Teachers Create a Curriculum that is Purposeful, Thoughtful, Engaging and Student Centered

Artifact 1: Teaching Through Analogy

Equality Movements Explanation.mp4

Being able to explain and relate social studies content to concepts that students already understand is an integral part of having an engaged student audience. Without the ability to show students how these historical events and ideas relate to their own experiences, they can often mentally check-out, believing the concepts are too complex or far-removed to really understand.

This short video clip shows me using the idea of a rubber band to explain how social movements have expanded the minds of populations throughout history. This takes an everyday object that all students are familiar with, and connects it to a broad theoretical concept that they will encounter again and again throughout their study of history. Part of having an engaging curriculum involves activating student's prior knowledge and life experience in order to prove to them that they don't have to be "good at social studies" in order to truly understand and relate to the material. Through feedback I received from students themselves throughout the year, I found respond quite well to this style of teaching through analogies. Little examples like this, where teachers connect larger, more complex content ideas to easy-to-understand aspects of students' daily life, seem simple but can have a profound impact on student engagement.

Artifact 2: Differentiating Content Delivery

Differentiating curriculum in order to accommodate all types of learners is something that I devoted a large chunk of my planning time towards in each and every lesson I created. I worked hard to ensure that every single student was able to relate to and engage in the curriculum by incorporating a range of instructional strategies into my teaching.

The letter above was written by one of my students at the conclusion of my internship, and the small collection of responses below were from a survey given to students at the halfway point of my lead teach period. This feedback was a major confidence boost, as they clearly communicates that my efforts in differentiation were certainly not unappreciated. Varying instructional strategies from day to day not only reassures students that their particular learning styles are being accommodated, but also gives them the opportunity to discover new styles and methods that work for them that they may have discounted in the past. It is of the upmost importance to me that every students feels they have equal opportunity to succeed in my classroom, and creating a curriculum that seeks to engage all students is the first step in accomplishing this. Reading this letter and these survey responses motivates me to continue implementing new strategies into my lessons, as I now know that students value this differentiation just as much as I do myself.

Artifact 3: Incorporating Enduring Learning Targets

As a subject, social studies carries the stigma of "memorize, repeat, forget". This sequence has little to nothing to do with actual learning and is something that I'm dedicated to eliminating in my classroom. The learning targets I present to students each day are not intended for them to forget the next day when they walk in the door, but remain relevant across not only the entire unit, but the entire course.

The artifact here depicts an activity that I executed in class at the start of the semester to review what they'd learned in the first half of the year. Students made these freehand "graphs" mapping three major themes of the course that I pulled from the class syllabus. Using the past semester's learning targets to guide them, students traced the progress of these three themes throughout each of the last semester's unit of study. I had planned to revisit this activity at the end of the second semester, but unfortunately my time with my students was cut short due to COVID-19.

Effective learning targets should serve as checkpoints in both content and skills that students can refer back to as the year progresses to make connections and draw broader conclusions about history. Implementing activities like this that draw from the learning targets of previous units in order to connect them to current content teaches students that events in history are never isolated, and every thing that they do in class is related in some way.

Artifact 4: Developing Multiple Perspectives

Student response to the question "Should we have dropped the atomic bomb?"

Monday 1/26

As social studies educators, I believe that one of the most important skills we can teach students is how to develop their own perspective on a topic. Practicing this with historical content in the classroom is an efficient and low-stakes way to train students to do this across all areas of their lives. It's one thing to simply present students with a few different ways of looking at something, but their understanding is taken to a whole new level when they're given the opportunity to use that information to develop their own perspective. Throughout the semester, I presented questions to the students such as "should we have dropped the atomic bombs?" that require analysis of multiple perspectives in order to come up with their own reasoned opinion.

In the lesson plan linked here, I ask students to consider the question "was Truman's Fair Deal a success?". Having provided them with the necessary content information in the first half of the lesson, students were expected to use what they'd learned to develop their own perspective on the question. Being able to understand the thought process and opinions of both yourself and others is a necessary skill that spans all disciplines, and requires regular practice. Incorporating it into the social studies curriculum is an excellent way to ensure young people are being exposed to this type of thinking in a structured and supportive environment.

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