To represent Standard Six: Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication, I chose a debate lesson I held in my student teaching World

History classes. I selected this lesson because I believe it demonstrates my ability to recognize and address student oral communication needs though meaningful delivery of relevant content. Similarly to the first artifact for this standard, I created this lesson to address a specific need I identified with the students in my world history classes; they needed to practice their oral communication skills. According to my cooperating teacher, it had been a long time since the students had done some kind of debate or presentation. I had also begun to notice that, oftentimes when I tried to challenge them with a contentious or controversial topic, almost everyone quietly went along with my opinion, or did not bother to speak up if they disagreed. It is my understanding that much of the vital force in the social studies comes from the dialectical, back-and-forth discussions of potentially contentious issues, historical or otherwise, so I wanted to engage the students in a way that would prepare them to do this on a deeper level. Having them debate on which intellectual of the Scientific Revolution was the most important gave them a chance to develop those skills in a very relevant way- it also helped to reinforce the content they had learned about the previous day. Even though it was somewhat of an arbitrary topic, I was pleased to discover how much the students seemed to engage with the activity, and one class even begged to continue the debate the following day. As with the first artifact, this lesson represents one of the first times I deliberately targeted a skill deficit to address in an activity. It is also the first time I have staged a debate in a classroom setting, and though I normally try to encourage oral communication and participation, this was a more intensive instance of such. My cooperating teacher and I also agreed to use the feedback from this activity to determine whether the students were ready for a more in-depth, full-scale debate later on. I had made data-based decisions before this lesson, but this was likely one of the first times I had decided to do so consciously before I taught the lesson.