Cross Case Features: Teachers

South Lake High School: Social Studies

Lydia Reynolds, World History

World History teacher Lydia Reynolds says that the NCTA seminar helped her find ways to introduce the Japanese perspective to lessons about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For example, students read works of literature by Japanese and U.S. authors, and then write a conversation between the two authors about their differing perspectives. Prior to the seminar, according to Lydia, she would have taught the material in this class as the historical event of dropping the bomb. Now she focuses on the victim’s responses. She anticipates doing this with other events too.

Lydia maintains a resource center near her classroom. She welcomes other teachers to use it and says that the teachers in the Social Studies department do a lot of sharing about resources and techniques.

Lydia cites the resources, knowledgeable speakers, and preparation of a lesson as positive attributes of the seminar. The most important aspect of the seminar for Lydia was “having something you can take back to the classroom and use right away.” She developed a lesson on the development of the new constitution in post-World War II Japan. She describes her NCTA experience as follows:

“ I think the biggest thing NCTA did for us is to really make sure we’re aware of the Asian perspective and that a lot of the things we are studying were not new in regards to history but new in regard to perspective...I’ll look at a lot of my lessons now and see if there is more about the other person’s point of view. I do a simulation in the spring. This class will become Japan and we’ll do a model United Nations program where they are online writing letters back and forth. But they’ll be writing as if they are Japan. So it’s important now for me to try to teach them the Japanese perspective of history.”

Derek Garrison and Hans Ulnar, World History

Two South Lake teachers who took the NCTA seminar teamed up to create a lesson plan on the building of Three Gorges Dam in China. Initially they wrote the lesson plan to fulfill the seminar requirements. Later they developed it into an extensive unit that covers topics in Geography, Economics, Literature, and Government.

In the “Three Gorges Dam” unit, the class is divided into six groups, each dealing with one of the topics included in the lesson. Each group has a color-coded set of materials that includes key vocabulary words, readings and reference, and a data retrieval activity such as a timeline, graph, or diagram. Every topic includes quotations from literature or other primary sources.

The teachers have presented the unit in their own classrooms, as well as in the classrooms of other teachers. In addition, they made the resources available through the district’s Teachers’ Resource Center. In their view, their NCTA experience has inspired them to continue the teaming efforts begun at the seminar—a strategy that the district culture of sharing supports.