Sunday, June 3, 2007

Week 5: Reflection

This week I started teaching another class -- year 10 Modern History. I will be teaching them a short unit on the Cold War. I will be basically covering the causes of the Cold War (both the immediate and ideological) as well focusing on a case study of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

** Bahaviour Management: With the year 10 Modern History class I was really quite proud of my behaviour management ability. I felt like I had complete control over the class : ) I think my year 9 class has forced me to become clear about my behaviour management strategies.

**Connectedness: I start the Cold War unit with a 1:30min video of The Simpsons in which the Soviet Union returned. I asked the students whether or not they fully understood all of the jokes. I asked them what questions they had. Some of their questions were: What is communism, What is capitalism, who was Lenin, Why was Russia called the Soviet Union. This then allowed me to answer their questions. I then had a topic map on the blackboard, which displayed the causes of the cold war.

** My SOSE class was much better this week! : ) I was really able to keep the students motivated and interested. I did not need to write anyones name on the board. I directed the learning of the class much more than before which in turn created better learning outcomes.

Needs to Improve:

** I have never formally studied the Cold War before so I did not feel 100% comfortable answering their questions. However, I am going to try and read up on it as much as I can and I will work had to go through all of the activities before hand.

** I need to learn how to improve students motivation! The school in general is not very academically motivated.

What I have learnt:

** over the past couple of weeks I have learnt to rearrange my lesson plans either during or the next lesson to better suit the students learning needs. For example, with my SOSE class I had to introduce and explain the government decision making process. The students did not completely understand what lobby groups did. So I changed the next lesson to focus just on lobby groups (it was vital to the unit). I had them create brochure's using information sheets from pro and anti nuclear energy lobby groups.

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