Briana's Response #7

Teaching Day 1-
Wow. You'd think that having 30 kids in a room would be completely overwhelming and not at all exciting...but it really was! I absolutely loved having a big class. So cool. One thing that I really thought about after we taught them was the assessment that we were able to make of their prior knowledge of our topic we wanted to cover over these next couple weeks. We're teaching theatre history to a beginning drama class and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that some of them actually knew a bit about theatre history! So cool, because I definitely had no clue when I was in high school. All that I learned about theatre history, I learned at BYU. But I don't want to be the kind of teacher that has students like that. So. Our students were surprisingly informed. We decided to asesss their knowledge of history by making a timeline of the world. When we planned for the time line we assumed that they would give events such as World War 1 and 9/11. Unfortunately, we got quite a few of our students' birthdays on the timeline and not as much actual history of the world. I think our idea and intention was good, but the assessment didn't work with the way we worded the instructions somehow. I still think this assessment and activity can work and be helpful, we just need to be more specific about what kind of information and events get put on the timeline in order to better gauge their knowledge.