Reflection About NAT Project

This NAT project was a very good way to reinforce the ideas we learned in fieldwork about how to create engaging lessons. Although it was not as in-depth as fieldwork, we still got to practice how create powerpoints and create interactive activities. One of the main things I'm learning show to condense my slides and speak from what I know rather than reading off a board. Reading off the board is very boring to students and isn't useful when you want them to remember it.


To get the students involved in the lesson, by group and I found a "Just Dance" video about Lakota music for students to participate in. This way the students are up and moving and will remember the Lakota clothing by seeing the character dancing and will remember their music and dance by interacting with it. This is great to do with young students because they love to be active and many of them are really good dancers at that age! In one of the readings it described that to get students motivated you as a teacher have to create activities that grab their attentions and use pictures and colors in powerpoints that grab their attention. That is what my group tried to do in our presentation. We incorporated gifs, as well as colorful text in each of our slides. I also added a video of the Lakota fight dance to grab students attention and make them remember the types of dance and song related to the Lakota. Throughout the presentation my group would ask students to turn and talk about questions we asked relating to the next slide to see what they think might be true based on what they already learned. From the readings we completed for class they described that having students work in groups is essential to the development of their social skills, it allows them to grow through these interactions. The turn and talk technique gets the students to feed off each other’s ideas and gets them thinking about things they may not have thought of on their own. 

My group and I also assessed their prior knowledge by asking the students what they knew about Lakota, and many of them didn't know much. This was good for us because we had a lot of information in our slides to present and didn't want to bore them if they knew the facts already. We also asked the students to repeat the harder words we were speaking of. This is a good way for the students to practice how to say the words and also repetition is good with memory. To end the presentation we created a Kahoot to review the information. The students loved the game because it was engaging and easy for the students to show off what they know.  In the articles I read for class I learned that students learn better when they engage in activities like this. The main things we read in the article were to create engaging lessons that get the students involved with the information, and I think my group accomplished that. We also actived prior knowledge, and pre-assessed the students by asking them what they knew about the Lakota tribe. This was another important highlight that was presented in the readings.



I think this jigsaw method is a great way for students to focus in on one topic rather than worrying about all the different topics because it can be overwhelming. It is also a good way for students to practice their presentation skills. Many students are shy when it comes to talking to their peers but by having students do a jigsaw every week, hopefully these students will realize that talking in front of their peers isn't as scary as they think it is. Jigsaw also gets students to learn how to teach their peers and how to present information. This activity makes students realize that all their work is part of a puzzle piece and when they present their information it all comes together in on puzzle. The jigsaw method can be done in two ways. By grouping students into what is called "expert groups" then giving each person in that group a specific task. Then that person goes and meets with members from other groups that were assigned the same topic as them. After students finish they are asked to go back to their expert groups and report to them their findings. This was the way we did our first jigsaw lesson in the beginning of the semester on cooperative learning. I never did a jigsaw this way before so it was very different for me. I liked it because it gave everyone a chance to participate by having an assigned task so the work is equally distributed. I also liked how we got to present in these small groups rather than the whole class. I preferred this method because it gave everyone the chance to contribute to their groups completion by assigning specific tasks to everyone. The other jigsaw method we did for the NAT project was conducted differently. Here we got broken up into 4 groups and assigned a different tribe. We worked in these groups to complete the task and then presented our final projects to the whole class. This way of doing a jigsaw was a how I am used to doing them, but I liked getting to see a different approach to it.