Prentice J. Sargeant
Social Studies: Licensure 6-12
Instructional Delivery
Instructional delivery is essential is to ensure that every student is engaged in every lesson and mastering the material day by day. Without an engaging, varied lesson with multiple learning strategies, teachers are unable to create a truly active learning environment. By utilizing a student’s prior knowledge, the educator can build new material upon an established foundation, creating meaningful connections between lessons. Furthermore, differentiated instruction allows for new material to be digested in multiple ways, creating an active learning environment that creates an equal opportunity situation for every student to learn the same material. Finally, educators need to be able to use varied strategies and resources so that lesson plans can exceed monotony (base level knowledge) and truly become something that piques the students’ interest and intellectual curiosity.
Building on Prior Knowledge:
In order to build upon a student’s prior knowledge, I make sure that every warm-up activity specifically builds upon information covered in the prior class. This allows students to connect the dots between lessons, as each lesson should specifically focus on one given topic or skill before moving onto the next. Below, I have the the warm-up activities for each of my World War II lessons, indicating how each lesson built upon a student’s prior knowledge.
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Differentiation:
Differentiation is best described as when students can learn new material in different ways. Because students master new material through different means, it is important for an educator to deliver lessons that access those multiple intelligences. I try to touch on a few in every lesson, especially verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and visual-spatial. At Cave Spring, I made an effort to incorporate more than just lectures and reading assignments into my lesson plans. One of the more successful strategies I used to incorporate the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence was a World War II Leader Gallery Walk, in which students created biography sheets on various World War II leaders, hung them up in the hallway outside of the classroom, and shared their findings with their classmates. This assignment worked so well because it reinforced material they had learned in the prior class and it got everyone up and out of their seats for more lively class discussions.
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Varied Strategies:
Learning strategies in social studies are often limited with whole group instruction through long lectures and accompanying notes. In each of my lessons, I worked to make sure that, even if a lecture was necessary, it occupied no more than twenty minutes of our ninety minute class time. One of my strongest examples of utilizing varied strategies came from my lesson plan on Early Events and Ideologies of the Cold War. In this lesson, we had three primary activities:
- a lecture, in which the students and I discussed the fallout of the Big Three Alliance and the beginnings of the Cold War
- an interactive Cold War Ideology Chart, in which students compared and contrasted the political and economic ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union
- a jigsaw version of a primary source analysis, in which students, in groups, read excerpts from writings by Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Harry Truman, and then split into new groups to answer questions together about each of the documents
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Contact Information:
Prentice J. Sargeant
prentice.sargeant@gmail.com
540-797-8373