Weekly Reflection 2

 Weekly Reflection 2 (05/21/2023):

This week I mainly focused on creating a lesson plan and then delivering that lesson plan to two blocks of US History. My lesson plan was on the topic of the Space Race, and the lesson was a short lecture followed by the students reading two sources and writing a short analytical writing response. I definitely could have done a better job during the first block (G), and after students began working Ben gave me some feedback, which was to be more assertive and to almost embellish the importance of my topic. I feel like a did a decent job implementing that feedback with F block, as my lecture was longer, more focused on the competition between the Soviets and Americans, and concluded with a detailed description of the assignment. 

The prompt I cultivated for students to respond to was “What are some of the political implications (conclusions that can be drawn) of Apollo 11, and the space race as a whole?”. The only requirements were two pieces of evidence and proper in-text citations, so essentially a standard MLA writing response. I knocked off the works cited because I was providing sources. 

This prompt produced some interesting results. The sources I picked sort of guided the students into writing about certain things, but the papers I got were on a range of topics, and surprisingly most of them were implications about the Space Race. I enjoyed reading and grading them and plan to use some of them as exhibits during Express Fest.

Speaking of Express Fest, the end of Senior Project is approaching rapidly. I plan to present some papers I graded as well as some mock Official Notes at Express Fest so that I can show some evidence of what I was doing during Senior Project. From now until then my Senior Project will mostly be shadowing Ben during class, and writing my Project Self Evaluation during my independent work.

This week I wrote 6 mock Official Notes, taught 2 classes, and read some more of Evolving Education. While this doesn't sound like a lot you have to take into account that I did my whole lesson from scratch, including cultivating the lesson plan, and since this was my first time doing it, it took me a while.

I have enjoyed Senior Project thus far and think I’ve learned much about teaching. I definitely learned a lot about a learning-centered curriculum, since that's what we use here at Proctor, and from what I have seen personalizing the curriculum to teach students ability is an effective way to teach.

Hours Total: 51