Indian+War+Lesson+Plan+Analysis

The students learned about the conflict between the US government and the plains Indians. We covered the different battles, massacres, and treaties that defined this era. We also talked about the different major figures on both sides of this “war.” The main source of learning was lecture based because the field base supervisor feels that is their preferred method of learning as a class. I do not know how much information the class actually learned because as a whole they did not seem that interested. I was able to get them to talk and be part of the lecture but throughout the period it was minimal. I even stopped lecturing for a minute and tried to joke around with them to give them a break from the lecture and try to spark something out of them. I think I would have even preferred if they were trying to disrupt the class at that time. I did give them a small assessment after the lecture where they had to pick one event from the lecture and explain why they thought their event was the most significant out of the others. Some of the responses were pretty good but the majority were pretty vague which is a normal occurrence from this class. The thing I mostly thought about when planning this lesson was how I was going to keep the class on track and keep them from getting too rowdy and disruptive. This class is known for this and I have seen this behavior through my observations. I do not think there was a real effective part of the lesson due to the attitude from the class. They did not want to get engaged even after several attempts on my part. The field base supervisor even commented after the lesson that I did very well given the circumstances. She said that there will be days were they do not want to do anything and just sit there no matter what you do. The only thing I would change about the lesson is try to find some other way to get the class engage with the lecture. This is very hard to do because the student’s attitudes change from day to day even class period to class period. Even though the same lesson would have a completely different result a day later, I still try to think of one more thing I could have done to get the class involved.
 * Analysis of Indian Wars Lesson Plan**