Program Standard I Develop and use in-depth knowledge of subject matter
When I think about going into the classroom in the next year, one of the most intimidating things to think about is whether or not my knowledge of the content is deep enough to successfully get the information to my students. However, I do know, as a historian, that the best place to familiarize yourself with content is to understand the importance of primary and secondary sources. I specifically like the way that Wineberg teaches us to use the textbook in the classroom alongside other historical documents. As teachers, we need to get away from the textbook centered classroom in order to immerse ourselves in the content through primary sources. Once we have those sources, it will help inform us with content we have have previously not understood while at the same time giving us an idea on how to use it to spark interest in our students to learn. If we, as educators and life-long learners, want to engage our students and help them learn the content, we have to teach them how to “do history.” “Facts are mastered by engaging students in historical questions that spark their curiosity and make them passionate about seeking answers (Wineberg, 2011, kindle position 121).” I think this embodies the way I feel about content and learning in the classroom the most. I don’t want to be a teacher who just uses the text book and makes worksheets for students to follow along as I outline through the book. Instead, I would rather take my knowledge of how to do history into the classroom with me and learn with them as a team. I have been in too many classrooms during practicum as well as internship A where the teacher simply takes the pacing guide and the text book and follows along with the same powerpoint presentation technique day after day. Our classrooms have to be so much more than that. I want to challenge my students to get their hands dirty and research the information for themselves. Or as Loewen puts it, “Our goal must be to help students uncover the past rather than cover it (Loewen, 2009, p. 19).” In addition to uncovering the past with our students, I feel that in order to get them to even want to learn, we must chose topics, or trees as Loewen calls them, that are meaningful in their own lives. The key is taking the state standards and chasing a group of thirty to fifty topics that are interesting to yourself as a teacher as well as relevant to the present and interesting to your students as well. Loewen uses the analogy of forests, trees, and twigs where the themes of the class in general, the trees are the units, and the twigs are the facts and information about the units that we want the students to learn as we go. I believe that too many teachers are stuck on the twigs and are afraid to allow the students to freedom to learn them through creative work. Saye, in Achieving Authentic Pedagogy: Plan Units, Not Lessons, says that we should engage our students in authentic intellectual work. That is to say that we should chose to explore content with the students through activities that allow the students the ability to actively learn in the way that our graduate school cohort learned through our local global connections projects. Instead of diving into the content through a textbook, we were given the site and allowed to research on our own. Saye agrees with projects like this and gives more such as investigative groups, persuasive presentations, and five minute discussions (Saye, 2014). I believe through these steps of showing students how to do history through sourcing, picking out relevant trees, and empowering students to learn though authentic intellectual work, we will immerse ourselves in the content that we teach and will grow overtime into experts of that content along with our students. With these basic ideas in mind, I have also been able to employ them in aligning my lessons with not only the South Carolina state standards, but the NCSS Thematic Strands as well.