S.

Grace Jeffords 23 April 2014 ESOC 5560

Video Analysis Multiple Perspectives

One of my aims as a social studies teacher is to teach against the traditional side of history that tells the stories of victors without follow-up on the defeated. I want to show my students more than one side of an event I want to offer them multiple perspectives of any social, historical, or political issue. It is through teaching multiple perspectives that we can expect young students to grow into respectful citizens who consider more than one aspect of a difficult decision. When students are choosing for whom they will vote, from whom they will buy insurance, and any decision regarding morality or justice, students use the skills gained by studying multiple perspectives to reach an effective conclusion. To provide a strong analysis of my teaching students how to maneuver through multiple perspectives, I will provide a contextualized lesson plan, a description of the video clip, and an analysis of the video content.

Contextualized Lesson Plan This particular unit included the Byzantine Empire, Middle Ages, and Crusades. Having previously learned about the rise of Islam, my students were in a perfect place to begin studying the Crusades as a specific topic in this lesson; they had the background on Muslims, Byzantines, Jews, and Christians necessary for this activity to work. While I wanted my students to learn the effects of the First Crusade per the Georgia Performance Standards, this goal was secondary to my wanting them to have a better understanding of multiple perspectives of this event. Primarily, I wanted my students to gain an understanding that the type of history we most often receive is

only half of the story. If two of my students got in a fight in the middle of class, but I only listen to the winners perspective, do I truly understand why the two students fought? Seeking out all possible sides of an event is not only important in history, but also everyday life. I believe that my students took the insights gained from this lesson plan and apply them to their outside lives based on the discussions I heard during this lesson. I consistently work to make my students more well-rounded and open-minded citizens. Video Description Because I wanted to focus primarily on student discussion in my video analysis, the majority of this video focuses on student responses in an open forum. The video will correspond with the closer in my lesson plan (made available on my E-Portfolio). This video starts as the students have completed their accompanying worksheets with their groups. There was some confusion regarding the correct answers to the questions, so I used this time to talk, as a class, about the types of conflict that persisted between the four groups. For this portion of the video, students remained in their seats in groups while I sat in the front of the classroom near the projector that displayed a list of perceived conflicts between groups. I asked specific student groups questions from their worksheets as we unpacked reasons that Christians hated Muslims, for example. I also asked students for a summary of their primary sources what could be learned of your people group from these documents? what could be learned of other people groups? what evidence do you have to suggest there was conflict? Students respond; I compress and restate. After we finish this debriefing segment, I segue into a Corners of Contention closer. I put the following statement on the board: I believe that the Crusades were justified. Students think on their response and then move to the corner that best fits their rationale completely agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or completely disagree. Students must

formulate one single argument with the others in their corner and defend their reasoning; I also ask them to question others to prod discussion. I gave directions and then offered the students a competitive incentive one student was undecided in which corner she belonged, so I then made it the other corners jobs to persuade her to join them. After giving the students a few minutes to make their arguments and talk within their groups, we began discussing. Students gave thoughtful insights about whether or not they believed the Crusades were justified based on what they had learned that day, referencing multiple points-of-view.

Video Analysis As previously mentioned, I used the First Crusade as a springboard into multiple perspectives. History classes often provide that the First Crusade was won by the Europeans as they conquered Jerusalem, but give very little follow up to the Muslims, Byzantines, or Jews (if in fact they even mention the latter two). These are all equally important people groups that were affected by the Crusades and deserve equal attention. As I went through the people groups with my class and discussing them one by one, I wanted my students to tell me what they learned from their primary sources. It was crucial to me that they tell me what sense of the documents they made. In my practice, I do not like to explicitly drill my students with the big ideas of social studies; rather, it is more important that they come to the big ideas on their own after carefully scaffolded lesson planning. I believe that this gives students a sense of accomplishment and fosters their willingness to learn more as they now understand that they can learn. As the students began to discuss whether or not the Crusades were justified in the second half of the video, student insights come to the forefront. Students many of whom, at the beginning of class, said that they completely agreed that they believed in something so strongly

that they would go to war completely disagreed that the Crusades were justified. By looking at the primary sources and taking in the full scope of how horrifying the crusades were as they took their toll on each people group, students began to realize that going to war because of a conflict in beliefs was not a justifiable excuse for such bloodshed. While I like the premise of this lesson plan, there are some things that I would like to do differently. The meat of this lesson came from the student activity with primary sources that were too difficult for most of my students comprehension levels; modification of these documents would have done wonders for these young students. In order to scaffold them to the more difficult passages, I will spend more class time (either during or before this lesson) in the future teaching students how to dissect sentences to understand their meaning. I will also work to create a different activity that allows students to take on the identity of more than one people group; it was not until the lesson was over that I realized that each student group was only responsible for one people group, and probably had little understanding of the multiple perspectives like I had intended. I chose to video this class during a multiple perspectives lesson primarily because the students are so diverse in socioeconomic status (SES), background, and culture. While more than half of the students had Individualized Education Programs, ten children (two pending) received testing accommodations and six students spoke languages other than English in their homes, one of whom was barely more than conversational in English. Even though this class had an inclusion teacher, it was still a handful at times. However these students, more than any other class, were willing to contribute their life experiences to enhance their answering of any discussion question. This seems to be the case particularly for these students because they have had much more real-life experience in situations in which they had not been offered the

opportunity for multiple perspectives; they were not extended the grace of giving their side of the story as easily as my other classes with higher SES. Because of this, the students whose voices are normally choked in classes like math, language arts, and science were willingly contributing to this discussion about justification of the Crusades. Additionally, this was the only class to take advantage of the open floor without fear of knowing the correct answer. Several times in the video, I had to pause instruction to discipline, redirect, or move students around because of constant disruption; similarly, I was shocked at the constant, whispering conversations made light during my video. The times in which students were supposed to be silent were filled with noise! Although all classes have their management issues, this fourth block (final class of the day) always seems to have more discipline issues than my other classes - this could be contributed to my class being an academic course so late in the days schedule and the diverse makeup of my students. There is no classroom free of management problems, but I will continue to work at my techniques to handle it. In my practice, I pay little attention to planning lessons with classroom management on my mind it is often an afterthought. I believe that it is important to film lessons frequently if only for reshaping the way that class is structured and implemented to limit the amount of distractions at hand. While you can hear several student voices on the tape, there is still a vast majority of the class that does not contribute to discussion. In the video, there are several students in view who are shifting in their seats, staring at the ceiling, and barely clinging to consciousness as school is almost over for the day. I choose not to believe that these students simply do not have anything to say; I believe that they feel marginalized by such a large crowd in whole-group discussion and as though their ideas and opinions matter less than some of the more vocal students. This is absolutely not the type of class that I hope to maintain in the future. As I add more scaffolding

and structure into my future lessons, all students will be given equal (and mandatory) opportunity to contribute to the classroom discussion in some way, shape or form.

Conclusion As this was my first discussion attempt, I was very pleased with this class responses. While I do not hold lower expectations for this class because of their special needs, I found myself overwhelmed with pride that they were able to handle such deep, difficult contexts (primary sources) and make well thought out statements in which they fused their knowledge and personal experience with multiple perspectives.