My blog last week was pretty vague. So I’m going to attempt to narrow it down to something that can actually be measured. I still am very interested in how social studies teachers can know their entire content. I guess it’s just years and years of teaching basically the same thing. So, while this is still intriguing, I think I’ll leave that up to my own discussion with teachers outside of the actual research project.
From Dr. Friedman’s suggestion, I think I am going to focus on how teachers take this broad content and develop a lesson plan around it. How do they decide which topics are important and need more attention? How do they cover the entire Civil War in a few days? How do they make sure they pick out the important details, when there are so many details with each event? I know it could open up a whole different can of worms, but do the US History or Civics EOCs have a huge effect on these lesson plans?
To do this kind of research, I will most likely be conducting interviews with a small sample of teachers. That way, I can really understand their thoughts and suggestions towards lesson planning. I could even interview some students to get their perspective on lessons. I’m not sure exactly what I would ask them, but I know they see it all in a completely different way. Or lastly, it might even be great to do a large survey with many different teachers as a complement to my small interviewing sample. I wonder how much of this I could feasibly do, and what would actually be beneficial. Thoughts?!
6 comments:
I meant to write "Blog 2" in the title- sorry!
Kristina, I like your new focus. Lesson planning is a large part of a teacher's job, and any insight you might gain would be helpful to you and to others.
You could interview teachers to get the in-depth information or you could construct a detailed teacher survey. I think you would be better not to include students.
I think you can probably find studies of methods of lesson planning.....
Hi Kristina,
I related to your question of how to pare down such a broad subject area (especially if you want for History to be more than names and dates for students). Yours seems like a smart research topic to choose because it will allow you to pick up a lot of advice from experienced teachers--all while taking care of your research project requirement. I wonder if your findings will generalize to multiple subjects, or if it will only apply to History classes.
Kristina,
Something that I think would be interesting to consider is what materials do teachers rely on in constructing their lesson plans. Do they seem to follow what the text-book suggests so far as lesson plans? Do they get ideas out of magazines/journals for social studies teachers? Are there any good and reliable websites for lesson plans? Do teachers get ideas for lesson plans from other teachers in their department? These are all things that you could possibly ask in your interviews or on a survey.
I dig it. I think this is awesome because if you are like me, you've heard many teachers tell you how important it is to have some sort of lesson plan, or you and your students will just be lost. I can totally empathize with the struggle to know all of your subject content. I also like that this is a topic that tackles something that you are personally concerned about for you future as a teacher. I also think it's awesome that you're including the EOC aspect, because teaching what is important vs. teaching whats on the EOC seems to be a constant struggle.
yo t. way to narrow down. your topic reminds me of the talk we had with one of last year's mta's (christy)... she was saying that even though she's more of an expert at history of china, there's really no chance to cover it in much depth. sooo i would be interested to find out if, while planning out lessons, teachers are able to focus on their passions at all. if he loves the civil war, does it mean he chooses to spend more time on it? do teachers have that option? what are the factors that go into this planning. great work. thoughts?!
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