Strategy & Activity in Action

Post for 11/23

Today was the day before Thanksgiving break and I taught my first lesson. To provide you with the long and short of it, Mr. D recommended that I use a documentary or other type of media as an organizing conceit for the day. Considering a lot of students would be out of school for the day and that the ones who were in would likely be restless in anticipation of the long weekend, I agreed with his point. He also recommended I design an organizer for students to fill out as they watched the video and so I could check for understanding throughout the video.

Being that Mr. D's US II classes were about to begin a unit on the Great Depression and New Deal, I thought it might be useful to front load and help some of the students get a grasp of some concepts before they started a new unit rather than backtracking over content they had already reviewed. To make a long story short, I began planning from the standards and decided to focus on the initial economic aspects of the Great Depression and to reinforce that the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was not the cause of the Depression but a symptom of larger economic problems looming on the horizon and an event that aggravated a stagnating economy. By deciding that this was the objective, I started to look for the right documentary or video clips on the web. I got lucky in finding one that streamed from PBS' website for its series The American Experience and chose the documentary on the 1929 Crash. The entire documentary from start to finish was an hour and class was 40 minutes minutes. In addition to checking to a brief introduction and checking for understanding, I pared the video down to about 30 minutes of viewing time and chose which sections I would show carefully. In addition, I designed a concept map that at the edges had questions prompting students to identify certain causes of the Crash and at the center, briefly listing some of the effects. With Mr. D's help, I went through about 4 revisions of this concept map before it was ready for prime time.

When the activity itself came, I gave a brief content introduction that reinforced their previous unit on the 1920's and their knowledge of how the stock market works. In addition, I modeled how students would fill out the concept map and made sure they understood before I played the video. After that, the class was largely a success. Students were engaged with the video, asked relevant questions and for the most part filled out their concept maps very well. My main issue with organization was my own pacing and in making modifications for the students that needed them. Mr. D explained that I need to watch the clock and really get a feel for how to pace a class like this, especially one that uses media that is important for completing the learning activity. In addition, he gave me a lot of feedback about the organizer itself. Essentially, in my early drafts the concept map was shaping the way the lesson would go and not the other way around. It was a lesson that was hard learned for me because I literally spent days organizing and planning the concept map only to throw all my initial work at the end for a much simpler model. Strategy needed to dictate the activity, not the other way around. In addition, I got a lesson about conserving paper, as well and was instructed to use the other side of work sheets for something constructive. Say, another organizer (PEDLIGS with key economic and historical terms, for example) that could have been filled out for students at the 'blackbelt' level (Mr. D modifies in terms of 'beginner' to 'blackbelt,' giving students work on this spectrum helps to act as a modification for struggling students and an anchor for those who complete work quickly). Today was a learning experience that was largely successful but a reminder that I have a lot of room for improvement.