Discussion Questions

Children with Disabilities
400 WORDS!!!!!
Assume that a new student with disabilities is entering your classroom. Should you explain to the other students about the new child’s disabilities? Does it depend upon the disabilities?

400 WORDS!!!! Based on your readings for younger children, is it better to use make-believe settings for problem solving or their own community for problem solving? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? Give some examples describing the differences.

400 WORDS!!!! Teaching Approaches Presume that in all cases these fifth grade teachers responsible for teaching history are professional and want the best for their students. How do you evaluate their approaches? Ron sees the textbook as the curriculum he is to teach. He says “I feel a responsibility to do this. Experts decided that this textbook was the most important. And who am I to say that it is not so?” Ron uses media and various instructional strategies to help students learn what is needed to do well on state tests. Even for her fifth graders, Kim wants her students to be aware of how historians go about their work. She looks for primary sources, even though they have to be short and within the understanding of her students. Her class identified the Declaration of Independence as a primary source document. They spent days going over the meaning of the various parts of the document with an emphasis on why the particular ideas were there and what was left out. Sue has set up an economic simulation of life in Virginia. She hopes that, in the debriefing time and afterward, students will identify economic problems that the nation is facing today.