Midterm Week!

I cannot believe we are already half way through the semester and finishing up midterms. This past weekend, I completed the midterm for our social studies methods class. It took me a long time to complete, especially since I had to dig through the textbook, but it was all very effective and useful information. I was very glad we got to have as many attempts we we wanted too in order to get all the information correct and get a good grade. Our teacher truly wants us to know the information, and was not just giving this midterm to trick us or stress us out, which is very appreciative. 
Before the midterm, we also had to complete part 1 of edTPA. This went a lot smoother than last semester and was easier for me now that I have experience doing it, whereas last year I had none! The only thing that remained difficult was not having enough of the information about the school or the students that we needed to complete it, so it got frustrating at times. I am really glad we did get a chance to practice with it and go through the process of edTPA to start preparing us for student teaching. It is a very important task for us that we all need to know and be familiar with, considering we will be doing all of the parts for student teaching and they have to be accurate.

Engaging Students in Examining History

Today in class, Dr. Smirnova went over a powerpoint with us about learning to teach history. The powerpoint started with 3 paintings that represent different types of freedom. We were asked to identify the freedoms these paintings meant. These paintings were created by Norman Rockwell who became famous during the second world war and $132 million was raised from these paintings for the war effort. This was really interesting to learn about and I had never even heard of Norman Rockwell. You really do learn something everyday! We then learned that in order to teach a social studies lesson, there are powerful elements that are essential. These include the lesson being meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. We went over the importantce of each of these elements and talked about what they meant. We also talked about the structure of knowledge used to teach these lessons. After that, we went on to learning about what history means to us and what we think is the definition. I always remembered history as events that happened in the past and artifacts dug up from the past. This was right, but there was a lot more too it. "History is a chronolgical study that interprets and gives meaning to events and applies systematic methods to discover the truth in the storyline of history". We also discussed the importance of the difference between teaching your students, and making sure they learned and retained the information you taught to them. The last thing we learned about was what it meant to be a historian, which led us to being detectives and find out who the person is based on artifacts given to us in the artifact bags.

Our group was handed an artifact bag containing a birth certificate, a Russian jewelry box, an American flag pin, and a picture of an elder lady. The birth certificate was written in Russian so it was hard to figure out what it said. Our group actually thought it was the elder lady's passport, and she was coming to the United States which is why there was an American flag pin in our bag. We later found out that it was actually Dr. Smirnovas birth certificate and the picture was her grandmother who was really special to her. The American flag pin was inside the Russian jewelry box so Dr. Smirnova would always have a piece of Russia with her and to tell us that she keeps both cultures. The American flag pin was gifted to her when she first started teaching at the mount, which is really special to her. This was a challenging, but meaningful artifact and our group had a lot of fun figuring out what was in our bag. Next class, we will be creating our own artifact bags based on our topic we taught for fieldwork, and then teaching other fieldwork groups a mini lesson on our findings. I am excited to see and figure out what everyone will put in their artifact bags!

Second Day of Teaching

Our next lesson was our inquiry and direct lesson. Our group decided to do things a little differently and use a different type of inquiry that we have never used before. First, we started with a review of key points from the direct instruction lesson and pre-assessed the students with a word cloud. Then we moved on to our reenactment of the battle of hastings. This was our inquiry method. There was no problem for this method, but you still had to of course follow the steps of inquiry which was tricky. This method of inquiry also involved questioning throughout the lesson, which we did by asking questions and predictions about what might happen next during the reenactment. For the reenactment of the battle, we split the class up into two sides: the normans and the anglo-saxons. Harman was the king for the anglo-saxons, and lead her side, and I was the King William for the normans, and lead my side. The students had fun reenacting the battle and pretending they were a part of it, and it gave them great visual insights on the tactics used by both sides and the weapons. This was a very engaging lesson for the students, and they got a chance to reflect on their expoernece conducting an interview with the opposing side to implement cooperative learning. We should have made the groups bigger as cooperative learning should be in group of more than 3, but we got mixed up a little. It still went smoothly and the students enjoyed finding out different perspectives of both sides and coming up with conclusions about what they would change, or what they would do the same.