oIn July
of 2006, a group of teachers selected as that year's Museum
Teacher Fellows for the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum participated in a Lesson Study for their project.
They were teamed together by region and tasked with created
a lesson that could be taught in middle or high school,
social studies or English classes. Each teacher would teach
the lesson while the others observed, along with personnel
from the USHMM. After each lesson, the team debriefed about
positives and negatives, changed the lesson, and the next
person taught it with the changes. It was an amazing
journey that taught us all much about ourselves and the
pedagogy of teaching the Holocaust.
History of the WS/FCS Project:
In February of 2008, Laurie
Schaefer presented the USHMM Lesson Study: Non-Jewish
Victims of the Holocaust to English teachers in WS/FCS. From
that presentation, one of the teachers, Marshall Marvelli,
was excited enough to help Laurie create a lesson study
focused in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County. Using her
experience from the USHMM project, Laurie worked with Alex
Hoskins, the English/Language Arts Curriculum specialist at
central office. This lesson study focused on using survivor
testimony from the Voices of the Shoah foundation. Guy Blynn
from the Guy Blynn Holocaust collection at Forsyth Technical
Community college helped sponsor the initial conference to
prepare teams of teachers to create these lesson plans.
Three different lessons were created using the Lesson Study
method and you can see them to the left. In August of 2009,
participants will present their lessons to first year
teachers in English and Social Studies in
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County to pass on their new knowledge.
