The text that I was using for my mini lesson is “Kennedy’s Address to the American People,” a speech given in 1962 that was intended to update the American people about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Given that it is a speech, it is difficult for a contemporary reader to understand it without the necessary historical context. This is what my lesson revolves around.
My lesson most closely aligned with the final pillar of the SMC Education Department mission statement, which reads “Our graduates are collaborative and knowledgeable instructional leaders.” My lesson was not a lecture, but rather a collaboration between the prior knowledge and perspectives of my students and the historical context that I provided. It served more as a conversation between the learners and myself, with the intention of exchanging historical knowledge while also giving students an opportunity to predict the outcome of historical events before engaging with a text. I also attempted to model a shift in historical discussion; where previously students received only an Amero-centric viewpoint, I provided this as well as the perspective of Cuba and the Soviet Union.
In general, I have learned that as a teacher, I am animated and can be surprisingly confident. I felt very comfortable in front of my students, and this was obvious in my video. I was not stiff or anxious, and the movement of my hands and body reflected my enthusiasm for my topic. To begin my pre-reading lesson, I asked that my audience take note of the interactiveness of my lesson. I was most worried that my lesson would feel like a lecture for my students, given that much of it revolved around giving context for the speech. I was surprised to learn at the end that my lesson was far more interactive than I imagined it would be; my students commented that I did well to pull them into a topic that they did not know much about. Although the powerpoint was our focus, it did not feel like a lecture, for myself or my students. Rather, it was a conversation, in that I would display pictures and maps, then ask my students to contribute their prior knowledge or predict the outcome of events. At the end, they seemed to agree that this format was both informative and engaging for them.
The most important thing I learned about pre-reading was that the content must be brought to the learner. So often, texts are unreachable for students and because of this, they will become lost in them and read without comprehending the content. If the text is made accessible, readers will feel much more confident when they begin the text, especially if they know exactly what they will be looking for within it. That was my goal with my own text: to first make the text accessible by providing the necessary background knowledge, and then to point students in the right direction by telling them what they should be looking for. I definitely reached this goal, because my students were able to take the context that I provided and apply it by predicting what the text will say before they read it. We did this in the form of an informal conversation, where I asked each student to share their predictions about the contents of the speech using at least two pieces of evidence from our discussion. They had similar but varying answers, and used slightly different evidence to support it, representing their unique perspectives. My intent with this activity was to give them a much fuller picture than the one provided in the text alone, allowing them to generate meaning from it while reading it with a critical eye.
I think that my next step is to firstly make all of my lessons interactive in a variety of ways. It is so easy in history to fall into the habit of talking at your students, rather than actually have them do history. Therefore, in the future I’d like to incorporate diverse and engaging activities around the content. In terms of teaching generally, I think I would like to work on slowing down. When I watched the video, I felt as though I was flying through the lesson instead of taking time to highlight points made by my students. Our double mini lessons next week will be an excellent time to practice this.
Hi Andrew, I really liked how you said that the text needs to be brought to the reader. Not that the reader has to meet it half-way or that the text is just given to them, and they have no choice in what they read. I wonder how you will highlight points, in your double mini-lessons and how you would slow things down for your students.
ReplyDeleteAndrew,
ReplyDeleteI love how you scaffolded your content to make it accessible for your students, and how held your discussion in a very informal, low-stakes manner so your students could focus on the learning. I wonder if you have any concerns about accidentally over-scaffolding the material for your students, because it can be a hard balance to achieve.