Liyanage 1

Deshana Liyanage
HST:4463
Teaching Evaluation:
To properly reflect myself, I must first describe the setting where my lesson was taught.
Although it took place in an HST 463 class that consisted of History majors. Imagined the setting
to be as if I was teaching a group of 20 or so eight graders. I imagined the classroom environment
to be that of the ones I had observed earlier this quarter. Filled with posters of motivation, historical
relevance and overall just a classroom that seemed lively. The day and time were a Monday,
towards the end of typical school time. So, I imagined the students to be tired and eager to go
home. So that Is why I knew my opener had to grab their attention and something to keep them
engaged so that they wanted to learn. The topic at hand was “the southern perspective of slavery.”
My opener consisted of me and my partner showing the classroom a painting of a slave
plantation in the 1800s asking them what they saw within the picture. To give the classroom a
question not ponder about that would be relevant throughout the lesson. The question was slavery
necessary to keep the big plantations profitable?
I think given the topic; we encountered many challenges in developing a lesson plan.
One of the biggest and I think the most pertinent was, how we were going to teach this lesson to
8th graders without giving them the notion of if slavery was “okay”, or “just” given the
circumstances. How was it we were going to teach students this is how southern rationalized
slavery without them themselves adopting that rationalization. The solution was to emphasize,
how slavery was cruel and the negative effects. Our topic was the southern perspective, and to
any college student, it is easy to see the fiscal reasonings for why southern wanted slavery. So
how" can we convey the fiscal reasoning to an 8th grader without them getting “bored” etc.
This brings us to our guided practice, which was a to budget a plantation. The goal of
this was to show students that southern made more profit with slavery as opposed to. I think by
doing this student got this idea. However, as pointed out by my classroom peers it steps on a fine
line of sensitivity. By letting students budget their plantation we would be inherently letting them
budget “people.” This is a sensitive topic; I think this is where the feedback was most insightful. I
think I should have realized exactly how sensitive "the subject it is especially for 8th graders. Try
to address this concern and chose a different guided practice. I think there can be other exercises
to convey the same point but not to impede on sensitivity.
I think a part we did do well on was the independent practice, giving students the choice
to write or draw was applauded by my fellow peers. This because it gave students the option; if
they were better suited for one.
Overall, I was very indifferent to our lesson. I felt like we accomplished the idea we
were trying to get through. However, there were a fair bit of stumbles. I think I learned so much
from this experience. I learned that I have to put extra effort into knowing potential sensitivity
issues within my lesson plans. It gave me quite a lot to ponder about how exactly to address
sensitive subjects.