This past week in school was a bit crazy because we had a lot of guests come into our class for special lessons. My favorite guest speakers were these two undergrads from Penn who were trying to recruit for a Model UN team from Constitution High. They spoke to us on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday about issues going on throughout the world. It was an enthusiastic presentation and then we all participated in a simulation...very similar to the structure of Model UN. The two presenters broke the class up into 8 separate groups and had them each represent a country. The entire class was given an issue to deal with and had to come to some sort of compromise. Each country had a unique fact sheet about how passionate their country viewed certain issues and how much they were willing to budge from their current sticking point.   Simulations, if ran correctly, are one of the greatest methods for informing high schoolers. It was great to see most of the students working together with people they didn't normally converse with in class. The simulation also provided the space for students to negotiate with one another from neutral standpoints. Even though ultimately no compromise was reached in our class time I still believe that the students learned a lot from this exercise. Some of them were taken out of their comfort zone and showed the ability to thrive in a position they weren't use to performing in. Overall, it was a very impressive few days in class and I'm sure the students were able to come away from this lesson understanding a little more about international relations.

This past week at school we began our Olympic bid pitches. The students were able to present to the rest of the class their projects and explain why their country should be able to host The Olympics. I went into that day’s class wondering how the audience would behave and was surprised by the result. I imagined that students would get bored and begin talking so I created a worksheet for them to fill out highlighting positives, negatives, and questions about other presentations. The questions portions was probably the best idea out of the 3 because it provided the structure for a good back-and-forth discussing once the presentations were completed. Some of the students tried to stump/embarrass the opposing groups after their performance asking them difficult questions. It was impressive to see some of those questions being asked though because it showed that students did their homework on opposing countries too. The assignment was framed around the idea of why your country should host the Olympics and why it shouldn’t be in other countries. The presentations supported the why factor but the question asking highlighted the why not. I was generally surprised with the amount of work the students were able to complete after only doing research for 2-3 days. This was a lot smoother than our previous NHD projects and occurred in about 1/10 of the amount of time. Hopefully lessons continue to go this smoothly and I’m able to still create plans that will excite the students into doing good work.

This past week we had a whopping 2.5 days of school. I began the week introducing an Olympics Unit to the class by putting on a model Olympic Bid pitch. I was expecting the students to collaborate and conduct research together later in the week, but due to the snow that hasn’t been able to happen. One thing that I noticed a few weeks ago that I was able to re-implement this week was goal worksheets. When I have the students working in groups, I’ve noticed that some tend to slack off while others do the majority of the work. I brought back our NHD goal-setting worksheets with hopes that they would get the students to set their own goals and try to achieve them daily. From my monitoring of the classroom I was able to see that the students were, as expected, setting daily goals and reflecting on them at the end of each class. I was really impressed by this. Last time I noticed a few students filling in their reflection at the beginning of class because they forgot to the day before, but this time they looked like they were all doing what they were suppose to. I haven’t had the opportunity to collect and closely review all of the goal-worksheets yet because of the stupid snow, but I’m hoping from the improvements that I’ve already seen that these goal worksheets are going to be even more impressive than the last batch.

This week at school I’ve been really excited to teach one of my first completely constructed units. I’ve been watching my teacher teach for a bit and taking notes and I’ve noticed some of his most successful lessons occur when he’s able to relate real life current events with his plan for class. I thought it would be a great opportunity to start an Olympics lesson plan because this year’s Winter Olympics will be taking place as I’m teaching the lesson. We’ve only had one day of the lesson plan so far, but the students seemed really engaged throughout the whole lesson. Even some of the kids that don’t normally participate as much were raising their hands and sharing everything they knew about the Olympics in our preview.
My ultimate goal is to place the students in groups and have them create an Olympic bid pitch for their respective countries. I’m attempting to differentiate most of the lessons and teach toward specific learning modalities. The opening lesson gave students an intro to the Olympic Games and had them guess the location and year of when my favorite Olympic memories occurred. A lot of the students looked like they enjoyed this activity. I also gave out candy to those who guessed correctly so this created a playful competition among some friends in class. I’m really excited to teach the rest of this topic and I’m curious if the student enthusiasm will stay as high as it’s been for the rest of the lesson. I’m trying to see what type of lessons/units are more/less entertaining for this crowd so I think the feedback I receive from this lesson will help me out greatly in future development of my classroom.

So last week we finally finished with the creating portion of National History Day projects. Some of the students produced really exciting projects and others just seemed to want to get it over with. We had a reflection discussion on Friday and I was shocked by a lot of what the students had to say. A major concern for them was that they didn’t have enough time to work on the projects and they felt like they didn’t get enough instruction. I was willing to hear everything they had to say and found some of their feedback helpful to creating future lesson plans, but couldn’t disagree more with those two pieces of feedback. The students have been working EVERY DAY on NHD since the end of October.

 There has been an insane amount of time put in to creating these projects and in no way shape or form should anyone have felt rushed. I also thought that my teacher and I provided a bunch of scaffolding methods for the students in what they needed to provide in these projects. We gave them plenty of outline/rubric sheets explaining exactly what was needed for a good project. We even gave them the judges scoring sheet that would be used to grade their projects. I wonder what to do when what I have to say 100% disagrees with what the students have to say. I don’t think I’ve been overestimating their ability to do work because some of the projects were outstanding. Luckily I probably won’t have to teach an NHD class again next year, but if I did I wonder what feedback should I be taking away from this discussion and what I should completely dismiss.

Last time I spoke about creating a goal worksheet and daily reflection log for my students. I was shocked last week when I received 46 out of 47 of the worksheets back. I was able to immediately correct each of the worksheets and find common remarks that I made for most of the students. I was right with the assumption that most students would create relatively simple and vague goals such as “work on NHD” so one of the pieces of feedback I offered the entire class through a power point presentation was to create more specific goals.
This past Monday I gave out new goal sheets for this week and explained to the students what I expected from them. On Friday I collected their worksheets and this week EVERY one of my students handed in their sheets and almost all of them improved upon last week’s grade. I never thought something as simple as writing a goal down would have such dramatic impact in the work they did. I even heard from my Penn mentor that she thought the students were more engaged in the work they were doing and that they looked like they were more on task. She messaged me that, “[She] saw many students hard at work today...some who haven't been so involved in the past. (Penn Mentor)”
Due to extremely dragged out and painstakingly boring approach my school has toward National History Day it’s been tough for me to motivate my students to work hard and complete their work. I’m still shocked that for 2 weeks in a row I was able to get every student to do exactly what they were suppose to. I’m wondering how long this will continue.

getting ready for NHD

In World History we’re still in the creation process of our National History Day projects so I haven’t been able to really teach anything new since we’ve gotten back from break. One thing I was able to create was a worksheet with a list of goals for each day. On the first day the students received the sheet they wrote down the last thing they completed in class for their projects. Each day as the students came into class their preview was to set a daily goal and write one thing they can do to achieve that goal. With about 5 minutes left in class each day I had the students reflect on the progress of their goals as well as create a plan of action for their next day’s work. Due to the shortened periods I hoped that setting goals and creating a plan of action (the day before) would eliminate some wasted time in class. I noticed that we didn’t use as much time on the preview and students were able to come into class, immediately write down their goals, and begin working. Overall I think this was a successful teaching strategy for shortened days. One thing I think some students may need to improve on is setting more difficult goals. Some student set relatively simple goals that could easily be completed in a few minutes. I collected all of the worksheets from last week and plan on giving them feedback suggesting a more careful thought process while creating their goals for this upcoming week.