Talk:Vanessia Wilkins' Mini-Course

Review -- Shannonmcshane (talk) 16:31, 3 December 2016 (EST)

Hi Vanessia!

I just got finished up reviewing your mini-course. As a past student that never really enjoyed social studies, I appreciated your different view. I think I didn’t really see the point of learning about things that already happened because my social studies teachers made me memorize dates and names of generals in battles, rather than analyzing and evaluating like you mention. Here are my thoughts!

Things I liked:

I love the idea that you have the analogy of the lunchroom fight and the principal trying to figure out how the fight started with multiple perspectives. I think if this analogy was done with students in a classroom, they would be able to see that history of the same event has multiple different perspectives. This would be a really great way to start the year off in a social studies classroom.

I like the layout in your introduction page, with the title of Unit 1: Lunchroom Fight with a short paragraph about what the unit is about.

Using the National Council for the Social Studies is a great resource to quote!

I know you mentioned you hope to put assessments at the end of end unit. I’m excited to see what those might be!

Have you considered this?

Keep in mind that your audience is full of teachers, not the students. Unit 1 is set up as a great lesson to use in the classroom, but your audience is teachers. With this mini-course, it was my understanding that the information should be helping educators. For example, in Anthony’s mini-course, “Integrating SMART Technology in the Elementary Classroom,” his objectives are centered on teachers learning more about things to use in their classroom to help their students (i.e., finding interactive lessons, making routines simpler through the use of technology, etc.)

In your performance objectives, if your audience is a group of teachers, they should already know how to do these things (identifying point of view/purpose, distinguish between fact/opinion). Your performance objectives are based on the participants of your course: teachers. What do you want the teachers to learn about reading like a historian? What information are you providing to convince educators (like you and me) to teach their students to analyze and evaluate different perspectives?

Perhaps this is a misunderstanding on my part. However, I would check in with our professor to make sure that this interpretation is something she is looking for!

-Shannon Mc.