1. Educators know the subjects they are teaching.
The educator understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the disciplines she or he teaches and can create learning experiences that make these aspects of subject matter meaningful for pupils.
Wisconsin Educator Standards for Teachers
InTASC MODEL STANDARDS
Standard #4: Content Knowledge
The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches and creates learning experiences that make these aspects of the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners to assure mastery of the content.
Standard #1 pertains to knowing the content knowledge well enough to teach it to students. Throughout my coursework and student teaching I have found that I truly did need to know my content area in order to create not only well thought out lesson plans, but plans that were effective. Knowing my content area knowledge allowed me to focus more on how and why I was constructing lessons rather than on what I was teaching. Below are various artifacts with descriptions and reflections from my classes and student teaching that demonstrate my knowledge of my content area; many are lesson plans or lesson materials.
Artifact 1: Holocaust Lesson Slides (Attached Below)
These slides are from my student teaching in a World History class for freshman. The lesson was about the Holocaust and was part of a larger World War II unit. Because I have done extensive historical research about World War II, I found this unit and lesson both easy and difficult. I found that having the content knowledge allowed me to better plan lessons and lesson materials, but it was also difficult to limit the information to one or two lessons. These slides were the result of collaboration from the world history department, discussions with my cooperating teacher combined with my own ideas. These slides are a brief overview of the Holocaust, where I focus on timeline of events and key vocabulary related to this topic. The students also watched a scene from HBO's "Band of Brother's depicting the liberation of a concentration camp.
Artifact 2: Native Americans and Manifest Destiny Unit (Attached Below)
This is a lesson plan created for my social studies methods course during my last semester before student teaching. The assignment was to create a mini unit of lessons using the framework of "Thinking like a Historian," and the attachment also includes commentary about my thinking process while constructing this mini unit. This artifact shows my grasp in content knowledge, for my focus for this assignment was less on covering content and more on constructing effective lessons with engaging strategies.
Artifact 3: Russian Revolution Slides (Attached Below)
This artifact is also from my student teaching experience. The Russian Revolution unit was the first unit during my student teaching semester where I took the lead in planning lessons and the overall sequence of the unit. Because I knew the content knowledge for the unit, I was able to focus on the sequence of lessons and the building of knowledge for the students.
Artifact 4: Thinking Like a Geographer Framework (Attached Below)
The last artifact is an outline for a framework similar to "Thinking like a Historian" but for geography. This is an assignment from my summer methods course in the ASP course sequence. This assignment demonstrates my knowledge in geography and my ability to develop a workable framework that could be used when outlining a course sequence for a geography class.