Technological Advancements Lesson
This specific artifact was pretty early on in my integration into the classroom and really at the beginning of my student teaching, so I had a lot to reflect on after the fact. The lesson we were focusing on was Industrialization and the Gilded Age, and so to get through and have students work though technological advancements, I put together this Google Slides presentation. Each student would make a copy of the slides (through Schoology, our online platform), and they each would turn in a filled out presentation. But the students would have one specific advancement per group of 4 or 5, and together they would work through the directions as a group. And I would invite each group to share out information, so that as a class we all gained knowledge about the technological advancements. My goal in this activity was to work on the Teacher Quality Standard III, Element A; which states that teachers demonstrate knowledge about the ways in which learning takes place, including the levels of intellectual, physical, social, and emotional development of their students. Up until this point in the semester the student had done little group work, we would do mainly pairs before this. And so I wanted to start to create the space of collaboration for the students with more of their peers instead of just on a partner basis. In the long run, as a teacher I know that this kind of collaborative classroom is setting the students up for success in their own learning. In this space they were not only building their intellectual learning they were also building upon that socialization learning as well. I felt that utilizing my knowledge as a teacher by implementing rubric element 1, for this project, was really going to kickstart the students' collaboration and socialization with one another, their physical awareness (being that they were separated into groups now, and intellectual collaboration with each other. As for the reflection upon this artifact, it was a great start to my collaborative classroom, the students were tentative at first, but then began to realize that working together could be a really fun and productive way to learn. This helped to propel further group work activities and lessons in my class, because the students were becoming more comfortable with not only their peers but with actively participating in their own learning.

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