Reflection+Near+East

Ancient Near East: This was a unit that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with. I was feeling a little pressed for time, and I also was feeling very bogged down with school work, planning, correcting, and the general day to days of teaching. I knew there were about six or seven civilizations that I wanted to cover in a very quick, fairly painless way. I knew that I didn’t really have time to do research on my own for each one and create interesting lessons. Most of the civilizations were short lived leaving little direct information behind, but influencing great civilizations to follow. Such as a Phoenicians who through their crushing of a small sea snail created purple dye which was sold at a very high price, creating the stigma that it was only for the rich and that it was “royal purple”. Also, and more importantly, they developed an alphabet that, after being adopted by the Greeks, would become the foundation for the alphabet that we currently use. So what I did to try and have the students learn some of the information that I thought was important, but I wasn’t sure how to present, was to have them investigate one of the civilizations that existed in the Near East from 1200 BCE to 500 BCE. After they gathered sufficient information they were suppose to put together a powerpoint and short activity to get this information across to the rest of the class. The students did a fantastic job gathering information on the key areas we have been focusing on, so much so that the information gathering and putting together of presentations took a full week. While the information that was presented was very thorough, in my opinion this project failed for a couple reasons and will not be done again in following semesters. For one, I gave them too much information to try and get across. Some groups were trying to discuss 700 years worth of information in their powerpoint. Also, students had to address an entire civilization instead of just a focused area of that civilization. The result was no depth, just a lot of coverage and I think very little understanding. A brief overview does very little for student comprehension and retention. A third reason this project failed was the student activities were not engaging and again did little to help understanding or facilitate actual learning. I had word searches, note guides, multiple choice quizzes, and crossword puzzles. These were easy, and for students who didn’t really understand the information to begin with, they were something that would be done to complete my assigned task. The final reason I think this failed was the entire presenting stage of the assignment was really boring! If I was bored, I knew the students were probably very bored. Pretty much this entire 2 week period completely went against my entire idea and policy of authentic assessment that was to engage the students and appealed to their interests. I know other teachers have students do powerpoint presentations to present a given topic, but I don’t think I will ever do it again, especially after seeing how great more authentic assessment can be. The enjoyment that I saw my students have with so many of my other projects was completely gone during these two weeks. Students were there to get a task done, and there was little to no learning going on. As the presentations dragged on and on, I genuinely began to feel bad about the whole assignment. There was nothing authentic about this assignment and as a result there was also no creativity. There was nothing for the students to take ownership of. Why would they want to learn this way? And the answer is simply they didn’t. They finished their powerpoint without retaining much information, and once presentations started they turned off and waited for the whole thing to be done. Just like in so many other classes they sit in all day where they aren’t allowed to be creative and take some ownership in their learning.