So, we just taught our last lesson and I have a bittersweet feeling about it. I think overall our lesson went fairly well, but I would definitely change somethings given the chance. This lesson was our cooperative lesson. None of us have ever taught a cooperative lesson before and it took some Our group chose to have each group of students research a different historical figure from our lesson (Sacagawea, Lewis, Clark, Jefferson, and Adams). Then as a group, the students had to work together to create a campaign poster that included facts about their candidate, a slogan, and negative comment to use against their rival. To ensure that the group ran smoothly, each student was assigned a role. The students could be a note taker, a facilitator, a presenter, or a helper. We assigned the roles before we got there to save some time. To ensure that all student would be individually accountable for contributing to the group, we had all of the students sign a contract. The student did have some resistance to their roles and were not as egar to particpate as I would have liked them too. However, every group got to work and all of the members contributed something, even if it was minimal in comparision. My group struggle with time management. The students struggled to come to an agreement on just about every aspect of the project. When it came to finding our three facts, the students began to argue about what was an important fact, I tried to lead the student in the direction of what would be the most important and they eventually did come to a consensus. When it came to writing a slogan, the students were worried about being "cringy." Our example slogan we chose for Alexandar Hamilton, which we found from a YouTube video was "if there is a problem he can Alexander Handle it." The students were not fans of this slogan, but they eventually decided to go with a song like slogan as well. Their slogan ended up being "If you have a problem in your country, who you gonna call? William Clark," barrowing from the Ghost Busters slogan. With that final squared away, the students were left with about five minutes to come up with a jingle and a diss for our rival, Merriweather Lewis. The student had several songs that they began writing lyrics to, but they could not agree on what song would be the best. As our time dwindled away, I had my collegues skip our group so they could add the finishing touches to thier poster. In the end thier jingle was half written and the students had no time to decorate their poster. Looking back, I believe that the group was poorly planned. The students themselves did not get along, and with a lack of a decisive leader, the group was not entierly sucessful in completing the task. If I were to teach this lesson again with the same group of students, I would use their feedback forms to discuss how they could improve thier preformance and really emphasize the importance of respecting others ideas. With more of an emphaise on how working as a team can benefit everyone in the group, I would have the students choose thier own roles to help everyone play to thier strengths. I would also make the jingle be the independent practice so that the students would have more time to think about what they wanted to say and not have to be emabress about what the other students might say.
Today we had our mock interviews in class. I volunteered to be an administrator during the interviews. My specific role was to interview people from the inquiry angle. I had come up with four questions centered around the process of inquiry and how my colleagues turned potential employees would implement it in their future classrooms. The four questions I asked were, " Which of the five E’s would you consider the most important to the Inquiry model?", " What technologies would you incorporate into an inquiry lesson based on Ancient Greece to help students engage with your content in the elements of history, geography, philosophy, etc ?", "Why do you think this technology will bring the process of inquiry to life?", and "How does providing students with divergent/open-ended questions (that require multiple answers) encourage higher order thinking and how would you incorporate them into your classroom?" These were the three main questions that I...
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