GSU Social Studies > Courses > EDSS 6560 >

Practicing Pedagogy Assignment Information

Overview

Lecture is the most prevalent and possibility most misused pedagogical form practiced by social studies teachers. As a method of delivering content, lecture is efficient and, seemingly powerful. The problem is that lecture does not require active participation on the part of students. As a part of this program, you will learn some techniques to enliven lectures. This assignment has been designed to given you an opportunity to practice explaining content in the form of a lecture to a group of people. This is a practice at which you must become accomplished. Your explanations will not always be in the form of lectures. You may simply be explaining an assignment or answering a question. For this assignment, there will be several ground rules and expectations and these are listed below.

1. Your presentation cannot go over 15 minutes. This rule will be very strictly enforced.
2. You must use at least one visual aid. It can be a handout, a map, something displayed from the computer, an overhead, etc.
3. You must present an advanced organizer. These are short summaries, presented in advance of your content, which prepare the learner for the coming material.
4. You must practice effective delivery, meaning you must project your voice, move around the room, etc (see below for more).
5. You must present on pre-assigned content derived from a web-based presentation of a local history topic. Part of your task will be to explain how this local historical content matters on a national or global level.

Criteria for "effective delivery" of your presentation

• Always face your learners.
• Know your content. This will enable you to move freely and speak in a manner that is conversational.
• Move around the room.
• Engage your learners with anecdotes.
• Sequence temporal content.
• Manage the time. This means you must not linger in your explanations.
• Informally assess your learners understanding of what you are communicating by asking at least one non-volunteer and one volunteer to respond to a question.

The content for your lecture

You will use a web-based presentation of the Story of Asaph Perry, a turn of the 20th Century resident of Cherokee County Georgia available at http://www.gdhp.org/Cherokee/narrative/ Asaph's story is presented along with the documents which were used to construct his story. Your task will be to select a narrow element, theme, event, or character in the story and expand on it with your lecture. You must complete two tasks as you prepare your talk. First, you will have to make a connection between the content you are presenting and the broader standards in Georgia or United States history. These standards are available at http://www.glc.k12.ga.us/ Second, you will have to inquiry in more depth about your topic to fill in the nuance and detail, missing in the online version of the story. This will require that you read the primary source documentation available on the web site. You may also need to engage resources and content not available on the web site.

Summary of your content and its pedagogy

You will also write a 4 page summary of the content and pedagogical potential of this content. This content summary should reflect what you present in class and will provide me with means to confirm your subject matter knowledge about this content. The pedagogy emerging from your content knowledge is more complex. I would like for you to think about what parts of your content knowledge are most important. This process of selecting content for presentation in class is an essential part of planning to teach. I would also like for you to consider what you want student to know in terms of the depth of their knowledge about objectified units of subject matter. You should balance these objectified knowledge statements with a more global or inclusive statement about what you want students learn about when they engage this content.

Assessment of this project

The assessment of your work will be carefully focused on the following rubric and criteria. These assessment rubric/criteria relate directly to the criteria described above for the two parts of the assignment. The project is worth 20 points or 20 percent of your final grade. The lecture presentation will count 10 points and the written summary will count 10 points.

Lecture presentation rubric

Written summary criteria

1. The written summary must covey a single thesis or proposition relating to a narrow element, theme, event, or character from the Asaph Perry story. This should be presented at the beginning of the summary.
2. The thesis or proposition must be expanded upon in the body or main portion of the paper.
3. Knowledge of content must be abundantly displayed throughout the paper. The measure of this criteria is general the extent to which you fill in the details in a rich and communicative manner as it relates to the thesis or proposition emerging from your selected narrow element, theme, event, or character from the Asaph Perry Story.
4. There must be a clear and obvious connection to the Georgia or United States standards as presented in the QCC.
5. Engagement with primary sources from the web site or some additional resources outside of the web site must be evident in the form of direct references.
6. Content must be selected from a broader content knowledge base which is appropriate for some specific group of learners. Identify the grade of these learners.
7. Include a short list (3 or more) of objectified knowledge statements which learners should be expected to master. These statements should lay claim the depth at which students should be expected to learn the material as well as the actual content they would be learning.
8. A global statement regarding the larger purposes or goals of any student engagement with this content must be included.