Post for 11/30 & 12/1
For the past 2 days, I have been presenting my own designed lessons and testing them out in the real setting of Mr. D's classroom yet again. Since Mr. D's class was still working on the Great Depression, I decided to focus on two aspects that the class's textbook mentions but without a whole lot of detail. In short, Day 1 was a lesson on the Bonus Army and Day 2 focused on the Dust Bowl. Both lessons ended up in the same format as a pedagogical exercise for me and both seemed to be relatively successful lessons.
For Day 1, I began my design and planning from an objective that aligned with a standard about analysis of the actions and policies of the US Government and how it contributed to the Great Depression. I determined that the lesson should be an evaluation of Hoover's policies toward the Bonus Marchers and how that effected his chances at re-election. This objective would later tie into my DoL but would also direct the design of the learning activity itself. In the strategy process, things were already going more smoothly. After compiling 5 or 6 primary sources, I also wrote a brief introduction to the Bonus Marchers as a Do-Now read and annotate activity. While time consuming, this Do Now was extremely helpful as I would realize on Day 2. The learning activity for the class after the Do Now and a brief "mini-lecture" was for groups to be assigned a document and organize their own ESP (Economic, Social & Political) chart and identifying what aspects of their documents were examples of these. After a class discussion and check for understanding of the documents, students were assigned a DoL that was a brief Open Ended question about how they thought Hoover's treatment of the Bonus Marchers would effect his bid for re-election.
While students seemed to like the class itself, I found later that most of the responses were directly connected to the documents I assigned that particular group and students did not use evidence outside of what they had already been assigned. In addition, pacing was way off yet again because I took time out of the introduction to answer student questions that were pretty relevant and observant. So for Day 2 I had two areas to improve; pacing and macro understanding of a topic beyond an assigned document. Mr. D recommended that I try the same format but to work out the kinks I ran into the first time through.
In order to work on pacing on Day 2 I changed the Do Now from a long reading activity to a brief image reaction writing activity for the Dust Bowl lesson. I still had groups assigned to single documents so I unfortunately did not fix that problem since I was worried I would not have enough time for a gallery walk. Again, the kids reacted well to the documents, asked good questions and generally understood what was going on. However, without a longer introduction or background there were a lot more questions about the content itself outside of the documents. The solution to the pacing problem for Day 2 again became the issue with the pacing problem again since there were so many questions. We were able to spend more time in question and answer about particular documents but this is only useful if a student is listening (I would suspect maybe 60% were). That said, I feel I need to develop a solution or learning activity that gets students to consider all documents or materials.
Again, I feel that the class went alright but I have a lot of room for improvement in some areas. I feel comfortable in front of students and feel like I'm getting closer to a real success every time. It's really a matter of practice in addition to my co-op giving me just enough rope to hang myself with. Frankly, I wouldn't want to have it any other way. Mr. D directs me to the point where I know I'm in the right ballpark but not quite there. As of right now he's letting me make my mistakes but not big enough ones that will set students back. I have a lot of work to do but I'm more confident every time I get out there.
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