Matthew Spindler and Gibran Raya

POD Reflection
Group: Jessica Stewart, Matthew Spindler, Gibran Raya

I: Summary: The group collaboration began by reviewing all of the units to be covered
for the rest of the year and mapped it out on a weekly and monthly schedule. We also
reviewed the DYO process and considered the positive and negatives of the current
project in order to make improvements on future attempts.
Our work during the POD reflection encompassed both substantive and procedural
strategies to help the student learn course material in a more meaningful and purposeful
way. We all thought that a potent tactic would be to create an essential question
encapsulating each unit. For example, the essential question for the unit covering the
French Revolution would ask “was the French Revolution truly a revolution.” Students
would study the causes and consequences of the event in order to better comprehend the
relationship between the state and people which would result in the ability to make
analytical connections through answering the essential question.
Our group also came to the realization that various students in the classroom are
struggling with multiple choice questions as a result of literacy limitations. We decided
that it was imperative to craft lessons using divergent literacy strategies such as requiring
students to underline and define important vocabulary words in the questions. This is
because a multitude of the questions contain extraneous language making it difficult for
students to follow the relevant content.

II:

Relationships: Our class stresses developing relationships with the students in order to
promote an optimal environment for learning and success. We have delineated roles in
the classroom to ensure that students are given the best chance at performing well on all
assignments. For example, while one teacher is discussing the lesson, the other will walk
around the classroom to ensure that all students are on task and focusing. We also
consistently encourage students to attend office hours to complete missed or incomplete
work, and are always open to listening to students’ social and emotional concerns in the
process.

Process: The writing and reading process have become integral forces in our classroom.
We introduced a mnemonic called TEA (Topic Sentence, Evidence, and Analysis) to
facilitate structuring and writing body paragraphs. The overall writing level of the
students has significantly improved since introduction of this literacy strategy. Students
are developing the ability to write organized arguments buttressed by evidentiary support.
We adapted the aforesaid mnemonic, instead of using the complete structure, in
consideration of the students in our CTT classes struggle with the writing process.

Curiosity: One strategy employed in the classroom to spark curiosity and interest is to
make connections between historical content and current controversies. For example,
prior to highlighting the intricate content of the Enlightenment, we allowed students to
debate the controversial questions of the time period in relation to today’s issues. For
example, we asked the question “Are humans being naturally good or evil?” Many of the
students offered insightful arguments and shared personal stories. Overall, this tactic
appeared to generate diligence and an interest in the substantive content. We aim to begin
lessons and units by allowing students to share their prior knowledge and to pose
questions connecting to the topics.

Resilience: Our goal is to create a classroom milieu where students can feel confident
and capable of their abilities. All students are consistently praised for insightful or
elaborate answers. Students recently struggled on an examination, so we crafted the idea
of allowing the students to review their tests while writing explanations correcting their
wrong answers. The goal is to give students the belief that they are capable of succeeding
in school and that it is important to learn from past mistakes. This is particularly relevant
to our study of global history since students need to repeatedly practice the skill-set
employed by the Regents assessment.