TED 633 Assignment 3A:

Lesson: Plymouth Colony

The most enjoyable thing about teaching was the questions - the kids had many and I got off my intended task quite often to answer them. They were all relevant but I found myself having to limit questions to intermittent periods of discussion. The kids were much more interested in back and forth discussion than working on the individual and group assignments. For instance, one girl wanted to know if the settler woman were allowed to marry the Indian men and vice versa. This came up because during an earlier lesson on Spanish colonization we learned that the non-noble males were not allowed to bring woman and were encouraged to intermarry with the native population and convert them whereas northern European (English and Dutch) colonial patters did not encourage racial intermarriage and did encourage woman to go to the Americas. Inter society marriage, while it did happen, was not the norm amongst English and Dutch settlers. We continued with the Early colonial America theme and as part of the lesson we made powtash - a type of stew made from onions, beans, venison, and wild fowl.  This would have been a common Wampanoag meal. If we continue to have these joint sessions I will be moving into the Great Awakening but after Christmas I am going to be much more busy with my job at work because we have two ladies out on maternity leave and will be undergoing a tri-annual state audit so I will have less time for the homeschool cooperative until the audit is over and the ladies are back from maternity leave. The lessons will most likely be restricted to my own kids and one or two closer family friends during this period of time.

The pre-and post tests were making more sense to the kids once they learned pretests are not graded and were not expected to know everything on them unless it had been previously covered. Some topics had been covered with their families ahead of time but for some kids the lesson was new.  I use pre-assessments as a derivative of the "Data-not -guess-work" program. They are generally for myself. I encouraged the kids to use them to make note of things they did not yet know and then see if they could answer the questions later.

As an accommodation for one child who has a specific reading and writing disability I verbally asked him the questions and he answered them much better than he had on the previous pre-assessment. He has strong oral language skills but could use some encouragement with his writing skills. His mom did not want his needs pointed out so I took him aside under pretense of getting things ready for scouts (he is a troop leader in our kids scout group as well as part of the home school group) while the other kids were working together. The main post assessment was a cooperative group assignment in which the kids answered some questions together. Over all it went well but personally I prefer a more individualized summative format. During my classes at National I have been experimenting more with non preferred activities so as to increase my exposure//understanding, and use of these formats too.

Things I would maybe do differently is maybe set aside specific Q/A periods throughout the lesson as sometimes one question would lead to another. In the homeschool groups we are not under pressure to reach point A,B,C within a certain amount of time so we can often explore tangents as we see fit. Having taught in a NPS though I know this is not a luxury classroom teachers often get so I would have to become slightly more formalized when I transition back to a more structured district setting.

Pre-Assessment Reflection

For this second assignment I developed a short multiple choice pre-assessment. the pre-assessment served as a quick reference tool for myself so I would know what was known and what needed additional explanation. The students I worked with were part of our high school home school cooperative. There were a few students that participated this time that were new to me so I was not aware of what they actually knew in relation to what was to be discussed so this was a good thing. We have there are about 200 k-12 kids in the home school group we participate in.

I designed the pre-assessment to cover some basic information I would like students to walk away from an actual lecture and/or reading regarding the content. The assessment pre-supposes the students have not recently had a class on the material and is designed to gather data about pre-existing knowledge: the expectation is they try their best and attempt to rule out obvious wrong choices.

Some obvious wrong choices had the Klingons migrating to America as part of a more correct sounding answer. Unfortunately two kids chose this as a correct answer. This was part of question three (3) which nine (9) of ten (10) kids did respond correctly too. Several kids chose the next best correct answer but the most correct answer included early Colvis people in the list of peoples migrating to the new world. Question three demonstrates that in an actual class I would have to spend some time covering the land bridge and sea people migration theories for the arrival of early Colvis homo sapien-sapiens (modern man).

Other questions related to the Mayflower Compact being an example of social-contract theory. Most everyone understood the Mayflower Compact was an example of working together and choose that answer which was above social contract theory demonstrating that they did not read all answers first and stopped at a correct sounding answer. Here the kids will need to be taught test taking strategies - read all answers before answering - to ensure a more correct answer is not ruled out. this question was deigned to see if they would read all answers. It was a commonly missed question.

Most kids knew who Squanto was and why he was important so that would be an area that would be touched upon but not necessarily requiring much instructional time. Of more importance would be discussing the difference between the Iroquois, Wampanoag, Cherokee people during the Native American cultures discussions.  

One question I added in as a bonus asked what holiday do we celebrate today based of a harvest feast shared with the Pokanokets: I expected pretty much everyone to choose Thanksgiving as the most correct answer but two (2) of the ten (10) choose Black Friday and one chose the 4th of July.

The rubric was based upon number of questions answered correctly which I did not feel comfortable with. As this was a pre-assessment I would not feel comfortable assigning a grade as I am seeking what is known not what has been taught and retained. I included a rubric in assignment 2A but in actuality I would not grade a pre-assessment. In an actual classroom I would be more interested in knowing how the scores changed after a lesson so that I could measure knowledge gained and then taking it a step further measure knowledge retained at a later date.

Upon further thought the rubric might have better been based off tactics such as lining out obviously wrong choices, etc, to demonstrate test taking skills.