Running head: CONTENT AREA LESSON 1

Content Area Lesson

Christie N. Ellis

Johns Hopkins School of Education

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The habit and mindset that our class focuses on is perseverance or grit. Students in my

class are continuing to focus on the ability to persist through activities due to the fact that for

much of the year, students have developed negative habits related to giving up upon receiving a

difficult assignment. For many students the increased focus of our classroom discussions and

lesson plans focused on perseverance has increased their ability to self-judge perseverance. In

order to continue this trend, I chose to incorporate the ideals of perseverance into our late

February reading unit.

Lesson Plan

Throughout the week, our classes reading lesson plans maintained dual focusesreading

about important figures in African American history, and demonstrating the positive personal

characteristics of these figures (primarily perseverance). For our lessons, students would engage

in a rigorous close reading activity that culminated in a classroom discussion of the figures lives

and accomplishments. Following this discussion, students completed an independent writing

activity that addressed the character trait in questionfor example, How did Ruby Bridges

demonstrate perseverance? Through these lessons, students were challenged to reflect on the

lives of heroic role models in their personal history, and discuss why those individuals became

great figures.

Results

As we progressed through the week, some students opinions about what it meant to

persevere changed drastically. However, students began to create false comparisons between the

feats of the individual figures, rather than consolidate their learning about character strengths and

connect it to their own experiences. For example, many students found the accomplishments of

former slaves such as Sojourner Truth or Booker T. Washington to be far more impressive than
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those of Ruby Bridges or Rosa Parks. Through this, I found teaching these habits challenging

because students began to stick to their false comparisons between great figures of history, rather

than compare those leaders actions to their own. One reasoning behind this is my students

misunderstandings about the differences between the movement against segregation and the

movement against slavery. Overall, students began to find new meaning in the worth of some

activitiessuch as creating important writings and speeches about the experiences of being a

slave, while downplaying the importance of others. If I teach this unit again, I believe it will be

important to begin the unit addressing the historical differences between segregation and slavery,

fully separating the two time periods so that they can get a better understanding of how the

figures studies display perseverance, with both struggles being just as important as the other.

Conclusion

Overall, I believe that reading historical biographies about figures that my students can

connect with was extremely influential in helping them understand the importance of

perseverance. In particular, I believe that when we speak about perseverance in our classroom,

my students are now able to point out specific examples in history of when different figures

perseveredfor example, my students understand the hardship that Sojourner Truth went

through to battle for custody of her son. In the future, I think that the classroom must work to

incorporate habits of mind in all three ways that were explored through this unitContent Area

Lessons, Explicit Instruction, and through classroom discussions and environment. I do not

believe that the character traits should be explicitly taught on a daily basis, however it is clearly

useful to integrate it throughout the unit with fidelity and incorporate it in classroom discussions

or behavior modeling. Overall, I am extremely excited to continue the use of habits of mind in

my classroom to boost student engagement and joy.

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