InTASC Standard #5: Application of Content. The teacher understands how to connect concepts and use differing perspectives to engage learners in critical thinking, creativity, and collaborative problem solving related to authentic local and global issues
After President Donald Trump’s immigration order, many students were feeling conflicted and expressed these feelings in class. In order to help students become more informed about the immigration order, my cooperating teacher and I team taught a lesson on the immigration order with the chart/worksheet above. The immigration order affected many of my students in a personal way, as well as affecting the whole United States. In order to implement both viewpoints into the lesson we used a news interview off two experts on the issue with opposing views. In order to keep things clean we asked students to put their feelings aside and that we would not be looking at our own emotions on the topic, but instead look at the legal side of the immigration order. In order to look at the arguments, students used the chart above. Some of the arguments in the chart are in the wrong spot. While watching the video, students unscrambled the arguments and then added to the categories based on the points that the experts made in the video. Using this lesson, students were able to educate themselves more about the differing viewpoints on the immigration order and the legality of it, making a controversial topic easier to digest in a classroom setting. This relates back to InTASC Standard 5 because I have become well equipped to introduce controversial global topics with my students in various formats, helping them to grow in their ability to look at situations from a legal standpoint.