Classroom Close-Up: Ms. Higgins, Hillside Middle School

For this Classroom Close-Up, we are featuring Ms. Higgins' 7th grade Social Studies class at Hillside Middle School. The learning style for this classroom is flexible self-paced which means the students are given all the lessons upfront and work on them at their own pace. Students are currently learning about innovations and river valley civilizations.

Show Transcript

Hello, my name is Kristen Higgins and I teach 7th grade Individuals and Societies at Hillside Middle School. Today, what you're going to be seeing is a flexible pace lesson. So students are learning about innovations in river valley civilizations. So you're going to see students working on three different lessons. What's really great about this is that they are working at their own pace, they're working together, and they get to work with different differentiations and different types of learning. So come on in! So we're learning about ancient river valley civilizations and right now we're learning about the writing innovations and how each different river valley civilization like what type of writing they used, what materials did they have, and it's really fun so far. So self-paced we have all our materials available and we can do the lessons whenever we're ready to do it. We have deadlines and when we should be doing stuff but we'll say you're kind of slow and you get behind at a normal class, you can work at your own pace and if you're fast you can work ahead and you won't have to be bored and that's what I really enjoy about it. So I like how we have like a variety of ways we can learn. You can learn through videos which is like good for like different kinds of learners because we have readings we can do and like hands-on activities such as the play-doh which is really funny because I can like learn in all these different ways and it really helps me understand everything.