reflection+for+social+studies+interns

In this page you can post your thoughts, insights, understandings and critique you have based on your reflection within the internship year. the reflection can be upon classroom management, curriculum, teachers' responsibilities, observations you have in other classes or any other issues regarding the job of teaching. these reflection are helpful for you, and they are not for internship evaluation purposes.

Andrea Petitta One lesson that really worked out in my psychology class was a discussion about gender. At the beginning of class, the board was split in half, and I chose two volunteers (one male, one female) to write. The class took a couple of minutes to shout out words that have to do with women, and the male volunteer wrote these words into a list on half of the board. Then the class took another few minutes to shout out words that had to do with men and the female volunteer wrote this list on the board. This activity went really well. Students were excited to get to shout things out. They also laughed because some of the comments on the lists were silly. Once we were done, I had some discussion questions (How do you feel about the items in the list for your gender? How did you feel shouting out words for the other gender? Do you feel hostile towards people of the opposite gender in the class right now?)

After this activity, we had a short power point about gender roles, stereotypes, and the ways in which people learn their own gender roles when they are children.

After the notes, I played some videos which showed commercials that had gender stereotypes included. These videos included car commercials, kitchen appliances, cleaning supplies, and other things. Then we had a large discussion about how men and women are portrayed in these commercials. Students enjoyed watching the videos and participated in the discussion because they were interested. For the last part of class, I assigned the students into groups. These groups were given ten minutes to recreate and act out commercials that they have seen, other than the ones that I showed, that included gender stereotypes. The groups took the last five minutes of class to act out their commercials for the class. The students seemed to enjoy this because they had a chance to entertain each other. I think this lesson was successful, because students were engaged the whole time. There were a few notes to take, but most of the lesson was focused on active learning because students were shouting out at the beginning and acting at the end. I also think students enjoyed learning about the topic because it is an important one that is relevant to them. Gender is something that plays a huge role in how we work together and act in a community, so students got a chance to explore something that affects them in a huge way.

petittaa@msu.edu