REFLECTIONS

As social studies educators, our jobs are not just to teach the content material; we are to help prepare our students for the real world by teaching real world skills.  Part of this personal development is the studying of individual development and identity.  It is important for social studies educators to take into consideration the individual development of their students when planning lessons.

A lesson that I took a lot of time to look at individual development and identity is a lesson on the Holocaust.  The Holocaust is a very good topic to use this theme because of the nature of this horrific event.  I wanted to try and get the students to not just look at the Holocaust from a third person perspective; I wanted them to view the Holocaust as if they had lived through it.

Using pictures really helped the class fully understand what occurred during the Holocaust.  I was pleased to see students getting upset and asking questions concerning how the Holocaust was able to occur.  Furthermore, students wanted to know how a person/country could kill so many people without even blinking an eye.  The questions that were posed were all really good and many of them dealt with the individual development and identity of Germans during the Holocaust.

I feel that this lesson was one of the most successful lessons that I taught throughout my student teaching experience.  Students really seemed to get involved in the lesson and seemed very interesting.  I always like it when lessons generate questions; this lesson generated the most questions.  As an educator, I like it when my students’ minds are working during the class period.  I will continue to teach individual development and identity to all of my future classes because of how important it is to the study of the social studies.