Kristy Teague

ELED 3223

4 November 2019

Dr. Rock

What are They Thinking?

As a future teacher, I need to practice planning and implementing lesson plans relevant to

the grade level and subject. To do so, I need to be familiar with what students already know and

need to know about the topic to build understanding and help them master the content. This

semester I am observing and completing clinical work in a third grade classroom. For my social

studies lesson I interviewed four students to see what background knowledge they had on the

topic for my lesson: culture. For my interview, I chose students of different ethnic and racial

backgrounds as the majority of the class are non-dominant students and they may have more

knowledge about what culture is since they may celebrate different holidays and traditions than

their peers.

Students were asked a few icebreaker questions and questions relating to what they think

culture is. I came to the conclusion that do enjoy social studies. It’s not their favorite subject, as

they tend to like math and science better. They said they like the content better than social

studies. Although I can’t change the content of my lesson to make it more like math or science, I

can build off of what students seem to know already about culture.
 The second conclusion I made was that students like learning about cultures different

than their own. They enjoy learning about holidays and traditions that they don’t know much or

anything about. I personally feel that my love of multicultural learning was deeply affected when

I took Spanish in high school. I loved my Spanish teacher freshman year but she couldn’t finish

out the year because she got pregnant and the doctors found a tumor in her body and was put on

bed rest after the holidays. We had several substitutes fill in until they found a teacher from

South America who had a thick accent and wasn’t fully proficient in English. He had us sit in

front of a computer everyday and had us do Quizlet the entire class time. I didn’t agree with that

type of instruction. I must make my lesson more engaging and hopefully further their love of

culture.

The last conclusion I made was that the students were familiar with culture but it was still

hard for them to define it in their own words. They understood, for the most part, elements of

culture but couldn’t give me a solid definition that they were certain of. They said they learned

some about it last year. Knowing this information, I’m going to ensure that students are able to

define culture by the end of my lesson. I’ll probably have students make their own definitions

and make a group definition before sharing the actual meaning to see how theirs compared.

This assignment was helpful for me as a future teacher as I gained valuable insight into

students' prior knowledge on the content I’m going to teach. I think this strategy can be helpful

to every teacher, even veteran teachers. We can look at standards from the previous grade level,

or teach the same lesson for many years in a row, but you won’t ever fully know what students

know and don’t know about until you ask. Overall, I learned more about the students and were

able to connect with them in a way I haven’t been able to yet. It was nice talking to them in a

smaller setting and hearing what they had to say. I now know how to better prepare my lesson
for them and hopefully they can see that I took their answers into consideration and feel heard

through my lesson.