually walk around the room to access the QR codes that I created since that’s where the thick of my material actually was. The post-it activity gave me a chance to reflect on my own learning which was a really good feeling to close another chapter in this program. Each course helped to shape me and I feel proud of myself and my work until this point. I thought that the gallery walk was a great way to gauge others perspectives and to target active listening in a different way. It was cool to make connections to others, even if anonymously, and to reveal where other students might be at the end of everything. I think what resonated with me the most, was the big idea about following the truth and trusting your instincts. This was my very last class in the TLP program before student teaching. When I first started in 2017, I couldn’t have possibly fathomed that I would feel so confident in my abilities to become a successful teacher. Absorbing endless content in both sped and gen ed, strategies, endless lesson plans, and learning how to effectively collaborate, has brought me to where I am now. And through all of that, nobody ever said to me before, “Just trust yourself”. Thank you, for 3 little words that meant so much to connect our program to our practice. Thanks for a great semester!

• I am adding this post late due to inconsistencies with the website. I did send this post via email on its original due date.

I was really excited about last night’s topic because I had identified this discussion from the beginning of the semester as a matter of importance to me: Talking about the difficult topics with students. I really appreciated the worksheet that encouraged us to think outside of the content and forced us to reflect and evaluate our own strengths and weaknesses as an educator. Our topic was Thanksgiving, and until this assignment, I didn’t realize how much emotion and thoughts/opinions I would actually bring to the table and how that might affect the way I’d want to teach the content. I do wish that we would have had more of an opportunity for our groups to explore a variety of ‘heavy subject’ ideas rather than just one. I feel more prepared after our lesson to teach these big pieces but I also walked away feeling more nervous than when we started. I think I feel this way because even though I have been given the tools, I realize just how many things must be considered, and from so many angles. I do feel like we’re not going to get it right the first time, and maybe not even the second, but working through the parts that were good, and identifying the places where we went wrong, will be the best indicator of our success. What resonated with me the most, is the importance of relying on your team to guide one another through the hard parts. Use your resources!

I really enjoyed how you guys decided to connect the lesson content to our presentation. I really like the idea of using that in an elementary setting to have peer-to-peer instruction, giving students the opportunity to be more independent and self-directed learners. I think what resonated with me the most from last night’s class, is using more metacognitive strategies to think about the way we are asking questions. The activity helped me to understand not only the importance of wondering’s and asking questions for our young learners, but it helped me to further appreciate the true value in the meaning of our questions. Meaning, I understand that in order to receive the answers I expect, I need to pose questions in a way that supports those answers. Such a very simple concept but definitely a big aha- moment for me. Overall, I really appreciate the use of so many primary sources in our exercises this semester. It really demonstrates the impact they have on making important connections to content, self, and others. Finally, Mentimeter is such a great way to incorporate simple formative assessment into lesson planning. I am wondering if this can be linked to SeeSaw in anyway, or more just for other systems like SmartBoard.

Due to my absence from class on 4/2, I’ve choose to reflect on our assigned readings. Chapter 8 discusses the power of pairing the arts with social studies content. The chapter specifically uses literature, drama, and music to demonstrate how to deeper connect students to the content. I like how they used dramatizations in social studies and was intrigued by how many pieces of the deep learning framework were able to be demonstrated through this activity (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity). Through this exercise, teachers are able to engage students with varying intelligences and learning styles. I really liked the idea of having students role play. I think that this is a good strategy to make the content more than just the factual historical pieces, but also to engage students with feelings of empathy and deeper understanding by acting out particular emotions and/or responses from people during that time period. Very similar, I also think this could be accomplished through a readers theater lesson for younger grades. What resonated with me the most though, is connecting students to social studies using music. Teachers can play the music from a particular time period that they are teaching to transport students to a different place and time. Music is a very powerful force in my life and allows me to make personal connections to things all the time. I believe that it would be similar in these examples. I liked the idea of having students analyze lyrics. You could do many activities including “I wonder, I notice, I predict”, stickynote predcitions, or a writing prompt. Finally, the power of good literature. This entire program has taught me the importance of having great books in our classroom. The chapter definitely recommends having a large variety of books on one single social studies topic available to students during the unit. It will add to lessons, be useful for further research, and can be used to benefit early finishers. I will definitely reevaluate how I would like to use the arts in my classroom moving forward!

