What I Do

Dr. Brad Maguth of the University of Akron has asked pre-service teachers in his Social Studies Methodology class to prepare a lesson on Imperialism / Colonization / Industrialization in the US for my world history students, and in response to our semester-long collaboration. His students have been getting to know mine through informal correspondence, shared lessons, and Skype conversations.  The plan is for me to implement a lesson these teachers-in-training are developing, record aspects of it, and evaluate the lesson itself. The University class will also reflect on the lesson after watching the video.

Once Dr. Maguth's students were provided with the unit assessment I planned on giving my grade 10s, they knew where we were headed, which helped them design a lesson integrating their knowledge of the students in my classes, the curriculum we are following, and where the class was headed. There was still a gap though, so Dr. Maguth asked me about my teaching "style" and approach.

And at the end of a long day of teaching, I took a few minutes in an email to describe what I do.  Sure, there are holes, and it could benefit from further editing, but it got me thinking about how rarely we articulate our unique teaching styles, and wondering how transparent and honest are we to ourselves, and others, about what we do inside our classrooms day in and day out? 

Thus, in a bold moment, I decided to post the e-mail I sent to Dr. Maguth:

Dear Brad,

All of the daily agendas and related docs for my 10th grade world history course can be found on our class website. Thankfully, I am not required to write up every lesson plan, though I do create an agenda for every class as part of my own professional practice, and to foster student independence during absences, etc. Your students will hopefully be able to read through the lines of the skeleton versions. Documents/resources used in class are almost always attached. 

In general, I expect participation from every student in every class, and will both randomly and strategically call on students for their input and sometimes use personalized popsicle sticks to do so. In class, students are usually arranged in 3-4 groups of 3-4; seating arrangements change regularly - at least every 2-3 classes. Sometimes we use individual whiteboards so student thinking is visible. I explicitly combine skills and content in every lesson, whether skills are more traditional to SS, such as graph reading, making timelines, and examining primary sources, or general skills such as reading strategies (multi-color highlighting, talking-to-the-text), summarizing, note-taking (Cornell notes or digital annotation), discussion (intellectual and social skills), etc.  I place a premium on relevance (more macro-history than specific dates and events) and students' critical thinking, questioning, and communication - I'm so not a rote memorization gal, and haven't used multiple choice in about 10 years. We do lots of big picture analysis and evaluation - in-depth and on the fly.

For example, in our class yesterday, students created analogies to better understand demographic terms that we'll use in the unit assessment after break. I never want them to just regurgitate a definition. It took them a while, but working in small groups on whiteboards, they came up with analogies as in the examples below, which then resulted in some pretty rich discussions about the terms themselves and relationships being considered:

• birth rate : abortion : :  income : taxes
• life expectancy : human : : expiration date : milk
• urbanization : factories : : photosynthesis : plants

That did not leave us much time for the current event piece of the day's agenda, so in only about 10 minutes time I had the small groups read / scan a different news article and state how the "current" event (one is a year old) connects to what we have been learning about - Industrialization and Imperialism. They did a great job explaining connections ranging from exploitation of natural resources, labor issues, pollution and environmental effects of development, agrarian vs industrial economies, and human rights issues, among others. We ended with everyone stating out loud the date of their article to explicitly note that what we are studying in class is not only applicable to "back then" much of what we are talking about is highly relevant today. It was one of those "oh wow" moments for many. 

Hope this helps a bit. And, I'm actually very pleased that your students are pre-assessing mine (however casually) with the aim of developing a stronger lesson - it's good practice!  (BTW, I don't think it has come up at all, but just in case it does, we do not use a textbook for this class - and I'm all the happier for it.)

- Torie