How to Teach Direct Lessons

Direct lesson plans are lessons where you throw a good amount of information at the students. You keep throwing information and review a couple of times in the lesson, just to make sure they are understanding.

You must create an introduction where you pre-assess the students on your topic and tell them what you will be teaching today. The introduction should be about 3-5 minutes. The development should be where you give them all the information and review it in chunks. Usually a teacher should give them a note sheet so they are following the slides and note sheet filling it in accordingly. This helps make sure they are paying attention, because students get bored when a lot of information is getting thrown at them. This is why during your development to have lots of pictures and videos to engage your audience. Usually during the development you should have at least three activities, one is the note sheet. Some examples of activities can be matching, questions, crossword puzzles. The closure should be what they learned, the students should be saying this. There should also be a final activity like an independent practice. A great example of an independent practice is making a Kahoot.

Teaching Space

In Science methods class, we had to teach our classmates about the solar system and different things in space. I great way to do this was using the digital tool Time toast. Out of the four of us, we picked a random NASA article each. Then we created a word wall using WordCloud. This was a great way to introduce a space lesson, and pre-assess students learning. We used our word wall words to find more information on them, like when they were discovered and by who. For example, a word of ours was STAR, so we talked about the first person to discover that the Sun was a star and that was Anaxagoras in 450 BCE. We created 13 events out of the 13 words on our word wall. As we taught our colleagues about Space, we made sure to elaborate more than what was on the board, we often repeated what we already learned. This is a good thing though so we can implant the information into their minds more. Finally we used a Kahoot, another digital tool, to create a summative assessment of what our classmates just learned. The Kahoot only had five questions, but it told us if our classmates understood our lesson or not.

Link to our Time toast

Collaboration Plans

Cooperative lesson plans are very important in unit plans.  Cooperative lesson plans focus on student's social skills. Also teachers must always remember that cooperative lessons have two goals, understanding content and practicing social skills. Performance objectives are based on what the teacher wants the students to learn.
 
This should be social skills, content, and evaluating themselves, as well as the group on how they collaborated. Materials should one set which is given out to each group, there is no individual materials. The introduction is where we find out the students social skills, and report on what the students will learn today. The development is where the teacher explains what he or she expects of the students, with both their social skills and the content being learned. The closure should also have two parts, the group projects and the roles the students played in their groups. With every cooperative lesson you should have the acronym, PIGS. Positive interdependence which means the students have to work with one another to benefit each other. Individual accountability means each student is accountable for their work in the group, the group must evaluate themselves and one another. Group Processing is when the students reflect on their work, they also talk about positive and effective working relationships. Social skills is the certain skills needed for cooperative learning. These skills are forming skills, functioning skills, fermenting skills, formulating skills, etc. Remember, Cooperative lessons have two goals, and two closures.

Dealing Children Observing Domestic Abuse

Today I learned about many gray areas when teaching students. These grey areas have to deal with what students are going through and how to approach them in a "crisis." One great area is emotional impacts students have such as domestic violence. One in five children are exposed to domestic abuse. Students sometimes open up to a teacher about what's going on in their household if they are comfortable with their teacher.

To help children open up to teachers, we should reach students on an emotional level. We should use mindfulness when they reach out to us. Whenever domestic violence happens most students believe it is their fault. This is where teacher's have to say that it is not their fault. Sometimes students ask themselves if they should call 911 on a parent, would the parent be disappointed with him or her. If this is said to a teacher the teacher must say back that this is not their fault and it is about if they feel safe in the environment. If a student does not feel safe in the environment then 911 is one of the best options.
Students tell teachers if their is a domestic abuse going on differently when they grow up. In elementary students tell through drawings they do, while high school students tell if they have a trusting relationship with you. The bottom line is to reach students on an emotional level, be trustworthy, and always ensure them that it is not their fault.