Action Plan

Using comments from my curriculum unit plan, I have found three areas in which I can adapt my instruction and hopefully improve upon.

The first point to address is making lessons meaningful to students. I think this is important because it is difficult to gauge interest from a majority of students that do not have the same interests as the teacher. Of course I have an interest in social studies and U.S. history, but how do I get students from all kinds of different backgrounds to appreciate the same things I do? I will try to adapt my instruction by finding out what sort of activities students respond to best beyond the standard note taking. This should tell me how to make lessons more meaningful for students.

The second point to address is reducing the amount of standard lecture. Granted a good portion of history simply needs to be explained in depth, but I need to find other ways to present material. History is difficult to do this with because it is not like a chemistry class where you can do experiments or a math class where students can actively engage in working out problems. I know I could use Google Earth more in the classroom and I also could try to implement more photostory.

The third and final point to address is working on my objectives. My cooperating teacher informed me how to write objectives more efficiently as far as displaying them to my university supervisor. I do not think addressing my objectives is a problem, but I do think I need to work better on using assessments to test for student understanding of the objectives. I plan on doing this through a variety of methods. I have used exit slips and think writes, which are both easy forms. But to tie these assessments back into making a lesson meaningful for students, I would also like to find some more fun methods of assessments to gauge student interest.