Mrs. Borowiec & Mr. Crowley presented at the S.C. Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference on September 27th aboard the USS Yorktown. The title of their presentation was The Rules of Engagement: The Art of Re-designing Lessons.
In this presentation, the secret to student engagement was identified as getting to know your students, and then to individualize your lessons to the learning styles, interests, & capabilities of each individual class in order to motivate them to succeed.
In order to accomplish this time consuming endeavor, their solution was to develop a lesson plan prototype with multiple activities for each content lesson. In this way, teachers are already prepared with multiple activities to meet the needs of any class. Lesson plan prototypes for World Geography and World History were shared with teachers who attended their presentation. These teachers were then asked to join a state wide collaborative effort to teach these subjects. Currently, teachers from 13 schools from 8 school districts have joined this collaborative effort begun by our own Social Studies department.
