Preparation For The Coming Storm

This past week has proven to be an interesting and productive time for me. For the past week or so I've been fiddling around with Sophia.org and figuring out how it works and what I can do with it. On top of this I've been looking at flipped classrooms to see how they actually function. Since the lesson plan is coming up quickly for this class I thought I'd get a move on it and do the research to make the lesson plan more effective than the last time I presented.


I've also been studying my professors carefully and observing their teaching styles and instructional effectiveness. My history professor uses a textbook that is entirely make up of primary sources (speeches, documents, letters, newspapers, etc.). We are to read these primary sources outside of class but class time is marked with lectures and discussions of the content and building on what we've read. Instead of reading from a textbook that only offers the publishers point of view, we read the actual sources for ourselves and interpret them. This creates the problem that I keep hearing from other students about how they have to actually think, interpret, and understand the content instead of just memorizing it like other classes. The only problem is that while we are looking at the philosophical, political, and religious ideologies of a given time period and the effects on society events such as wars, treaties, inventions, and key political figures are underplayed or ignored.


During my observation of my professors I've also learned what not to do. Another professor of mine attempts to teach wholly around discussion which is a good idea but it is poorly executed. He's a bit intimidating and no one wants to speak up which really makes things unproductive and awkward for everyone. He also has us reading a lot for each class to where it becomes overbearing and when taking into consideration the other classes we have it becomes work overload.


 So far it's proved productive and also frustrating trying to pull together fragments of what I perceive to be better ways of creating and executing an affective lesson plan. But I've got two more years before I have to start really worrying about that so that's a relief.