Getting Students Up and Moving

When structuring my lesson plan around the nature of conflict and US imperialism, I decided to begin with getting the students up and moving out of their seats. I employed an intentional “launch” with barometer statements including "if you start something, you better finish it" or "sometimes violence is necessary to make change", and this allowed for the students to engage with one another beyond their regular social circles. What gave me pause was that my launch had no corresponding text, and this lesson was taking place during my teacher observation. For the second half of the lesson, I had the students annotate the text to find similar themes, which felt more like the kind of lesson I thought I was supposed to teach; however, my administrator said she liked the first half of my lesson more. I was conflicted with wanting to get students active, both socially and intellectually, and being afraid that I wasn’t “teaching to the text”, especially while being observed.