This lesson plan was collaboratively created with an outdoor educator. The goal of this lesson is to teach students the history of a location, create a sense of place, and to teach them about working in groups. The class would be broken up into multiple groups that will create their own dynamics. In addition to working on group dynamics, the students will be individually working on a historical event project. Each student will pick their own topic in hopes that it will make the assignment feel purposeful.

The students will also have meetings with the outdoor educator to work on group dynamics such as respect, compromise, and collaboration. The students will also have check-in meetings with me to talk about their historical event projects that they are independently exploring.  The individual and group meetings with the teacher will take up a significant amount of time, but we decided it was the best way to work on group problems and to make sure each student is in engaging in decision making (group work) and exploration (historical event project), and they are able to intervene or help students who seem to struggle with any aspect of the assignments. 

What I learned:

What I learned was that despite our collaboration the group dynamic work did not seem to relate to the content I was teaching in the history section of the lesson. To me, the whole point was to create a human ecological or collaborative lesson that included multiple disciplines and interconnected them in some way over one topic. The lesson we created felt like there were very distinct disciplines being taught when one teacher was around versus the other. This interconnectedness is important to me as a human ecologist and I plan to work on more seamlessly combining disciplines in my lessons. 

This is one standard that I paid particularly close attention to and intentionally incorporated into my classroom on a daily basis. I did various things to ensure my classroom was a positive environment and adapted to whatever learning activity we were doing that week. I did things such as moving the desks around until I found a style that fit the students and myself. I provided a cork board with extra copies of work from the previous classes. In addition, I had a "Resource Wall" where students could find note-taking templates, helpful hints handouts, pens, pencils, etc. I also would hand out pieces of paper with positive quotes to students who did something well or were having a hard day (everyone had the option to take one though and many did). I also would start classes off with a question that a student would randomly pick from a hat. These questions started as general questions and then increased in intensity to become more introspective. These were key physical components of my class that I belieive created an environment that supported individual and collaborative learning. 

​

In my lesson plans, about once every 2-3 weeks, I would schedule a time where students were working in pairs or individually and I would have independent meetings with each student. During these independent meetings I would ask every student the same questions: about how they think they are doing in the class, how they think the class is going overall, any activities they would like to do more or less of. As a student teacher, I would also periodically ask the students what it has been like having a student-teacher. I would also ask them for suggestions or feedback about activities. ​Lastly, we would set a personal goal for them related to the study habits self-evaluation they did. 

What I learned:

In conversations with students, I came to the conclusion that these things do make a difference. The students verbally and in written evaluations appreciated the work I was doing to make my classroom a positive space. Some of the students felt that I was too positive. All students agreed that the resource wall was a great and useful addition to our space. I have found that your learning space and the way you interact with your students makes a genuine difference in the way they learn and interact with the class. 

In the future, I plan to continue to do the things I have already started doing such as desk arrangement and positive affirmations. I hope to be able to keep up with the independent meetings. When doing content, it can be super easy to forget about the meetings and to find time to meet with every student because it takes multiple class periods and a lot of pre-planning. In order to make sure I do this, I want to make it a part of our class routine that at the beginning and the end of each unit we have independent meetings. By making it a routine then I will feel more obligation to ensure that they happen. I found these meetings to be very informative and helped my students gain a connection with me and have a place where they can check in.