I know that my study is going to be qualitative, but I’m not exactly sure what that will look like. My ultimate goal is to study how social studies teachers decide what important details to include in their daily lessons. One chapter in a US History book often contains multiple important events, people, and facts. How do they discriminate important details from non-important details?
One way would be to sit down with teachers and ask them particular questions about their lesson planning. Some example questions would be:
1) By looking at a chapter in the students’ text book, how do you pick out the important details to cover in class?
2) Are there any characteristics of facts or details that you know you should definitely include?
3) Are there characteristics of certain facts or details that you automatically know you should not include?
4) When you are lesson planning, do you often look at other resources other than the teachers’ textbook guide?
-What resources do you commonly use?
Another method of studying the development of lesson plans would be to essentially do a “talk aloud” with multiple teachers as they planned their lessons. I could either sit and observe them as they did this, or give them tape recorders so they could do it on their own time. Tape recorders might be a good option because teachers might start and stop their lesson planning multiple times throughout the process.
Further note: Lesson planning would probably differ depending on the teachers’ experience. It would be nice to interview or observe teachers with different amounts of experience.
2 comments:
Kristina,
I think the tape recording option would be a nice way to collect data. I know from my experience, I would be more likely to participate in a study if I could choose when I wanted to talk about the planning process. A thought came to me as I was reading your blog about how teachers decide what to put in their lesson plans. Most teachers that I know plan their lessons based on the end of grade tests. If the standards say they need to know Teddy Roosevelt from World War II then that is how they decide to include him (and not someone else) in a lesson plan. I wonder if it would be of benefit to add a question about whether the end of grade tests guide daily lesson planning. Perhaps this will come out in the questions that you already have but just wanted to mention it since it had a huge impact on me. I think your last comment about the experience question is of particular importance. As a new teacher, my own lesson planning was impacted by the opinions of other teachers. I would often go ask other veteran teachers about what they were incorporating in lesson plan since they had more experience. I would be interested to know if this was the case with most beginning teachers. Again, this might come out in the questions that you already have but just wanted to throw in my two cents.
Kristina, I like this general topic, but I think you need to focus. I wonder if there isn't a difference in social studies in teaching details vs. teaching concepts. I don't know what you call it there. Dr. Friedman will be able to help you with this. And now in many SS classes, there is the dreaded EOC to worry about.
I think you have some good ideas, but you need to get into the literature for background info.
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