I thought tonight’s class was very helpful, insightful, and beneficial to elementary social studies instruction. Reviewing the list of stereotypical/bias books that are used in the classroom setting was incredibly eye-opening for me. While I know that these gender, cultural, and racial stereotypes exist in our past and current literature, the topography of those issues weren’t as obvious to me as they were tonight. Demonstrating tokenism in literature was helpful in recognizing those pieces, even if subtle. For me, that brings up the larger issue  about teaching to the difficult subject areas in elementary in a safe and appropriate way. There are so many pieces to consider to ensure that you are able to teach about subjects such as slavery and the Native American’s without bias or stereotypes included in your content. I wonder, are the books that we looked at on the website placed on a ban list for classroom literature, or was this just a representation of books that teachers are using in their own lessons? Also, was Happy Birthday, Mr. President removed from just Scholastic or pulled from shelves altogether? I would love a curated list of books without these bias/stereotypes to keep in my toolbox for the future. If I am being honest, this practice left me feeling a sort of particular ignorance about my ability to immediately recognize the stereotypes or biases in literature without this guided activity. I am happy to have been given this experience to mold my decision-making moving forward.

I appreciated the lesson review, especially since we were able to look at assessment/instruction at the first-grade level. For me, this activity was beneficial in many ways and forced me to think outside of the box. I do think it was difficult to look at the lesson/assessment first and then work backwards to do the actual design but I was able to work through some of that using UBD strategies.

I enjoyed the sticky note predictions paired with the gallery walk. I think the ‘I notice’ and ‘I wonder’ presents a good opportunity for students to have an open and creative discussion in small-groups, pairs, or whole-group. The map activity was a nice way to introduce map instruction. Specifically,  I thought that the opportunity to compare the two maps was a strong closure to the activity. It allowed us to compare and contrast the maps, but also to explore our inferences and ‘I wonder/notice’ observations. What resonated with me the most from our class was the closure activity. I liked that the 12 questions provided student choice and a variety of angles to communicate our thoughts. Having a variety of choices will hopefully deter students from repeating after their peers, demonstrating a lack of creativity and critical thinking in their own responses.

In reflection of our semester thus far, I feel as though we’ve spent so much time on teaching social studies to upper elementary. I don’t feel like I’ve had an opportunity to create a toolbox for the lower elementary grades regarding this content. While I understand that the more in-depth strategies used in social studies are targeted in the higher grades, I’d like to learn about other K-2 strategies that relate to the skills progression chart that was provided. While I think that the activities in the classroom are beneficial for teaching students how to ask questions, make observations, and infer about primary sources, I am starting to feel as though we are engaging in very similar activities each week. I did enjoy the Jamestown activity but I just feel like it was an extension of the same thing we’ve been doing all semester. I would like to have an opportunity to learn more about specific content areas in social studies with a variety of creative assignments for instruction.  I think overall, I just want to be challenged more instructionally in the classroom.

The presentation on the document-based questioning was so interesting! I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about the DBQ from such experienced teachers. Outside of special education, my biggest passion has always been to teach kindergarten. Just hearing their thought processes about being a pilgrim or a native-american, really demonstrated their ability to make decisions using critical thinking. There were 10-12 standards that were addressed in the DBQ and across curricular areas that made the entire assessment really strong. I thought that it was a very well-thought-out lesson overall. I liked that they are already thinking about ways to improve the assessment for the next year, including the rubric. I wonder what the process is like to introduce the DBQ to administration or if there is approval needed before implementation. I also think it would be cool to have these same students replicate this DBQ in the fourth-grade when Virginia history is introduced to see how their thought process has grown with this content.

Looking toward the assessment project, I think that we have had a lot of opportunities in class to observe bad examples of assessment.  I wish that we had reviewed examples of what a great assessment looks like, outside of the expectations of the rubric. I did like working through bad examples of the rubric itself. It was a good way for me apply my knowledge of assessment.

