REFLECTIONS

As the world enters into the days of a global economy, the world is more closely tied together than ever before.  However, there as always been some type of global connection.  It is important for students to see that everything done in the United States has the possibility of affecting other parts of the world.  Too often people forget that there are other people and countries in the world.  To make students better citizens, social studies educators must incorporate the global connection theme into their lessons.

I used the Cold War as an opportunity to incorporate this theme into my lessons.  Some goals of the lesson were to help learners to explain conditions and motivations that contribute to conflicts among nations and to provide opportunities for learners to evaluate the effects of changing technologies on the global community.  Since the Cold War is so closely linked to the dropping of the atomic bomb, it is also important to discuss science and technology.

The Cold War lesson was taught using direct instruction and discussion in order to help students create meaning.  It was surprising to me how many students did not know whom the Cold War was between.  Some guessed that the United States was involved, but many did not realize that the Soviet Union was also involved.  This lesson started out slow because I had assumed that students had some prior knowledge concerning the Cold War.

Not all lessons will go as they had been planned; this was one of those lessons.  I had hoped that this lesson would start out as direct instruction and would change into a class discussion.  However, this was not the class.  Because the students did not have the basic knowledge concerning the Cold War, I had to spend more time dealing with the basics.  Having to spend more time on the basics is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is important for teachers not to plan lessons that exceed the abilities of their students.  Even if teachers plan lessons to the assumed ability of their students, there will still be times when the students will not know as much as you thought.  This is where improvisation skills become useful.  Educators are not being paid to teach content knowledge; educators are being paid to teach students.  It is useless to continue following a lesson plan if there is little or no student comprehension.  Sometimes lessons just have to be thrown away.

Overall, this lesson went okay.  I feel that I adjusted very well after finding out exactly what the students’ prior knowledge was.  Because of this discrepancy, I was not able to use my lesson plan.  The most important thing that came out of this lesson was that I learned how to improvise a lesson plan.  I now know what it is like when a lesson plan blows up in ones face.

In the future, I will continue to teach about global connections.  This is one theme that I really like because too many people in the United States and elsewhere are too egocentric.  The world needs to understand that we are a part of a larger community and this message needs to start in the homes and schools.  It is time to learn about other countries and cultures because there is more intermixing of cultures than ever before.  Just about everything in the social studies has some type of global connection; it is up to the teachers to make these connections apparent.