Implementing the Lesson, Part I
Overall, I thought that the lesson went well and I accomplished the intended objectives. The Do Now activity asked the students to think about where they want to travel and what would make it difficult to get there. It seemed that the students really enjoyed the task because it was relevant to their lives and gave them a chance to talk about their interests. The students were eager to share their answers and reacted to each other’s responses excitedly. It was cool for me to hear about their dreams and I felt like I was able to get a glimpse into their lives as people, instead of just as students. I really let the students discuss their answers and tried not to interfere much.
I then spent the majority of the lesson reviewing and teaching my students the skill of outlining. Although this was created as a day’s lesson, admittedly it took about five days to adequately cover all of the content and skills. Initially, the students seemed slightly bored by the task of outlining. One of my students even remarked, “Why do we need to learn how to do this? I did it in English class!” Nevertheless, I believe that it is such an important skill, that I persisted and spent about three days making sure that my students fully understood it so that they would be able to do it in the future. Furthermore, I was not convinced that my students had properly learned the skill in English class and I wanted them to know how to outline in the context of historical text.
In order to teach the students this skill, I used the method of scaffolding. On the first day, I taught the students how to outline and we worked as a class to produce an outline of a paragraph from the textbook. The paragraph and outline from both of my world history classes can be seen below. I was really glad that the students seemed to be picking up the features of doing a close reading, which includes identifying vocabulary words and key ideas. I explained to the students that their outlines should contain a question and then an ordered list of the main ideas.
I then spent the majority of the lesson reviewing and teaching my students the skill of outlining. Although this was created as a day’s lesson, admittedly it took about five days to adequately cover all of the content and skills. Initially, the students seemed slightly bored by the task of outlining. One of my students even remarked, “Why do we need to learn how to do this? I did it in English class!” Nevertheless, I believe that it is such an important skill, that I persisted and spent about three days making sure that my students fully understood it so that they would be able to do it in the future. Furthermore, I was not convinced that my students had properly learned the skill in English class and I wanted them to know how to outline in the context of historical text.
In order to teach the students this skill, I used the method of scaffolding. On the first day, I taught the students how to outline and we worked as a class to produce an outline of a paragraph from the textbook. The paragraph and outline from both of my world history classes can be seen below. I was really glad that the students seemed to be picking up the features of doing a close reading, which includes identifying vocabulary words and key ideas. I explained to the students that their outlines should contain a question and then an ordered list of the main ideas.