Reflection

Throughout the course of our social science methods class I explored, discovered, and grew in so many great ways that will befit me in my future classroom someday. From class presentations, small group work, independent research, and other teaching strategies I now know about the social studies standards, I understand current trends in social studies education. I can plan high-level thinking strategies and I can use technology successfully in the classroom to influence students. I am able to prepare organized lessons that integrate multiple different content areas, and I am able to create learning experiences for students with diverse abilities.

In order to know both the national and state social studies standards we got to partake in some great learning strategies. To learn about the national standards we were broken into small groups where we got to work with our peers to make a presentation about one specific standard to present to our class. I thought this was great because each group got to break down their standard which helped us really understand it. While our classmates presented, we were able to take notes on the other standards to keep in our teaching files to use as a reference someday. This was good because it allowed us to go in-depth to a standard and become the expert in at least one area.

Since there are so many state standards at each grade level, we were all given the opportunity to choose a grade to work with and really understand the standards at that age level. By breaking down into small groups, where each representative for a grade level shared the standard, it generated a lot of group discussions about different ideas you could incorporate into your future classroom. I liked that strategy, ...

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...he handouts we were given to keep in our teaching files, really helped us open our minds and understand about current trends in social studies education that we can implement in our own classroom someday. Our service learning projects are too something I feel is very important to use in the classroom because we need to show our students that it’s also important to be good citizens as well as good students.

Being able to write this final reflection from our social science course on how we met the seven different objectives has really helped me tie everything all together. I have been able to look back at everything we have done and see how it’s all interrelated into helping me become a great educator someday. I learned some great strategies that can be implemented in different content areas throughout many age levels, and that I am very grateful for. Thank you!