Exploring the World of Social Studies with Danielle

Models, strategies, and methods all play an important role in the lives of educators as well as their classrooms. However, they are not all the same thing. Although they do share some similarities, they also have many differences. To begin, models represent the broadest level of instructional practices and present a philosophical orientation to instruction. They are used to select and structure teaching the strategies, skills, and methods for a particular instructional emphasis. Within each instructional model, there are several different types of strategies. Strategies determine the approach a teacher may take in order to achieve learning objectives. Strategies can be broken down into five subcategories: direct, indirect, interactive, experiential, and independent. Methods are the most direct way of creating learning environments and specifying the nature of the activity in which the teacher/learner will be involved during the lesson to achieve the educational goal at hand. Some metho...

Feedback in the classroom is extremely important in order to help students to succeed, but what is true feedback? True feedback is not just advice, evaluation, and grades because none of these gives students the proper tools to improve and reach their goals. Feedback is often described as comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. However, none of these are actual feedback. Instead, true feedback is actually information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a certain goal. To put this into perspective, I will give an example of proper feedback below. "I'm really happy with your determination to finish this project. I know it wasn't easy, but I knew you could do it. Your helpful attitude makes it clear that you can continue to take on new challenges and grow in this class. Keep up the good work." Now, this is a great example of proper, helpful feedback. Notice how this example involves deliberate, explicit giving of feedback by an...

Powerful learning and deep understanding derive from team building through cooperative methods. There are five characteristics of cooperative learning which is demonstrated above with the acronym PIGS. Each of the elements within the acronym PIGS has an important meaning. I will define each of them briefly below: 1. Positive Interdependence - refers to two distinct conditions that promote cooperation: a) a positive correlation of outcomes, and b) interdependence  2. Individual Accountability - occurs when the performance of each individual is assessed and results are given back to the group and the individual 3. Group Processing - t he interactions and relationships between teachers and students, and among students, as they work side by side 4. Social Skills -  behaviors through which we express ideas, feelings, opinions, affection, maintain or improve our relationship with others, and solve and strengthen a social situation Cooperative learn...

Hello everyone! Long time no see. For this week's Social Studies Methods class we were required to evaluate a real lesson plan created by a teacher. The lesson plan that I chose to evaluate was called "The 13 Colonies." It was created using a HyperDoc, which I'm not too familiar with so I figured why not try and get to know it better. That way, I might be able to use it in my own future classroom one day to create lesson plans. I particularly liked this lesson because it showed how technology can be used in a meaningful way in order to engage students within the classroom. The link to the lesson can be found here ! Now, let's go more in-depth about this lesson plan. This lesson in particular addressed two different Social Studies Standards which include: History of the United States/New York and Geography. More specifically, in this lesson students are required to gather and organize geographic information from a variety of sources and displa...

In last weeks Social Studies Methods class we talked all about the Digital Generation. To be more clear, we discussed Generation Z and Generation Alpha. I am apart of Generation Z which ranges from the years 1995-2009, whereas Generation Alpha ranges from the years 2010-2024. Before I start talking all about that, I want to begin with the fun activity that we began class with, which is known as a "brain-break." A brain-break is exactly what is sounds like: a break from whatever you are focusing on at the time. They are proven to show real benefits that include a reduction of anxiety, stress, and frustration. The brain-break that my class and I participated in was an acrostic of our names from the letters A-Z. A picture of mine can be found below! As you can see, my name is Danielle. So, for example some of the words I chose to describe myself were "dedicated," "empathetic," and "funny." I would say that these words describe me pretty well and oth...

  When I look at this cartoon I cannot help but think how social media is ruining not only the lives of children, but everyone else in the world too. It has slowly taken over everything as it has so much power to consume every aspect of our lives. Another idea that comes to mind when I look at this poster is the fact that the teacher has little to no knowledge of social media. If you are going to be a teacher in this generation, it is important to be caught up on all the new fancy technology out there especially because it is just going to keep getting better and better. The use of technology must be made aware in the classroom, not only for the students but for the teacher as well. This way, the  teacher will be able to engage with the students in a more meaningful way. There are many useful tools and websites out there that can be extremely helpful when it comes to engaging students technologically.