Week 4 Blog Reflections

In my PDS this week, I took over two classes in order to teach classroom lessons. These lessons focused on material for chapter 3: the difference between colonial sets and the French and Indian wars. In these lessons, I tried to balance direct instruction with more constructivist methods as well (group work, product creation, etc).

On day one, we took some notes on section one (mercantilism and other economic policies) first. I tried to keep these at a reasonable length. I think this was a wise decision, and worked well for the students. Next, we transitioned to a graphic organizer activity in order to help students organize their thoughts. In this activity, students compared and contrasted mercantilism with capitalism. This is an important concept to highlight as it shows comparisons to today's world. Finally, we transitioned to an activity in which students engaged in role-play in order to construct a dialogue script about how policies such as mercantilism, the navigation acts, and salutary neglect effect the daily lives of colonists in the Americas. I felt like in general, the lesson was planned out well enough and highlighted important materials. Students seemed to like the dialogue activity and generally worked well. Things that could've went better included the execution of activities and and the volume of my direct instruction. These are management things that I will work on, and hopefully improve with time.

On days two and three we talked about differences between the southern and northern sets of colonies to begin with this, we took some notes in order to get kick started on the topic. On the first day, we also worked in order to analyze colonial courtship. Students examined prompts about different cultural methods of courtship (including diverse populations such as Enslaved Africans). In addition , students created illustrations which emphasized the differences between the colonies. I felt that these lessons went well but were problamitized by some of the same issues.

On the final two days, we worked on a chapter map, outline, and current events. These activities went well, but suffered from time management issues. In the future, I need to encourage students to use more of their time in order to discuss the current events that they did. The reason for using the map was that it was pertinent to my research activities.