Social Studies

Reflection Questions:

• What is a significant concern you have about student learning/engagement as it pertains to your subject? To what Hallmark (1. Engaging Texts; 2. Rich Discussion; 3. Frequent Writing; 4. Academic Vocabulary and Language) is the concern related?
• What protocol or strategy did you try to address your concern? How did it go?
• How can the protocol [name it] improve learning for all students?

Academic Vocab and Language

Annotation with emphasis on vocabulary definitions. It is a work in progress helping to encourage students to look up words on their own.

Annotation can improve learning for all student by allowing for individualized learning and understanding across content areas.

We are continuing our work on academic vocab and definitions along with adding in rich discussions.

Students took time this month to look at Constructed Response Questions. They used the strategy of annotation to help them analyze and answer questions pertaining to the documents. Students worked in groups on this activity that also helped lead to discussions about the topic and how to go about answering the questions.

We will continue to look at documents in groups to continue both work on annotations and rich discussions.

As a group we discussed that we feel that for the most part we all allow for discussion in class but it is often teacher directed, it is often short, and a lot of that is due to time and what we need to get through.

We will work to try to incorporate more of the think-pair-share and jigsaw ideas as we utilize classroom discussions.