TIP Presentations

The TIP presentations have been very informative. I think more classes should go over strategies to use in the classroom. I spent years taking education classes and at the end of them I kept thinking that I still wasn't prepared to be a teacher. I am not the most creative individual. Sometimes I need help in coming up with ideas and fun strategies to use in a classroom. I even have this issue in coaching football, as a lot of coaches might. This is why their is a widespread sharing of drill tapes. We have thousands of videos on our computers in the office with examples of practice drills from other school that we can use with our players. All of our coaches watch these videos to see if we can come up with new and beneficial drills for our players to go through. This is why this class has been so beneficial to me. We have gone over lists of strategies to use in the classroom. I can keep this knowledge and my bag of tricks to refer back to, almost like my drill tapes in coaching, and I can use them in the future if I ever need to. The TIP presentations have really given me an overload of material and strategies to use. Not all of them will necessarily apply to high school history students but a majority of them do, and the other ones have given me ideas of other things I could do in my classrooms.  

Direct Instruction

Direct Instruction can take place in any classroom where there is a large set of content to be covered. This strategy may not always be the most fun to employ for yourself or your students, but sometimes it is a great way to get a lot of content to your students. Direct Instruction doesn't have to always be boring though. The teacher can make the lecture a lot more interesting by adding a PowerPoint as a visual and maybe attaching pictures to this presentation or video clips as examples for your students. The teacher can also add in some supplementary reading that the students may find more interesting. Direct Instruction is a very important strategy to use even if it is not always the most popular strategy. Some students may even prefer this strategy. Some might not like being in a group discussion or a whole class seminar, and simply prefer being provided the material from their teacher, studying it, and then being assessed on the material.

Socratic Seminar

One of the strategies we discussed recently was the Socratic Seminar. This was an interesting model, and could work well in a high school history class. There are plenty of debatable topics in history. This would be a good chance to use this strategy and have the students discuss possible scenarios and outcomes of historical events. A teacher could use it in so many forms, such as taking a historical event and discussing what the outcome would have been if certain variables were changed. This is a good chance for the students to think critically, and learn from each other through the class discussions.

Their are a few negatives to this strategy though. One of the negatives is that students who do not like to speak in class may not participate. Discussions may be a few students who like to speak out going back and forth. The teacher needs to figure out how to make the students comfortable in the setting and figure out a way to get students more involved. The teacher also needs to be aware of the potential for the discussions to get faced paced and jumping all over the place and for certain students to not get a chance to speak.