Teaching Secondary Humanities and Social Sciences

Running head: TEACHING SECONDARY HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
TEACHING SECONDARY HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author’s note

TEACHING SECONDARY HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES1
Reflection 1
Lesson topic- Landforms and Landscapes
In this section I will discuss about my teaching experience about one of the Lesson
topics- Landforms and the Volcanos, which belongs to the unit of the Volcanoes, Landforms,
Landscapes, hazards, eruptions, and impacts. This has always been one of my favourite topic and
I enjoyed a lot while teaching about them.
I believe, that students tends to learn more effectively when they know, what they are
supposed to be learning. Hence, it is very important to draw the attention of the children towards
the topic why asking superficial questions related to the topic, - Let them guess the topic on their
own.
I have selected students and have asked them, “what kinds of Landforms have they seen”
following with questions like “What is Mount Vesuvius famous for?”
The warm up session was about 10 minutes, where I insisted them to watch a video related to the
volcanos. After a formal introduction with the topic, I wrote down on the board, the sections
which I will be teaching today. Scripting had always been helpful for me, when the topic is large
and the contents are difficult (Wolfe, 2015). However, this was followed by the main content of
my teaching session, where I discussed about the volcanoes and the types of volcanoes, based on
their formation and the time span of their eruption.
As this is a topic, which I have taught several times before, I know that student often face
challenges to understand the steps in the formation of the volcanoes or the reason for the
different shapes. I had already internalized the challenge and have kept a plan in advance. I

TEACHING SECONDARY HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES2
showed them a video that showed them the formation of the volcanoes. I also wrote the content
on the board so that the students could copy them down. I maintained and modulated my voice
tone is I was teaching in order to make the students understand the areas that needed focus. It is
evident that I have used lecture-cum-demonstration method in order to teach the contents to the
students. It has been stated by Tanner, (2013), that a lecture-cum-demonstration method assists
in teaching as students are shown concrete things and increases the maxim of the education.
While teaching the contents, I made sure that they are as per the Australian curriculum of year 7
achievement standards.
In order to assess the teaching learning process, all the students were asked to work in groups
and search for relevant data about volcanoes and volcanic activities from the website given in the
lesson plan.
The teaching session went quite good, except the fact that the time was too less to have an in
depth analysis of the topic. Hence, I had to hurry a bit. However, the videos shown to the
students were much helpful for the topic to be completed within time. There was almost no time
left to assess my teaching. Instead of setting up the group activity, a short question answering
session could have been appropriate.