Final Course Reflection

After completing this 12 week course, I can honestly say that I learnt a lot in that short amount of time. During my placement, I did not get the chance to sit in on any social studies, geography and history courses at all because of rotary. Therefore, looking at the syllabus 12 weeks ago, I was fairly nervous about how I would do in this course. However, each week eased us into something different and helped us to see how to integrate different things such as field trips, FNMI, equity and inclusiveness, into the social studies curriculum.

Firstly, I really favoured the way that the online quizzes were conducted. I like how if you do not do well on the quiz (since some people, such as myself, do not do too well with multiple choice), you are able to retake the quiz as many times as you would like, until you get the desired percentage you hope for. I have never seen this done in all of my post secondary education, though I really like how this was done.

In addition, there is much to learn with the forum posts as well. It forces you to refer back to the readings and videos to come up with suggestions on how to integrate different topics into the social studies curriculum. This helps to remember the readings and videos, without having to always go back and re-read or watch them again, as time does not always allow for this. It also gives you the opportunity to read other student’s suggestions that you might not have necessarily come up with, but would consider doing in your classroom some day. Moreover, the same idea was used for the lesson activity demonstrations. Each week a different group was responsible for a different topic, which helped us see how we could integrate these topics further.

Furthermore, the unit plan was intense at first. I was terrified after looking at the template. However, this fear and nervousness for the unit plan slowly degraded, as we were given more instruction each passing week, and the time in class to work with our group members. It really helped to have the instructor, a guest speaker, and our fellow classmates circle the room and offer suggestions for the unit plan. It made things much more clear prior to creating our lesson plans.

Overall, I am happy with what I have walked out of this course learning. It was definitely beneficial for my growth as a future educator, especially since I did not have any experience with the subjects during my block placement. On a final note, I am happy with the decision to add a blog into the syllabus, as this will benefit us for future years to come, as a tool to refer back to for ideas.