Brittany Courtot

Cold War Lesson

April 26, 2016
The lesson itself was detailing what events or policies lead to the outbreak of the
Cold War. I really wanted the students to grapple with the question of: How two different
economy systems could cause such political tension? To get there, I had to build off the
knowledge they had from the previous Unit on the Second World War. I did this by
referencing or reviewing some of the key people or events from the previous Unit,
connecting it to information they have already covered. This lead to several of the student
asking questions, relating the content to today, such as asking how NATO reacts to ISIS
or Why Communism was such a bad thing? I was hoping the student would do this as I
was referencing several modern relationships (The Ukraine Crisis, Modern-day Russia)
between countries.
How I measured if the students were reaching the target was to have them each
have two different-colored stickers. I asked the students if they believed that containment
was a good policy against the Soviet Union. They put a green sticker on one column for
Yes and a yellow sticker on a column for No. In the end, the results surprised me, but
when I asked the students seems eager to explain why they put it in a given place. This
might be because I related it to todays world and many of them began asking similar
questions in the vein during the course of the lesson. I would say that most, if not all, the
students in class today seems to understand the concept and were able to defend their
point of view very easily therein.
This lesson captures my strength and philosophy in a few ways. First, it captures
my strength of using modern examples, relating it to the students lives or something
theyve seen in the news. Another strength I can see if that now I am a bit stronger with
them in terms of quieting down although this is something that I can continue to
improve one without using quiet you guys so much. However, I have begun to stop talk
and say, Ill just wait. which seems to work with this class very well as at least most
of them would life to have some notes form the class before they leave.
This lesson relates to my philosophy because I relate the content to the students
lives and am trying to get them to answer the So what? question by having them try to
answer why it even matters that the Soviet Union was expanding its Communist boarders.
Again, this is an area where I show strength within the classroom.
What I would have done differently would have been to have work on my
classroom management and given the students more opportunities to interact with the
content perhaps adding in a current event to strengthen the modern day connections for
the students.