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Principle #7: The teacher plans instruction based upon
knowledge of subject matter, students, the community, and curriculum
goals.
When reflecting on all of the social studies classes I have taken and the field experiences I’ve completed, I have come to clearly see my strengths and weaknesses in fulfilling Intasc #7. One of my strengths in planning lessons is that I am able to creatively make the subject matter apply to the student’s lives, while still meeting curriculum goals. In my lesson plan on the structure and principles of the United States Constitution (Artifact 8) I was able to use my knowledge of the Constitution and apply it at a level that my students would understand, make it applicable to my student’s lives, and meet the curriculum standards. I was able to accomplish this by having the students journal about a real life situation that is associated with the Constitution, having the students compare the U.S. Constitution to another country’s, and having the students find important rights given in the Constitution through a scavenger hunt. By using a variety of activities and making the activities applicable to my students, I was able to create a lesson plan that effectively helped students learn in a fun and exciting manner while still meeting curriculum goals. While my abilities to apply student’s lives to the subject matter and to create lesson plans that make that possible, while meeting curriculum goals, is very well done and a definite strength, I have a weakness in not encouraging students to apply what they learn to their community. I have participated in two field experiences, in which I was able to teach for at least one week in each. In both of these field experiences, I neglected to create a lesson or to apply a lesson to the student’s community. I feel that it is very important, especially when teaching history, for students to have an awareness of how their community is affected by history and what a large role that history and their community’s influence plays in their lives. For example, when teaching a full week on the United State’s role in WWII, I could have had the students do a report on a person from the community who fought in WWII, a business that was affected by the events of WWII, or an event that took place in the community as a result of WWII. This would have been a great way for students to see how that event in history affected their community. Even though this is an area I have failed to utilize, I feel that I can learn from this observation of myself, and use what I now know to improve future lessons. As I grow and learn everyday from my experiences as a learner of secondary education and social studies, I can’t help but see many of the goals that I have set for myself, being met. When doing a field experience with Mrs. Gorin’s 11th grade U.S. History class at Muncie Central High School, I set for myself the goal to get a boy, who never participated in class, to participate before I left for the semester. Everyday he would come into class and purposely leave his pencils and pens in his locker so he didn’t have to do work and whenever possible would lay his head down for a nap. He was failing the class and refused to be a part of any activity. One day I decided to have the class play a review game in which the class was divided into two teams, each with a speaker who was responsible for raising their hand to give the teams answer to me. I purposely put this boy in charge of giving me his team’s answer. As the game progressed the boy became more and more involved with his job. He communicated with his teammates and even told some of his teammates what he thought the answer was. On that day I came home more excited about getting the boy to participate and actually look like he was enjoying learning, then about achieving my goal. Although, I have met many goals like the one above, there are still many more that have been left unmet. Most of these goals are unmet because I haven’t come to the point in my career in which I have had the opportunity to meet them. One such goal is to continually hunger to gain knowledge in every area of social studies that I teach. I feel that reading up on new information, taking extra courses, and staying in touch with the times is important in teaching, so that my student’s will be guaranteed an up-to-date learning experience that relates to their world, lives, and community. Looking back on my experiences in the social studies education program, I have come to realize that my strengths, willingness to fix my weaknesses, and goals are all reflections of what I have learned from my experiences. All of these experiences and goals start with knowing my subject and through that being able to challenge my students based on their lives, community, and the curriculum goals set by myself, the school, and the state. By reflecting on my strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and goals, I was able to see more clearly, how I can use my experiences to impact my teaching in a positive way in the future. |