Veronica Dean-Reg Ed Psych 2019

Lesson Description:  The lesson I decided to teach was a New Deal Coalition activity. I wanted the students to understand what the New Deal was all about and also be able to learn about the complexities of passing legislation and the different moving parts that need to be in place for that to happen. This lesson was at the end of a unit on the Great Depression and New Deal (as an approach to fixing the economic crisis of the United States). The students had a lot of background knowledge on the topic already since they had studied the economic boom after World War I, the primary causes of the Great Depression, and how difficult life was for most of the people in the United States during the Great Depression. They had been introduced to a couple of the New Deal programs so it felt like they had a good preparation to be able to discuss what each different group (Corporate Executive, Black Activist, Labor Unionist, Wealthy Southern Landowner, Unemployed Person) wanted from the gover...

Current Teacher Behavior 1. The Constructivist strategies I've seen the most in the classrooms I've observed would have to be Jigsaw-type activities or Reciprocal Learning like Literacy Circles. Some classrooms are very lecture-based and I struggled to find any constructivist learning strategies, but Jigsaw's are used to break up class material and have groups "specialize" in their topic with others and then break up and teach it to others. This effective strategy for learning by teaching is also used in the Lit Circle's I saw where students all read a text and had to prepare different aspects of it to share in a small group. The main tenets I see at play here are Structure, because the teacher does try to start and end collaborative learning with a discussion on how this information fits into the bigger picture of what they're learning, and probably Readiness, because she definitely has to adjust the concepts and lessons for their level of understandin...