How do your students participate in the activities? What is the result of the thematic units you incorporate into the classroom?
This question is directed at the level of your involvement in creating curricula, but it is easy to answer. Speak about the thematic units that you conceived during intern teaching while you were in college or on the job, and, most importantly, what was innovative about them. Using your experience, what did you do differently?
Moreover, the purpose of all your work is the students’ learning process. Speak about students’ integration, what they did during the thematic unit, and the results.
For instance, here’s an answer secondary teachers can relate to:
“I’m mostly experienced in units related to algorithms and programming implementation. The topics that I covered were high-degree, complexity algorithms, Java technologies’ overviews, and object-oriented Java programming.
The students worked in groups, with my input, to set objectives related to the difficulty of what they expected to achieve. They worked in small teams on various programming projects. The results are impressive, as the students were well in charge of their learning process and performance, and they tended to establish higher objectives than I expected, which they met.
I believe the group work stimulated active competition. They did a terrific job presenting their projects to the whole group, which we videotaped to show at Open House.”
Here is a possible answer for elementary teachers:
“I planned a month-long study unit on ancient Egypt. The students were divided into heterogeneous groups and given one aspect of ancient Egyptian culture to report, such as food, religion, customs, clothing, homes, the arts, business, etc. They used textbooks, library references, and the internet to do their research.
Each group created a report and delivered it to the whole class. The report included verbal information, pictures, a mural for a background, and “realia” created by the students, such as costumes, foods, models of homes, schematics of pyramids, etc.
Each group made a report to the class and created five test questions on their presentation. After this step, the students took a test using the questions they created, and all the students did very well. We left the displays up for Open House and had students act as guides explaining them to parents. In the next segment of the unit, we compared our culture to that of the Egyptians.”
Please share what type of thematic units you have created?