Standard #8: Instructional Strategies
The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop deep understanding of content areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.
• Lessons related to real life/real world situations with discussion
Rationale: I make it a point to bring current world news into the lessons that I teach, in order to show my students that things that happened decades ago really does still effect us. I might also try to come up with scenarios that match their life in order for them to better understand a historical event or situation.
Rationale: At the end of two of my units I involved my students in a timeline activity, where I asked my students to create one large timeline over the time-period we covered. We then went back over the timelines to talk about the major events that maybe still effect us today. Another objective to this activity was to show the students the fluidity of history, and how each and every event effected the others.
Rationale: Prezi is a free online tool that does the same job as a traditional power point presentation. Prezi, however, enables you to present your information in a more interactive and entertaining way. Students love the freedom the creators have in the styles, the unexpected way you move through the information and the easy way many different styles of media can be incorporated into the presentation. Not only have I used this tool when presenting in front of my peers in my college classes, but I used Prezi to present a history lesson to my students while student teaching .
Timeline created by students