Yesterday’s field trip to the VMFA was a great way to experience and observe what a field trip might look like. My field trips in special education are strikingly different so I really enjoyed the insight. I really liked how in the front room, the VMFA provided different cards for students to use to think about art differently. Each card provided a prompt for students to answer and/or think about when they were observing the art. I thought that this was a good strategy for students to utilize creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration on the field trip. To target observational skills, I really liked the way that with each piece of art we observed, the guide moved us through phases of 1. What do you see? 2. What do you notice? and 3. What do you wonder? I think that provided a good opportunity for students to take notes and then possibly complete a journal entry or short writing prompt about their own reflections from the trip. My favorite room in the VMFA was the interactive music and art space. Engaging students in both art and music is very important to me in my classroom, as I would think it would be in my general education classroom. I loved that there were opportunities for students to create their own music, listen to music and art in other languages, and engage with braille activities. I did think that the distance learning was a great way for students to engage without actually traveling to the location; however, after the presentation, I was disappointed to learn that this option isn’t even available to elementary classrooms per the current grant.

This semester, in both instructional design and social studies, forms of assessments have been an important piece of each course. When you start to unpack different kinds of assessment strategies it makes me feel both overwhelmed and supported at the same time. Overwhelmed with the idea that because there are so many pieces, there are many elements to use and confuse (as noted in all of the bad assessment samples). The variety also makes me feel supported to know that as the classroom teacher, I am still provided with the choice to determine how I’m going to evaluate what my students have learned. For me, rubrics are a significant contributing piece to my success as a student at UR. It helps me to outline and define clear expectations as well as the ability to compare and contrast what is important/relevant and what is not. That being said, using these rubrics for performance-based assessments seems to be dauntingly inconsistent across educators. Like Deborah brought up in class, it also seems at times unrealistic that teachers will have such time to set aside to making “grading” consistent and equitable across the board. I am still wondering, if we aren’t giving percentage grades on all performance-based assessment, is the grade more for us as teachers to understand where our students are, rather than students trying to reach some numerical achievement? I really appreciated the review of bad examples of assessment. I have experienced assessment in both good and bad ways and this class has really demonstrated a clear path to providing good questions that require students to incorporate the six competencies in Deep Learning and more. What really resonates with me is that it’s not about trying to trick students, or to make questions as difficult as possible, but to provide and create questions that encourage critical thinking and information recall in a way that they can apply knowledge and not just regurgitate it.

I really like the way that tonight’s class gave me the opportunity to learn about applying social studies instruction in the classroom as well as giving me a chance to learn new historical information. I really enjoyed the progression of the Harriet Tubman activities and the resources that it provided. I think that it demonstrated a clear lesson on biographies that I will be able to refer to as a model for our lesson plan 1. The “tea party” was an active and engaging way for students to compile new information and to communicate and interact with other peers. I think another good name for this activity could be “Sentence Storyteller’s” 🙂 Learning about sorts in other courses, I have always felt that sorts were particularly boring. In this case, I thought that the sort demonstrated an important and significant full-circle activity for attention/hook, accessing prior knowledge, and for use of closure. Using this in my classroom, I would like students to use a visual notebook during the hook (post sort), to ask students to generate a few sentences about what they think the lesson will be about and what they hope to learn. After the closure sort, I would ask that students go back to their notebooks to write down 2 things that they learned and 1 thing that surprised them. I really enjoyed viewing the lesson video from start to finish. We have been on many classroom observations in this course but it is not always true that you will observe something of significance or strategies that you can connect to your own classroom. To watch a lesson unfold in a well-generated and thoughtful way, helped me to connect our class activities and discussion. For our own exit strategy, I liked that we were given a sort. I think that it reinforced our lessons strategies but incorporated a variety of content areas across instruction, content, standards, and front-loading. Thank you so much for this clear and transparent definition. It is often a term used in our coursework that I hadn’t been able to quite grasp until this evening.