My+class

Ancient Western Civilization:

I have chosen to use my Ancient Western Civilization class as the focus for my action research. This is a class that is brand new to not just me but also the school this year. Since I first decided to get into teaching the one topic I always wanted to teach was the ancient Mediterranean. After my first year of teaching here at Muskego I was given the opportunity to write and propose a new course dealing with ancient history. I jumped at the opportunity and after a year of developing curriculum, mapping out the course, and discussing details with our school board, the course was finally approved to be taught starting this year, the 2009-2010 school year. This class is an upperclassman elective. I have primarily seniors with just a handful of juniors. I would say almost two thirds of the students who are taking this course are students that I have had in the years past in other classes I have taught. Which can be a very good thing because you already have a relationship with them and they understand you, but it can be a bad thing because sometimes they can feel a little too comfortable with you and the class becomes a little harder to control. Primarily my experience has was the first one, I had a great relationship and understand with almost everyone in this class and I really feel that helps the teaching environment and my ability to connect the material with my students. Many of the students in this class did not take it because they loved the material, but instead took it because I was teaching it. Which again is great because they are there because they want to be and they like me as a teacher, but can be difficult because they may not feel fully engaged by the material all the time. I knew taking a completely new course would be challenging, but to add to the year’s difficulty I was also assigned another new prep, AP European History. With two new preps, one of which being an AP and the other being a new course with no set curriculum to borrow from, I knew I had my hands full for the year. I wanted my Ancient course to be fun and interesting, but I also knew it would be a great challenge to create the types of lessons and activities I wanted while preparing for two courses that were new to me. This was a huge reason I decided to use my Ancient Western Civilization course for my research and one of the reasons I decided to focus on authentic assessment. I wanted my class to be fun, interesting, engaging, appeal to what individual students were interested in, all while challenging them and making them learn the material. All those things are authentic assessment. With the use of authentic assessment in mind, I progressed through my course with the strategy of giving the students a lot of background information and a solid foundation to start with and then letting them investigate on their own while creating a representation of the material that made sense to them and dealt with topics that interested them. This took a heavy burden off of me and my preparation. Now I just had to work through most information on a broad overarching level, digging into topic every once and while. I didn’t have to worry about creating tests and correcting them, I didn’t have to worry about teaching every detail. I gave my students a jumping off point, pointed them in the right direction and allowed them find their way to a finish line that was different for everyone. Once I settled on this style of teaching for my class, I felt like I had a ton of bricks lifted off me, and I really felt that it opened so many doors for my teaching on a day to day basis. The curriculum for this class covers Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome. The first three are covered in the first quarter while the last two are covered the second quarter. For each area of study I tried to focus on several major themes; the role of women, social structure, government, religion, key people and events, and social achievements, while also focusing on how the environment played into the development of each of these areas. I would usually give a decent amount of background information on these themes through lecture, homework assignments, and classroom activities. Once I had given the information that I felt was needed, I would assign a culmination project. This project would be their authentic assessment and would be my gauge as to how well they learned the material. These projects varied from unit to unit. Some would be open ended, giving students complete choice as to what they wanted to produce to display the information, some I would tell the students the type of project, a newspaper for example, they were to complete. No matter the project they would have to display an understanding of most of the key themes mentioned above, however the information they used to display that understanding was up to them. I had some students who simply tried to use the information I gave in class, most students however would do some extra research and bring in new information to help their display of understanding. The result of this instruction style was a class where half the time I was dictating the information and process in which it was administered, and the other half of the time the students were gathering information they were interested in choosing how they learned and understood best.