"A well-organized class that is respectful and involves the students in some decision-making is a prerequisite for successful learning. Cooperative organization and student involvement alone won't build a community of learners, but they are essential building blocks in its foundation." -- Kelly Dawson Salas, The Best Discipline is Good Curriculum, 2004.
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This lesson was on East Asia geography from my first year of teaching in October of 2017 and focused on succinct note taking and a demonstration through Google Docs. Working on textbook reading from the night before, my class helped me to create a page of notes that was then shared with the class. Students were also encouraged to copy the notes on the screen to practice their note-taking strategies. I have a bit of a hard time watching this lesson because of how much I have grown over the past two years, but I remind myself that everyone starts from somewhere!
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This lesson clip on specific conflicts from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) was from the winter of my second year of teaching in 2019. Students were asked to get into groups and discuss specific conflicts mentioned in their textbook, becoming experts on their particular conflict. What you see here is the return to a big group and the debrief so that everyone can get all of the information that was necessary for the activity. I am there as a facilitator to get all of the important information on the board for my students' note-taking purposes.
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From the spring of 2018, this video is of a class discussion about the graphic novel Persepolis by Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, who writes about her childhood growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution of 1979-1981. The students were asked to analyze specific panels of interest to them and to talk about how they relate to what we had learned about the period, historically, as well as thematically within the graphic novel. I am the facilitator for this discussion, but allow students to respond to each other and to the questions I pose. I thoroughly enjoy using this text because it puts gender at the forefront of their understanding of the Islamic Revolution.
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