Abstract
Teaching my pre-service to breakdown the Social Studies standards into small bytes to write a lesson plan is the most difficult thing to do. Being the reflection practitioner, I have spent several semesters considering how to make their comprehension of the standard and its parts more understandable. This semester I believe I have made a breakthrough! I asked the students to imagine a forest and think of the entire standard as written by the Georgia Standard for Excellence (GSE) as that forest. The forest consists of individual trees, different kinds, but all are part of the forest and then each tree has leaves. I encouraged them to look at the standards in the same way. The forest, as the standards, the sub-standards, as the trees and the leaves as the individual topics that fall under each. Imagine then that they want to cut down the forest using an axe. It is hard work, but one must cut individual trees at a time. The forest cannot be cut down with one swing of the axe. In the same way the standard must be taught one topic at time. Students connected to the metaphor when I armed myself in class with several large branches representing the forest and asked them to remove each branch(tree) one at a time. I could see that they understood what I was teaching them.
Presenters
Ethel King-McKenzieAssociate Professor, Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education, Kennesaw State University
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Past and Present in the Humanistic Education
KEYWORDS
Teaching, Georgia, Standad, Excellence
