Coming to a Close-Fieldwork Reflection

Over the past couple of weeks, I was given the opportunity to work with second grade students at Bishop Dunn Elementary School. Now that our experience has come to a close, I must say that this has been a truly rewarding opportunity. At first I was a bit hesitant and a little nervous because I had never conducted a unit plan before. However, I am glad that I was given the chance to teach three different lessons.

The topic for our unit plan was money and banking. It was broken down into three main lessons. The first lesson that we taught was a direct instruction lesson. The lesson was titled "A Trip to the Bank." It focused mainly on teacher based instruction. In this lesson, we introduced the main concepts related to banking such as income, credit, checking, savings, deposit, withdraw, etc. The focus of the lesson was for students to gain an understanding of how you earn money, where you keep your money, and why the bank is so important. After teaching the lesson, we guided the students through an activity in order to check for understanding.Take a look at this video about direction instruction that I watched prior to designing this lesson! 

 

The second lesson that we taught was an Inquiry based lesson. This lesson is student-centered which means the students directly contribute to their own learning. In this lesson, the students were given a problem and had to work together in small groups in order to solve that problem. It was obvious that the students were much more engaged in this lesson then the direct instruction lesson because they were able to directly participate and contribute to the learning process. I was able to see that some students learn better through interactive participation rather then simply having things explained to them. 

The third and final lesson we taught was a Collaborative Learning based lesson. Again this lesson was student-centered so the students were responsible for their own learning. In this lesson the students needed to work together in order to figure out how to get apples from a farmer who only traded for eggs. Each student took on a specific role and helped their group to come to a conclusion. This lesson differed from the first two lessons because each student had to contribute to the process in order to achieve the goal. 

I learned so much through my fieldwork experience over the last couple of weeks. I think that the most important thing that I learned is how important it is to teach different types of lessons in order to meet the needs of all of the students. Each student learns differently and sometimes you need several different types of lessons about one topic in order to effectively communicate the idea. I am so glad I was given the opportunity to design and implement this unit plan because I feel that I have a better understanding of all the careful planning and consideration that needs to go into creating an effective unit. Another thing that I learned is how important it is to design lesson that will help students to develop essential skills. Social Studies requires students to develop critical-thinking, problem solving, decision making, and social interaction skills. These skills do not come easily to all students so it is important to create lessons that will help to foster the development of these skills. Overall, I think this was an extremely rewarding experience and I am so glad that I got the opportunity to work with these students.