Brittany Courtot teaches a lesson on the Cold War using modern examples. She says the lesson relates to her philosophy of quieting down the class. The lesson was a success because the students were able to defend their point of view.
Brittany Courtot teaches a lesson on the Cold War using modern examples. She says the lesson relates to her philosophy of quieting down the class. The lesson was a success because the students were able to defend their point of view.
Brittany Courtot teaches a lesson on the Cold War using modern examples. She says the lesson relates to her philosophy of quieting down the class. The lesson was a success because the students were able to defend their point of view.
April 26, 2016 The lesson itself was detailing what events or policies lead to the outbreak of the Cold War. I really wanted the students to grapple with the question of: How two different economy systems could cause such political tension? To get there, I had to build off the knowledge they had from the previous Unit on the Second World War. I did this by referencing or reviewing some of the key people or events from the previous Unit, connecting it to information they have already covered. This lead to several of the student asking questions, relating the content to today, such as asking how NATO reacts to ISIS or Why Communism was such a bad thing? I was hoping the student would do this as I was referencing several modern relationships (The Ukraine Crisis, Modern-day Russia) between countries. How I measured if the students were reaching the target was to have them each have two different-colored stickers. I asked the students if they believed that containment was a good policy against the Soviet Union. They put a green sticker on one column for Yes and a yellow sticker on a column for No. In the end, the results surprised me, but when I asked the students seems eager to explain why they put it in a given place. This might be because I related it to todays world and many of them began asking similar questions in the vein during the course of the lesson. I would say that most, if not all, the students in class today seems to understand the concept and were able to defend their point of view very easily therein. This lesson captures my strength and philosophy in a few ways. First, it captures my strength of using modern examples, relating it to the students lives or something theyve seen in the news. Another strength I can see if that now I am a bit stronger with them in terms of quieting down although this is something that I can continue to improve one without using quiet you guys so much. However, I have begun to stop talk and say, Ill just wait. which seems to work with this class very well as at least most of them would life to have some notes form the class before they leave. This lesson relates to my philosophy because I relate the content to the students lives and am trying to get them to answer the So what? question by having them try to answer why it even matters that the Soviet Union was expanding its Communist boarders. Again, this is an area where I show strength within the classroom. What I would have done differently would have been to have work on my classroom management and given the students more opportunities to interact with the content perhaps adding in a current event to strengthen the modern day connections for the students.