When structuring a teaching segment, assessing and effectively embracing the prior knowledge of one’s students is, perhaps, the most integral piece of the proverbial puzzle that one must solve to develop an effective and engaging lesson. With this emphasis in mind, when developing the teaching segment used for this paper, particular care was taken to analyze and inform myself of the current content knowledge of the students within the class that this lesson would be implemented during. To do this, I coordinated with my mentor teacher to ensure that I would be present at all scaffolding lessons that were related to my lesson on Apartheid. For example, in the weeks leading up to this lesson, my mentor teacher discussed topics including, but not …show more content…
Structurally and in relation to the historical relevance of early African history, this makes sense when discussing the early histories of the African continent; however, this did leave much less focus and emphasis on the early history and perspectives of those in South Africa at the time. As a result, I believe that without the inclusion of a reference to the colonization of South Africa by the British and Dutch, the lesson may have been much more confusing to students who had, primarily, been scaffolded and introduced to the strong histories of African countries, such as Mali, that did not have colonizing white populations. Though Apartheid is a much more recent topic in South African history, setting the foundational history of its existence is key in ensuring that the students do not mistakenly attempt to isolate this portion of South African history from that of the rest of the African continent. Another example of the assessment of prior knowledge that I conducted before designing this teaching segment is my assessment of the student’s knowledge of the Civil Rights