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Current Events
Each week students complete a Current Events lesson in which they read about a current event, then complete a graphic organizer, and usually involves some form of a think-pair-share in which students’ share their ideas with the class. The events are usually ones that are not entirely connected from week-to-week, but either tackle large issues of relative interest (like climate change) or geographic proximity (like a migrant death at the California/Mexico Border). This might not be explicitly connected to our ongoing project, but the main idea behind it is that history is being made every day, and their own stories contribute to it.
As current events was such a large part of our classroom, so too was it in my student teaching evaluations, such as the CalTPA and Gateway Assessments. This video is from the first of my Gateway Assessments and features a current event about social media and its affect on teens. In the video students are moving from corner to corner based on if they "strongly agree," "agree," "disagree," or "strongly disagree." At the end they are asked to use critical thinking skills to apply the concepts from the lesson to other parts of life. Additionally, below are the slides from this lesson.
This video depicts my second Gateway Assessment. This lesson served as the conclusion to Current Events for our year. My goal for the lesson was for students to understand how the news cycle affects what we do and don’t see. I hoped for them to think deeply about what this means for the role of news in our lives/society and to analyze the pros and cons. We revisited seven topics we’ve covered this year in current event sessions and created a timeline for the news based on publication dates. In the video, students are explaining the event they were tasked with researching, and then we transition into discussing the timeline we collectively created. Additionally, I set up the class for the extension of the lesson, a socratic seminar the following day during which students discussed the necessity of following the news and the value, if any, of the news cycle. Below are the slides that accompanied this lesson.
