Lansing+Eastern+group

__Lesson Reflection__

__ What was learned about social studies, student thinking, and student learning? __ The lesson that we created was on Renaissance art as a window into themes of the European Renaissance. We learned a lot about teaching through this experience, including but not limited to the following:

We learned that simple is usually best. Our mentor, Mr. Jason at Lansing Eastern High School, repeated this message to us many times. He told us not to go overboard (a lesson we have also been told in both seminar and lab) and he asked that we change our assessment strategy to be more realistic for time’s sake. Our original idea for assessment was to have students draw their own piece of Renaissance art and explain what themes they drew upon, but we ended up changing it to having the students look at two pieces of art and determine which one was a Renaissance production based on what they had learned that day.

We learned that prior knowledge is very important. We assumed that students knew enough about ancient Greek and Roman civilizations to recognize the ties that Renaissance had with them, but it seemed like they did not know much. Even information they had learned in that class was recalled by Mr. Jason.

We learned that many students want to contribute in the classroom. Part of students’ interest in our lesson may have been because they knew that we had created it, and part of it is definitely because Mr. Jason is a great teacher, but: the students were eager to give their two cents in class! The introduction took longer than we had expected because everyone wanted to chime in about what art is and what qualifies as art. It suggested that students enjoy sharing in class more than they want others to think they do.

We learned that simple lessons do not mean easy planning. As much as Mr. Jason wanted our lesson to be simple, he didn’t show it in the way that he prepared and executed his lesson. He was prepared with questions to ask students at every turn and he improved the guided notes that we submitted to him.

We learned that high school freshmen need a lot of structure and guidance. Again, he improved the worksheet that we gave him. It wasn’t enough to include tables that said, “What You See” and “What it Means,” for example: Mr. Jason added the names of the painting and more clear directions. He told us that often times directions and questions had to be leading in order to produce results from high school students (especially freshmen).

__ How will the research be shared with our school & professional communities? __ Our research during this project led us to realize that making correct assumptions about our students is very important. This speaks to the broader importance of knowing what level our students have reached upon entering our classroom at the beginning of the school year. We spoke about this issue with our mentor teacher after our lesson, and he mentioned that his freshmen had attended many different middle schools, which greatly influenced their base of common knowledge. As this is a very common situation in urban high schools, we felt that this research could be very helpful to our placement school.

In order to ensure that our lessons reach as many students as possible, it is important that we write our lessons with diversity in mind. Most commonly, people think about diversity in terms of racial and class divisions in the classroom, which is undoubtedly important to incorporate. In this case, we will strive to change our lessons to meet the diverse array of common knowledge that will be exhibited by our students. This also makes a difference on individual class culture, as lessons can be further tailored to meet the needs of a certain group of students who may or may not have learned the same material in middle or elementary school.

On the level of professional communities, this research can be helpful in approaching concerns of standardized curriculum knowledge. If the problem of unbalanced education can be met while students are still in elementary or middle school, secondary education lesson plans can be more effective to a broader audience of students. In this way, social studies teachers from a variety of elementary or middle schools can come together with high school social studies teachers to ensure a richer learning environment for all students.

__ How has our thinking changed about teaching this topic or unit? __  In terms of teaching this lesson, we learned that when using discussion as a teaching strategy it is very important to have a very organized plan of how things are going to go. When we first decided to teach this lesson by showing picture and then having a discussion about them, we thought that there would not really be a need for worksheets. However, when we talked to our mentor teacher he said that he really liked our ideas and guiding questions, but the students would need something tangible in front of them to keep them on track.

 As college students, we are used to just writing what we need to down on paper. Our mentor teacher made it clear to us that it is not safe to assume that high school students will know the important information to write down. We ended up making a very simple worksheet that told the students exactly what they should be thinking about. It worked really well. Essentially, we learned that it is extremely important to have a tangible worksheet in front of students as opposed to simply assuming that they will write the important information.

__ What went well during the lesson study cycle? What do we want to change? __ <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">After our lesson was taught, we met to discuss how our lesson turned out. It was a pretty productive meeting, we realized that the changes that our teacher made, made the lesson much stronger and much more suitable for his class. We also got some very helpful feedback from our teacher, he explained that we needed to scaffold more on our worksheet, meaning that we had to have more words and explanations on it to guide the students through the activity. The lesson study also went well because our teacher was very responsive and open with us, by informing us of our lesson’s strengths and weaknesses. He really liked our student direct art investigation, and he was upset because he did not have time to get to complete our whole lesson because our activating strategy lasted longer than all of us thought. In all, our study lesson was very productive and were thankful to have such a caring and helpful mentor.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">__ What questions and ideas related to this lesson would we investigate further? __ <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Some of the questions related to this unit we would really investigate further would be more into past lessons the students have had. It was one of the areas we really felt like we were weak on and we would have been able to create a better lesson plan with the information. Another thing we really noticed was how the final worksheet our teacher put together looked much more professional, we felt like it was something we could really improve upon in the future by looking more into ways to better organize the information on the sheet. <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">