During our second week of summer, we conducted a workshop on the benefit of sourcing as well as exposing our students to primary documents from the 1920s to help them understand the societal contrasts that existed during the Roaring Twenties. This class that we conducted is an example of how no matter how much you plan, you can never really know how a class is going to go or how the students will respond to a lesson. In order to engage all of our students, we created a Semantics Feature Analysis by which they agreed or disagreed with a simple plus or minus in regards to the documents (see document 3). We also scaffolded the sourcing with leading questions on the back of the analysis graph. Although many of the students filled this out exactly as we had hoped, there were a few that either thought the questions were optional, or answered one word responses, never delvign deep into the source as we had hoped. I learned the importance of clear and basic instructions to instruct our classroom and to also have the instructions displayed on the PowerPoint or the board throughout the activity.

     A second aspect of planning that I learned through this lesson is that you don't always need to stick to everything on the lesson plan, no matter how much time was spent creating it. We made a Timeline activity which we hoped to use to contextualize all that we had done for our students, however because with the sourcing activity and carousel taking longer than expected, we made the executive decision to pass on the Timeline activity until another day. Although this lesson didn't go exactly as planned, I learned an immense amount about the importance of flexibility, and ensuring that each lesson is adapted to best benefit the students.

To see the full lesson plan for this day, please select the following link: 792013.docx