STCBlogPosts

  I taught the same lesson to the other class this week; the one that Dr. Spanke was sitting in on. He had a lot of notes but I think I’m doing well, overall. The main critique he had of me (and something I know I do often that I need to work on) is that I advance through lessons rather fast. My lesson last week was supposed to go for 45 minutes and I only went for 35. Added some things to the lesson for this week in hopes that I would have more things for students to do and learn so I could shoot for 45 minutes and it still ended up being only 35. I think this happened because I had already taught the lesson so I breezed through it and students may have lost out. I added elements to this lesson such as more definitions and a different approach to analysis, some helpful Shakespeare vocabulary they might encounter often while working through Hamlet, a potential practice assessment students can do while reading, and quotes we use in the modern day that students might not have known h...

  Defeatist Attitudes in Students in a Post-COVID World What do you know about the problem? It doesn’t matter if a student is truly “defeated” or not, it’s the mindset that ruins their chances Defeatism is the mentality that, no matter how much things progress, they will never actually get better This is a learned response Increases in anxiety and depression (relating to financial and social health) can lead to a more defeatist mentality Not much is said in research about defeatism and high school students Much is said about hopelessness in secondary education You can’t discuss hopelessness/defeatism without taking external factors into account All the results I’ve found for why students feel defeated/hopeless do not seem satisfactory https://m.aliran.com/web-specials/2015-web-specials/aggrandisement-and-defeatism-in-politics-and-education https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1068744 https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=baac3c6a-6c21-4999-b928-6d05bafe41e4%4...

I taught my first official lesson on Friday. I started with what my mentor teacher deemed as the more difficult class, simply because they don’t engage as much as the other class. It went amazingly well! Students were actually engaged and I am far less stressed now after the lesson is over than I was going into it. Students are about to be reading Hamlet. Most, if not all, students have experience reading Shakespeare, but I still did a lesson about reading Shakespeare and understanding Old/Middle English (much of Shakespeare is written in an odd transition period between the two). I gave them a brief history and incorporated a lot of things that they might understand from the modern day that hadn’t necessarily changed for other languages. For example, English is, in part, Germanic, and we used to have words spelt with a ‘v’ instead of a ‘u’ and vice versa (the letters were almost interchangeable). I discussed how something similar happens in German where words with a ‘w’ are pronounced...

  Maus Lesson Plan Subject: English/Language Arts Grade: 7 Lesson Plan Day 1: Introduction to Maus and the Holocaust Purpose: Elicit prior knowledge in order to identify student understanding; Provide context as to why the content is important and in what ways it is relevant Anticipated Outcome:   Able to identify students’ knowledge of the topic Students have begun to make connections between literature and history Students are primed to identify rhetorical devices and think critically about the text Students are primed to think about the author as a character and narrator Hook: Immediately utilize prior knowledge and student participation through discussion Typing students responses out on slide so they can see and consider their responses Googling facts and allowing students to see on screen research being done Discussion Question: What do we already know or what have we already learned about the Holocaust? High Leverage Practices: Modeling Research Leading Discussio...

I chose my own lesson plan (it is only 1 day long)  that I wrote for Dr. Shaver’s class. I am still not sure I am meeting these standards for gifted and talented students, however I do know that I am asking a lot of seventh graders to ponder the questions I am posing. However, I do think that, with G&T students, I might be able to skip my front-loading activity in which I ask students about definitions like prologue and foreshadowing. I am worried that learning definitions might be tedious to them, but I might simply be able to go over it quicker than planned and, instead of having working definitions for the class, I can simply just identify them for my students. Even though I identify three different standards this lesson plan usually addresses, I would like to focus mainly on the first and last of the three. One component I like about my lesson plan that the previous one I chose to analyze is that I think my own plan has more diversity, which I firmly believe is the stepping...

  Lesson: Utopia and the American Dream (Notes) Lesson 1 Questions could probably be a little more open-ended for a gifted group (example: In what ways do you believe Winthrop’s ideas are manifested in society today? How are they not? Lesson 2 I like the focus on contradicting ideas of the American dream Comparative texts Lesson 3 I think the questions could, again, be a little more open-ended; Linking Kennedy and Winthrop is smart and makes sense in terms of front-loading information, but probably should have been done on day 2 Should have asked questions like: How has the American Dream evolved over time? Lesson 4 (1.2) (1.3) I don’t think we needed to refer to another president. This lesson plan appears to lack diversity. Why not hear a story from a regular, everyday person? Lesson 5 Questions seem too leading (except the first one asked in both images. That one is perfect) I like the choice of using pictures like this and drawing parallels again Lesson...